Goldfield: Nevada's Last Great Boom Town

Goldfield was the largest city in Nevada when it peaked around nineteen oh six, with a population approaching twenty thousand people. Gold had been discovered here in nineteen oh two, and over the decades that followed, mines around Goldfield produced more than eighty-six million dollars in ore; the boomtown itself supported multiple newspapers, a stock exchange, a telephone system, and a railway connection. The Goldfield Hotel, built in nineteen oh seven, cost three hundred thousand dollars and was considered one of the finest hotels between Denver and San Francisco.

The boom ended as abruptly as it had begun. The gold played out. A flood in nineteen thirteen, a fire in nineteen twenty-three, and a second flood in nineteen thirty-three each took pieces of what was left. Today fewer than three hundred people live here. The Goldfield Hotel stands empty and deteriorating on the main street, too expensive to restore and too historically significant to tear down. The town is one of the most evocative ghost-boom landscapes anywhere on US Ninety-Five.