Metropolis: The City That Wasn't

About twelve miles northwest of Wells, a state historical marker stands in the sagebrush beside a county road, and behind it, the ruins of a city that never became one. Metropolis, Nevada was founded around nineteen ten by the Pacific Reclamation Company, a New York development firm that purchased land in the Humboldt River basin, filed water claims on Bishop Creek, and began selling lots and farming parcels to settlers with the promise of a modern irrigated agricultural colony in the Nevada desert.

The ambition was genuine. The company platted streets, built a fifty-room, three-story hotel that cost one hundred thousand dollars, installed cement sidewalks and streetlights, and the Southern Pacific Railroad built a spur line to the new town. At its brief peak, Metropolis had a population of perhaps several hundred settlers, a post office, a school, and farms planted with wheat and other crops.

The problem was water. A court decision ruled that downstream users held prior rights on Bishop Creek, limiting the water available to the colony to a fraction of what had been promised. The growing season proved shorter than advertised. Mormon crickets ravaged the crops. The Pacific Reclamation Company declared bankruptcy in nineteen twenty. Railroad service stopped in nineteen twenty-two. The last store closed in nineteen twenty-five. The hotel and amusement hall burned.

What survives today is a section of the hotel's masonry walls, the concrete foundations of the platted streets, and the original dam, still standing, holding water that now serves only wildlife. Metropolis is the most honest kind of ghost town: the ruins of an idea.