The Million Dollar Courthouse

In the silver-mining town of Pioche, Nevada, a courthouse built in eighteen seventy-two became a legendary example of frontier financial mismanagement. The original contract called for the building to cost twenty-six thousand dollars. But cost overruns, corruption, and compound interest on bonds piled up for decades.

By the time the debt was finally retired in nineteen thirty-eight, the county had paid more than eight hundred thousand dollars for a building it no longer even used. The structure became famous across Nevada as the Million Dollar Courthouse, a cautionary tale about boomtown spending. Pioche itself was one of the roughest mining camps in the West in its day, and local legend holds that the town cemetery filled with gunfight victims before anyone died of natural causes.