How is all that stuff in those buildings still there? Those are ghost towns aren't they?
Brief synopsis cut and pasted from my post on ExpUT:
Bodie got off to a slow start with a small gold discovery by the town’s namesake
and his partners in about 1859. It wasn’t until a mine cave-in exposed a rich
gold ledge in 1875 that money and miners started pouring in and the town began
to boom. By the late 1870’s, some estimates put the population at 10,000
people.
Bodie had a reputation for being a raw, raunchy, lawless place.
Spawning sayings of the day such as “bad man from Bodie” and “goodbye God, I’m
going to Bodie”.
The mines never really lived up to the hype that had
brought all the money and people into the town though and steady decline was to
be Bodie’s fate for several decades. Finally, in 1932 a fire ravaged the town,
completely destroying about 90% of the buildings. The 10% that were left, are
mostly still there today.
Finally, World War II and the gov’t demands for
all mining to be in support of the war effort – which essentially stopped all
commercial gold mining, put an end to the town. What remained had been bought up
by a private speculator who hired guards to watch over his property, which
accounts for the remarkably intact buildings and shelves of goods in the stores.
In 1962 it became a California State Park.
Since taking over the town as a state park in 1962, California has preserved Bodie in what they call “an arrested state of decay”. Considered to be the West’s largest, best preserved ghost town. I’d rank it a must see for any ghost towner. There simply isn’t anywhere else I know of that you can walk the empty streets and peer into the windows of such a large, wholly intact abandoned western mining town.
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It's a lot cooler to visit than I thought it would be. And I thought it would be pretty neat. I'm just not a fan of gov't displays, in general. But there is enough raw material at Bodie to keep anyone interested in ghost towns happy looking around for a whole day. There are just artifacts and history and interesting stuff to see literally everywhere. The ground for acres is just covered in old detritus that is usually long gone and missing from "wild" ghost towns.
- DAA
