Terraville: The Town Homestake Ate

Terraville was founded in eighteen seventy-seven as the first headquarters of the Homestake Mining Company, perched on the mountain ridge between Lead and Central City in the Black Hills. At its peak the town held nearly eight hundred residents and was part of the early Homestake mining camp. The Homestake Company bored a tunnel directly under the town to move ore to the smelters below.

That tunnel also served as a commuter corridor for residents walking between Terraville and Lead. In the summer of nineteen eighty-two the company demolished the entire town to make way for its open-cut mine, and about seven hundred residents had to move. Today only remnants of the roads remain.