Idaho Ghost Towns
Historical photographs are in the public domain unless otherwise credited. Uncredited present-day photographs are by the author. In the case of Gilmore, I was fortunate enough to have a one-on-one guided tour by Dan Lerwill, the caretaker of Gilmore.
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Bayhorse The curious story of Bayhorse began in 1864 when prospectors discovered small mineral deposits near a creek flowing into the Salmon River near Challis. One of the prospectors, who owned bay horses, shared his discovery of silver and lead ore outcroppings with others. With the passage of time, his name was forgotten, and he became known as “the man with the bay horses.” As the mining camp developed, it eventually became known as Bayhorse. |
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In 1872, a much larger vein of silver ore was discovered, which helped Bayhorse grow from a mining camp into a mining town. Within a few years, large-scale hard rock mining operations began at the nearby Ramshorn and Skylark Mines. This sparked a silver rush, with prospectors and mine workers arriving in droves. |
Photo courtesy of the Idaho Dept. of Parks and Recreation, enhanced
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In its first two years of operation, all the ore from the Ramshorn Mine was shipped to a smelter in Salt Lake City, Utah at a huge cost. This problem was resolved in 1882 when the mine owners built a 25-ton-per-day smelter on the edge of town, along with a stamp mill. Bayhorse developed into a bustling town. It boasted a post office, smelter, dance hall, markets, boarding houses, hotels, banks, stamp mills, sawmills, two cemeteries, at least one girlie house, and an abundance of saloons. A few children lived in Bayhorse. It was not an easy life for the children of mine workers. There is no record of a schoolhouse in Bayhorse, so children like these three were probably homeschooled, if they received any education at all. |
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In 1889, a fire devastated much of Bayhorse. Later that year, mining production suffered due to a shortage of water, which was crucial for the milling process. By 1890, over 300 people called Bayhorse home. The town's troubles were compounded by declining silver and lead prices, causing several mines to shut down. By 1897, the smelter was dismantled and removed, as continued operations were simply unsustainable. As employment opportunities dwindled, miners and townspeople left Bayhorse, knowing the end was near. By 1925, all mining operations around Bayhorse ceased and the town descended into ghost town status. |
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Silver City The story of Silver City begins in 1863 when a group of men known as the Jordan Party were searching the Owyhee Mountains for the fabled Blue Bucket Mine, supposedly located in Oregon. However, the guys mistakenly believed they were in Oregon when they were actually in the Idaho Territory, so they never found the mine. However, as luck would have it, they instead discovered gold nuggets in a creek bed, sparking a minor gold rush. In 1864 large deposits of ore containing silver were discovered on the slopes of nearby War Eagle Mountain. |
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Several mining claims were located just above Silver City on War Eagle Mountain, including one operated as the Hays and Ray Mine. In 1865, newcomer D.C. Bryan discovered a silver vein on War Eagle Mountain, filed a claim, and named his mine Poorman. However, his claim was close to the existing claim of Hays and Ray. The owners of Hays and Ray believed (correctly) that the silver ore vein under Poorman was actually part of the vein under their claim. A court battle ensued, but both sides refused to give up their claim to the same silver ore vein, which contained an incredible 80% gold and silver. |
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The dispute turned violent in September 1865 when miners began shooting at each other. The Poorman miners even built a log fort above their mine entrance for defense. Eventually, the court ruled in favor of Hays and Ray, forcing the Poorman to shut down, but not before it had extracted $500,000 worth of ore from the Hays and Ray vein. Worse was yet to come. In 1868, another dispute arose between two mine owners when miners from the Golden Chariot Mine broke into a tunnel owned by the Ida Elmore Mine. |
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An underground battle erupted as miners from each side armed themselves and started shooting at each other deep in the tunnels. Two miners were killed and many more were injured by the heavy gunfire. The situation worsened when both sides hired gunmen, escalating the violence. At one point at least one hundred armed men occupied the tunnels. With a crisis looming, the governor ordered ninety-five soldiers with a cannon to the area. The military occupied the city, but it took four more days before hostilities finally ceased. Despite its violent history, the 250 mines around Silver City were extremely productive. By the late 1860s, annual production from the mines exceeded $1,000,000. The population peaked at around 5,000 residents. Today, the Silver City ghost town can be explored by those willing to drive the treacherous 23-mile-long one-lane dirt road from Highway 78 over the rugged Owyhee Mountain Range. |
