Art,  Nevada,  Photographing Public Art,  Ruins

A very different ghost town

February 13, 2025 / 34 Comments

The best strike I ever made was in 1904 when I discovered the Rhyolite and Bullfrog district. I went into Boundary Canyon with five burros and plenty of grub. … I walked over and broke off a piece with my pick – and gosh, I couldn’t believe my own eyes. The chunks of gold were so big that I could see them at arm’s length – regular jewellery stone! In fact, a lot of that ore was sent to jewellers in this country and England, and they set it in rings, it was that pretty! Right then, it seemed to me that the whole mountain was gold.

Shorty Harris, gold prospector, in Half a Century Chasing Rainbows

This strike became the Bullfrog mine, and the town that sprung up around it was called Rhyolite, named for the silica-rich volcanic rock in the area. As Shorty described it, ‘Rhyolite grew like a mushroom. … They decided to make the town the finest in Nevada—and they came mighty near doing it. … The bank was finished with marble and bronze. There were plenty of other fine business houses, and a railroad station that would look mighty good in any city.’

According to Wikipedia:

Industrialist Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery Shoshone Mine in 1906 and invested heavily in infrastructure, including piped water, electric lines and railroad transportation, that served the town as well as the mine. By 1907, Rhyolite had electric lights, water mains, telephones, newspapers, a hospital, a school, an opera house, and a stock exchange. Published estimates of the town’s peak population vary widely, but scholarly sources generally place it in a range between 3,500 and 5,000 in 1907–08.

But the town was very short-lived. The mine got into financial difficulties in 1910 and closed the following year. With no work in the area the population of Rhyolite declined rapidly, to below 1,000 immediately after the mine’s closure and close to zero by 1920.

Today little remains of Rhyolite, just enough to get a sense of what it once was. The railroad depot is fairly intact, as is an unusual house built from glass bottles and adobe, while others are just shells.

Unlike Bodie which we had visited earlier in our trip, this ghost town is free to visit and made a great stop on our drive from Death Valley to Las Vegas.

Rhyolite

The Cook Building

The most prominent building in town was the three-story John S. Cook and Co. Bank on Golden Street. Finished in 1908, it cost more than $90,000 to build. Much of the cost went for Italian marble stairs, imported stained-glass windows, and other luxuries. The building housed brokerage offices, and a post office, as well as the bank. Today you can just make out traces of the once grand ornamentation on its front.

The Cook Building

The Train Depot

The train depot is one of the few fairly complete buildings left in the town. The nearby caboose was used as part of a gas station, according to Wikipedia, during a tourism boom in the 1930s. At the same time the train depot itself was restored and used as a casino, the Rhyolite Ghost Casino. This was later turned into a small museum and curio shop which remained open into the 1970s. Today the depot is fenced off and hard to photograph. And there are no facilities here for tourists other than a few information signs.

Train Depot and caboose

The Tom Kelly Bottle House

The Tom Kelly Bottle House lies on the outskirts of the town. A sign explains that it is one of the few remaining examples of bottle house architecture in the US. Wood was scarce and expensive in this area so miners often built their houses with whatever they could find. Glass bottles were plentiful and free. They would be used like bricks and mortared with adobe. These houses were great in this desert climate as according to the sign they stay cool in the summer (which surprised me with all that glass) and hold the heat in winter. This particular house was built in 1906 by Tom Kelly, an Australian-born stonemason turned miner. He used over 50,000 bottles, paying local children to collect them (10c per wheelbarrow).

The Tom Kelly Bottle House, with selfie!

The house has been used several times as a location for filming, including Wanderers in the Wasteland (based on a Zane Grey novel) in 1924.

Goldwell Open Air Museum

Right next to Rhyolite there is a bizarre collection of sculptures, the Goldwell Open Air Museum, also free to visit. A group of Belgian artists have, as the website explains, ‘created a self-described art situation consisting of seven outdoor sculptures that are colossal not only in their scale but in their placement within the vast upper Mojave desert.’

The Last Supper, by Charles Albert Szukalski, 1984

This was the first sculpture on the site and later gave rise to the development of the collection. From the website:

Albert was attracted to the Mojave Desert for many reasons, not the least of which was the Mojave’s resemblance to the deserts of the Middle East. To construct a modern day representation of Christ’s Last Supper, especially so close to Death Valley (where he originally wanted it sited), is eerily appropriate. Working essentially from Leonardo Da Vinci’s fresco of the Last Supper within the desert environment, Szukalski succeeded in blending the two disparate elements into a unified whole.

Lady Desert: The Venus of Nevada, , by Dr. Hugo Heyrman, 1992

Again from the website:

Using cinderblocks to represent in real 3-D sculpture the pixels he uses in his virtual 2-D computer work, Dr. Hugo has created a sculpture which at once refers back to classical Greek sculpture while maintaining a firm presence in the highly technological/pixilated world of the 21st century.

Two more pieces by Charles Albert Szukalski, Ghost Rider and Serving Ghost, (both 1984) plus Tribute to Shorty Harris by Fred Bervoets, 1994

The website again:

Among the artists that have contributed work to the museum, probably the one who felt most out of place in the desert was Belgian artist Fred Bervoets, appointed a Knight of the Order of Leopold II by the King in 1988. His ‘portrait’ sculpture of Shorty Harris (an early miner in Death Valley and its environs) and a penguin has elicited countless questions. The miner makes sense, but why the Antarctic bird? Word has it that Bervoets wanted to include in his sculpture an indication of how ‘alien’ he felt in the Nevada desert. The penguin was the most out of place entity the artist could think of to represent his own feelings of displacement under the Mojave sun, a self-portrait then as a penguin in the desert.

As the museum is free to visit I’m linking this to Natalie’s Public Art challenge.

NB I will be away for the next three weeks so please bear with me if I don’t reply to comments as promptly as usual. I promise I will read them all and catch up eventually! And apologies in advance if I don’t drop in on friends’ posts as often as I would normally

I visited Rhyolite in October 2024

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