Austin, Nevada: Silver Town on the Loneliest Road

Austin, Nevada sits at six thousand five hundred feet in the Toiyabe Range, roughly in the center of the state, along US-Fifty, which Life magazine called the Loneliest Road in America in nineteen eighty-six. Silver was discovered here in eighteen sixty-two when a Pony Express horse kicked over a rock at a relay station, and within a year Austin had ten thousand residents, three newspapers, and more than a dozen saloons. The ore was rich but the veins shallow, and the boom lasted only about a decade.

Austin shrank to a few hundred people but never fully died. Stokes Castle, a three-story granite tower built in eighteen ninety-seven by a mining magnate who spent only one month in it, still stands on the ridge above town as the most photographed ruin on the central Nevada highway.