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May The tiny town of May is located in the Pahsimeroi Valley in Lemhi County. In 1897 Rudoph Wright established a post office in May, named after his wife, May. This hotel was built around 1901, and it is the largest building still standing in May. It had fifteen rooms upstairs and a café and bar on the ground floor. In 1946 Gus Uhlenbusch purchased this hotel, and the café and bar became known as Gus’s Place. Even though May is considered a ghost town, it is not completely abandoned. According to a recent visitor to May, there are currently seven residents. |
Photo credit: Steve Cobbley
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Photo credit: Steve Cobbley
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Photo credit: Kate Wiggins Martiny
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Photo credit: Steve Cobbley
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These two photos (above) of May's main street were taken 1907 and 2013, respectively, from approximately the same viewpoint. The house shown here is not covered with graffiti. It is art, painted by a woman named Sandy Thompson who grew up there. Some residents say it’s haunted. |
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Photo credit: Kate Wiggins Martiny
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This photo of the schoolhouse in May was taken on October 8, 1901. The tall fellow was the teacher, Mr. Val Maelzer. These were probably all of the school-aged children in May. The blue building shown below was the Post Office in the 1940’s and 1950’s. It later became a penny candy store that also rented movies. Children would ride their horses into town just to buy candy here. |
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Photo credit: Steve Cobbley
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This was Herrin’s Café, run by Norma Herrin and her daughter Jackie. It was a popular spot with the locals and out-of-towners. They would cut steaks to order from hanging sides of beef. One customer remembers ordering a steak that was about 8 inches in diameter. It came with a whole loaf of bread and a cube of butter. Nearby at Gus's Place, Gus was famous for serving huge portions of beef with his meals. One customer said that he had never seen a prime rib that big, and another said Gus always served a fantastic meal and served a beer in a quart bottle. |
Photo credit: Steve Cobbley
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Photo credit: Steve Cobbley
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Photo credit: Steve Cobbley
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Photo credit: Steve Cobbley
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Bonanza City In 1866, a group of prospectors from Montana searched the river for gold deposits for several weeks but did not find any. Before they left, they named the river Yankee Fork, perhaps because they were all Yankees celebrating the fact that the North had won the Civil War. This is one of the earliest known photographs of Bonanza, when only a few structures had been built. Local prospectors continued searching and finally found gold in 1870. The mining towns of Bonanza City and Custer were then established along the banks of the Yankee Fork River—Bonanza City in 1877, and Custer a few miles upstream a year later. The term “bonanza” in mining lore refers to an exceptionally rich vein of ore, especially of gold or silver. In non-mining terms, it refers to an opportunity to make a lot of money. |
Photo courtesy of the Idaho Dept. of Parks and Recreation
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Photo courtesy of the Idaho Dept. of Parks and Recreation
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Bonanza City was hit by a devastating fire in 1889 and then again in 1897. Most of the town was left in ruins, and it never fully recovered. Many businesses and residents moved to nearby Custer, which grew while Bonanza City declined. A few people moved their entire house. By 1900, only a few businesses remained, and by 1912, the town had become a ghost town. |
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Bonanza City had two cemeteries, which was not unusual for a small town. The days of the Wild West were truly wild in many of Idaho’s mining towns. Deaths from bar fights, gunfights, robberies, and mining accidents were so common in some towns that the deceased were never given a proper burial. Often, they were buried with whatever they happened to be wearing when they died, sometimes with their boots still on, in what became known as a “Boot Hill Cemetery.” There are countless Boot Hill Cemeteries in Idaho. |
