Our plan had been to head to Caliente but we decided
to return via Tonopah and Bishop. Ely
to Tonopah is a lovely drive but has to be one of the loneliest roads we’ve
ever driven, it’s not far shy of 200 miles and once you leave Ely there is
absolutely nothing. We saw one gas pump
that obviously belonged to a ranch, several ‘hamlet’ type places, a couple of
abandoned towns, dirt roads heading in all directions off into the desert and
that’s about it.
When we looked at the map we realized that for part of
the way we were skirting the huge ‘secret’ military base called ‘Area 51’. It was a good job it wasn’t night time as
otherwise who knows what we might've seen!
On our return to Tonopah we stayed at the same RV Park
and once more went ghost town hunting.
The semi-ghost town of Belmont was our first
stop. It’s quite a drive from Tonopah, or
at least it seemed like it, we first took Highway 6 back towards Ely, branching
off along highway 372 and then branching off along highway 82. Lots of wide open spaces and very little
else, in fact I don’t think we saw another vehicle all the way there.
Belmont was established in 1865 when Shoshone
Indians first brought prospectors to the area, the name is from the French
Beaumont meaning ‘beautiful mountain’ probably because of the view of Mount
Jefferson from the town.
Quite a few people live in the town and, as almost always seems to happen we
saw a UPS, truck they seem to turn up in the most unlikely places. Silver, copper, iron, antimony and sulphur
were all mined in Belmont and from 1865 to 1885 it’s estimated that ore to the
value of about $15,000,000 was produced.
Imagine how much that would be today.
At one time Belmont was the county seat for Nye County
and the town built a beautiful Italianate Courthouse. Belmont was also the home of Tom Logan, the
Sherriff who had an office in the courthouse and who died in mysterious
circumstances outside a brothel in the nearby town of Manhattan. We bought a very interesting book about him
from Tonopah Mining Museum.
As the town fell into disrepair so did the courthouse
and one of the stories we heard was that the drug addict and serial killer Charles
Manson and his drug addicted followers squatted in the courthouse for a while
and, supposedly, Charles Manson wrote his name on one of the courthouse door
frames. There are two different stories
relating to their time in Belmont.
One is that at that time the only occupant of Belmont was an old
lady who ignored them and they ignored her.
The other, my favourite, is that the old lady had a
shotgun and ran them out of town. I
like to think of an old lady with a shotgun seeing off that murderous lot.
The courthouse has been partially restored and opens
on selected weekends, needless to say we were there on a weekday.
This building was once the office of the Belmont
Courier newspaper.
What’s left of the Belmont bank.
The
remains of the Combination Stamp Mill, there are lots of loose bricks at the
top of the chimney; you really wouldn’t want to stand nearby in high winds!
As we left Belmont we stopped at the cemetery, for
once we didn’t find the graves of any English miners.
Our next stop was Manhattan, another ghost town. There is a shortcut across the mountains and
the dirt road looked good, but as we kept running into snow this trip we took
the long way round on the paved roads.
Most of Manhattan appears to be operational and it’s almost all marked private,
so we just drove through, turned around and came back.
Have fun, we are!
No comments:
Post a Comment