The Ghost Town That Refused to Stay Dead
Near Terlingua, Texas
Most ghost towns go quiet and stay that way. Terlingua went quiet in the nineteen forties and began to come back in the nineteen sixties, drawn by a force that no town planner could have predicted: the combination of a remote national park next door, a landscape of extraordinary severity and beauty, and a counterculture that was actively looking for places to be left alone. People began drifting back.
Some came for the chili cookoff and stayed. Some came for Big Bend National Park and found the desert ruin of the old mining town more interesting than anywhere else they had seen. Some came because land and buildings were cheap and the remoteness that had driven the miners away was, for certain kinds of people, the main attraction.
Today's Terlingua is an unincorporated community with a population counted in the dozens at the census level but larger in practice, a mix of desert artists, seasonal residents, outdoor guides, river outfitters, and people who have simply chosen to live as far from the conventional world as American geography allows. The ruins of the old company store and the Perry Mansion still stand above the ghost town cemetery. The Starlight Theatre, which grew out of the roofless shell of an old movie house, serves as a restaurant and gathering place, music venue, and community anchor.
The town is not what it was, and it is not nothing.