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The Bonanza City cemetery contains about 100 graves. Historical records show that ethnic groups from Germany, England, Ireland, Canada, Sweden, Austria, Italy, and China lived and worked in the area. Many of the grave markers in the cemetery are labeled “UNKNOWN.” This means that their relatives back home never knew what happened to their loved ones if nobody in Bonanza City could identify the body. Not so with little Alice Davenport, whose pioneer life lasted just a short seven years. Records indicate that she died in 1935 of blood poisoning from a cut on her foot or a spider bite. Quality medical care in mining towns was practically nonexistent. |
Photo courtesy of the Idaho Dept. of Parks and Recreation
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Custer The sole reason for the existence of the town of Custer is this stamp mill, which processed ore from the mines. The town quickly grew around the mill. It employed fifty-two men for processing the ore, while many other men worked in the mines. The steam-powered mill ran twenty-four hours a day, with twenty stamps, each weighing 1,000 pounds, hammering away to crush the gold-bearing ore. It processed 16 tons of ore each day. The noise 24/7 was deafening. |
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Photo courtesy of the Idaho Dept. of Parks and Recreation
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As the ore deposits gradually depleted, the Lucky Boy Mine, General Custer Mine, and the General Custer Mill all shut down in 1904, signaling the end of the boom days for both Custer and Bonanza City. The last permanent residents left in 1910, and the last mine shut down in 1911, leaving Custer a ghost town. Of the 100 buildings that once stood in Custer, only about a dozen remain. In 1889, much of nearby Bonanza City was destroyed by fire, and a second fire broke out a few years later. This set off Bonanza City’s decline, as many people left the town and moved to Custer. Bonanza City’s loss was Custer’s gain, and by 1896, Custer’s population had grown to 600 residents. |
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These are stamps that were used in a stamp mill. Rotating cams raised vertical rods connected to heavy metal stamps, which were then released. They fell by gravity, crushing the ore beneath them. The stamps in the General Custer Mill were steam powered. Dozens operated simultaneously. This camshaft had a series of cams (eccentric lobes) that lifted heavy stamp rods in a repeating cycle. Each stamp was a vertical iron rod, often weighing 500 to 1,000 pounds, with a stamp shoe (the head) at the bottom. As the cam rotated, it lifted the stamp and then let it drop by gravity onto the ore below. Five-stamp or ten-stamp batteries (groups) were common, with the stamps falling in staggered sequence to distribute the impact. The constant dropping of the stamps crushed the ore into a fine slurry, which helped release gold particles from quartz or other host rock. |
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Gilmore In 1873, gold was discovered in the area, but not enough to justify a commercial operation. In the early 1880s, a man named Joe Bush was prospecting on the east side of the Lemhi Mountain Range when he discovered a larger vein of ore containing lead, silver, and gold. During those early times, ore had to be hauled out by wagon train pulled by sixteen horses for an 85-mile, five-day trek through the desert to the nearest railroad terminal, then shipped by rail all the way to Omaha, Nebraska or Kansas City Missouri for smelting. |
Photo credit: 1906 Idaho Geological Survey
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Photo credit: 1906 Idaho Geological Survey
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Photo courtesy of Dan Lerwill
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Photo courtesy of Dan Lerwill
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The years from 1910 to 1920 were the best of times for Gilmore. Successful mining activities spurred the rapid growth of a vibrant business community, with sixty-seven mines developed. The town had a school, hospital, bank, volunteer fire department, Ford Model-T car dealership, movie theater, pool hall, dance hall, two hotels, boarding houses, two churches, numerous homes, seven saloons, and two houses of ill repute. The population eventually peaked at about 1,000 residents. Gilmore even had electricity from its own power plant. In the realm of sports, Gilmore had two basketball teams—one for the sons of miners and one for the sons of business owners. |
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Brothers Edgar and Swartz Ross from Pennsylvania built The Gilmore Mercantile shown below in 1909 after they had purchased many of the lead and silver mining claims in the area and gained ownership of most of the properties in the new Gilmore town site. The mercantile also housed the post office until 1957. The last full-time residents of Gilmore, Chub and Ellen Stout, moved out in the 1960s. Most of the original buildings in Gilmore either burned down, were salvaged for lumber, were moved elsewhere, or destroyed by the harsh winters. |
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Photo courtesy of Dan Lerwill
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Meet Stinky Dick. In 1939, the Fisher family from southern Idaho arranged to move into a house in Gilmore that had been vacant for ten years. They arrived around midnight and went to sleep, only to be awakened the next morning by a loud banging on the back wall. Someone had left a box full of firewood for them. They later found out it was this old fellow, their neighbor Dick Dickenschitzy. Two days later, Mrs. Fisher was baking bread. The aroma reached Dick in this cabin, so he went over to check it out and stayed for dinner. However, nobody could eat anything except for Dick. His body odor was nauseating. It turned out that whenever Dick would put on new clothes, he would never take them off until they were worn out, twelve to eighteen months later! Stinky Dick's cabin is shown below. |
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Eventually the time had come for an official post office. To honor Jack Gilmer, an application was sent to the Postmaster General in Washington, D.C., to name their post office “Gilmer.” The application was approved, but with one problem: the postmaster misspelled the name as “Gilmore.” The request to make the correction was denied, so the error was never corrected and the name stuck. Gilmore was supposed to be Gilmer. In 1926, the boiler in the power plant exploded and the building burned down. It was rebuilt but burned down again a few years later. This time, it was not rebuilt. The loss of the power plant, coupled with the Great Depression, signaled the end of large-scale mining operations and, with it, the beginning of the end for Gilmore. Sensing the end was near, many citizens boarded the last train out, never to return. To add insult to injury, the state highway that ran through town was relocated, bypassing the town by a mile. |
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This was Elmer Tucker's house. Grover and Elmer Tucker, who were nephews of the Ross brothers, managed the Gilmore Mercantile starting in 1911. The brothers worked on opposite sides of the store. However, they refused to speak to each other, continuing a feud that had begun between them back in Pennsylvania. Their solution was simple. Each worked one side of the building, with Grover handling the dry goods side while Elmer handled hardware and groceries. If a customer needed something from the other side, they would tell the customer to “see that guy over there.” |
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This is the Never Sweat Mine. This particular mine did not have toxic gases, as many mines do, because there were no support timbers inside that would decompose and give off poisonous gases. Hard rock mines like this one rarely needed timbers for support, so it was safe for Dan to bring his tour guests inside until a few years ago, when the owners blocked off the entrance with a heavy steel grate. Certain other mines in Gilmore are still hazardous. Besides cave-ins, miners encountered toxic gases. carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, methane, and sulfur dioxide. Some were prevalent enough to have their own names: nitrogen dioxide was “Miners Pneumonia”, which caused pulmonary edema, a build-up of fluids in the lungs. Breathing in lead-filled dust ten to twelve hours a day was the price they paid for a job. The average lifespan of a miner in Gilmore was forty-five years. |
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This was Shorty McClain's log cabin. Shorty was not very good at mining, so he depended on Spud for support, but Spud was a gambler. Apparently, Spud used to be a big time gambler, but eventually his luck ran out. That is when Spud stopped providing Shorty with any financial help. On February 23, 1929 Shorty went into the woodshed behind his cabin, laid down with a half a stick of dynamite, and blew himself to smithereens. The explosion was so powerful that it blew out the rear was of he woodshed, as shown in the picture to the left. |
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These are just a sampling of the historical and present-day photographs of ghost towns in Idaho. For more photographs and intriguing stories about Idaho's ghost towns and the pioneers who lived and worked there, Ghost Towns of Eastern Idaho and Ghost Towns of Western Idaho, both by Howard Frisk, are now available.
Eastern ghost towns explored:
Bayhorse Bonanza City Custer Gilmore Chesterfield Leesburg |
Western ghost towns explored:
Burke Silver City Atlanta Wickahoney Grasmere Warren Gnome |
Photographs and text copyright Howard Frisk unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.
