Hashima — universally known as Gunkanjima, or “Battleship Island,” because its high seawalls and ranked concrete towers resemble a warship riding at anchor — is a roughly 6.3-hectare (about 16-acre) rock some 15 kilometers off Nagasaki that the Mitsubishi company turned into one of the most concentrated industrial settlements ever built. Coal had been worked on the island in a small way since the early nineteenth century, but it was Mitsubishi’s purchase in 1890 and the sinking of deep undersea shafts that transformed Hashima into a self-contained mining city of high-rise apartment blocks, a school, a hospital, shops, a shrine, and even a rooftop garden, all wedged onto an artificially enlarged outcrop.
At its 1959 peak the island held 5,259 residents on its 6.3 hectares — an overall density on the order of 83,500 people per square kilometer, and far higher still in the residential quarter — among the highest figures ever recorded anywhere on Earth, roughly nine times the contemporary density of Tokyo. The buildings that made this possible were pioneering: Building 30, completed in 1916, is generally cited as Japan’s first large reinforced-concrete apartment block, a typhoon-resistant design later replicated across the island. For decades the operation ran continuously, with coal hauled up from shafts that descended hundreds of meters below the seabed and ferried to the mainland.
Hashima’s existence was bound entirely to a single fuel in a single market. As Japan’s postwar economy shifted decisively from coal to imported petroleum through the 1960s, the island’s high-cost undersea mine became uneconomic. Mitsubishi announced closure in 1974; the mine ceased operation in January, and the last residents departed by April 20, leaving apartments full of furniture, televisions, and personal effects to the salt air. The island stood sealed and empty for thirty-five years.
Hashima’s modern fame is shadowed by its wartime history: from the late 1930s through 1945, Korean laborers and, from 1943, Chinese prisoners were conscripted to work the mine under harsh and often deadly conditions, with deaths variously estimated from roughly 130 to well over a thousand — a history central to disputes that accompanied the island’s 2015 inscription as part of UNESCO’s “Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution.” Tours resumed in 2009, and the crumbling towers — battered by typhoons and corrosion — now stand as one of the world’s most studied monuments to industrial obsolescence.
Rhyolite rose almost overnight on the edge of the Bullfrog mining district in southern Nevada, on the eastern flank of the Amargosa Desert near Death Valley, after prospectors Frank “Shorty” Harris and Ernest “Ed” Cross found gold-bearing quartz there in August 1904. Within two years a tent camp had become a substantial town of concrete and stone, complete with electric light, piped water, a stock exchange, telephone service, three competing railroads, and a population that by 1907–1908 may have reached around 5,000.
The town’s confidence was extraordinary and largely borrowed. Its centerpiece mine, the Montgomery Shoshone, attracted the attention of the steel magnate Charles M. Schwab, who acquired it in 1906, and the speculative excitement his name generated drove much of Rhyolite’s construction — three-story commercial blocks, a grand concrete depot, and the eccentric Tom Kelly Bottle House built from some 50,000 beer and liquor bottles in 1906.
The collapse came as fast as the rise. The nationwide financial Panic of 1907 froze the outside investment capital on which Rhyolite’s economy entirely depended, and at the same moment the Montgomery Shoshone mine proved far less rich than the speculation surrounding it had promised. Banks failed, mines shut, and residents left in waves; the Montgomery Shoshone closed in 1911, and the town’s electric power was finally switched off in 1916.
Rhyolite stands today as one of the most photographed ruins in the American West — a skeletal three-story bank, the surviving railroad depot, the bottle house, and scattered concrete walls on Bureau of Land Management land just east of Death Valley National Park, with the adjacent Goldwell Open Air Museum adding a striking collection of outdoor sculpture.
Cahawba — the spelling later standardized as Cahaba — was laid out beginning in 1819 by Governor William Wyatt Bibb at the confluence of the Alabama and Cahaba rivers in Dallas County, and by 1820 was functioning as the first permanent capital of the new state of Alabama. The site was chosen for its central location and river access, but the very feature that made it a natural port also made it dangerously prone to flooding, a defect that shadowed the town from its earliest years.
The town grew quickly as the seat of state government, with a statehouse, public buildings, and a grid of streets laid out on an ambitious plan. Its tenure as capital was brief: persistent flooding — the rivers reached the town’s outskirts as early as 1822 — combined with political maneuvering, led the legislature to vote in January 1826 to move the seat of government to Tuscaloosa, only about six years after Cahawba was established. The loss of the capital was an early and serious blow to a town that had been planned around its role as the center of state affairs.
Cahawba did not die with the loss of the capital. Through the antebellum decades it reinvented itself as a prosperous cotton-shipping town on the river, a major distribution point for cotton floated down the Alabama River to the Gulf port of Mobile. The arrival of a railroad in 1859 sparked a building boom; the 1860 census recorded roughly 2,000 residents — about two-thirds of them enslaved African Americans — and on the eve of the Civil War the population approached three thousand. During the war the town became the site of Castle Morgan, a Confederate prison housed in a converted cotton warehouse that held more than 3,000 captured Union soldiers by March 1865, sixfold its intended capacity, and the town’s name became associated with the suffering recorded there.
After the war the foundations of Cahawba’s prosperity collapsed. The destruction of the plantation cotton economy, a devastating flood in February 1865, the relocation of the Dallas County seat to Selma in 1866, and the departure of much of the population left the town in steep decline — only 431 people remained by 1870. By the early 1900s Cahawba was largely abandoned; most of its buildings were gone by 1903, dismantled, moved, or left to decay. Today the site is preserved as Old Cahawba Archaeological Park, managed by the Alabama Historical Commission, where street grids, cemeteries, ruins, and foundations survive among interpretive trails as one of the South’s most significant abandoned-town sites.
Thurmond was a railroad and coal town wedged onto a narrow shelf of land in the New River Gorge of southern West Virginia, built almost entirely to serve the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway as it hauled bituminous coal out of the New River and Winding Gulf coalfields. Founded around 1900 on land controlled by coal operator Thomas G. McKell — and named for Captain William Dabney Thurmond, who had patented the original tract — the town existed because steam locomotives needed a place to take on coal and water and to assemble the long trains of loaded hoppers that the gorge produced.
At its height in the 1910s and early 1920s Thurmond was one of the busiest freight points on the entire C&O system. During the first two decades of the 20th century the town reportedly produced more freight tonnage than Cincinnati and Richmond combined, and roughly fifteen passenger trains a day passed through, the depot handling about 75,000 passengers a year — all with almost no road access, the railroad tracks serving quite literally as the main street. Two banks, including the National Bank of Thurmond, two hotels, stores, and offices crowded the narrow strip between the cliff and the river.
Thurmond’s prosperity, however, was bound tightly to a single technology and a single commodity. Steam locomotives required frequent coaling and watering stops, which is precisely what gave a place like Thurmond its reason to exist; the diesel-electric locomotives that railroads adopted from the 1940s onward did not. As diesels eliminated the need for division-point servicing and the long decline of Appalachian coal cut traffic further, the town’s economic logic simply evaporated.
Today Thurmond survives as a near-empty historic district inside New River Gorge National Park and Preserve, and the entire town is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The 1904 depot has been restored by the National Park Service as a seasonal visitor center, just five residents remained as of the 2020 census — making Thurmond the least-populous municipality in West Virginia — and the town stands as one of the clearest American examples of a settlement obsoleted not by a depleted mine beneath it but by a change in the machines that passed through it.
Terlingua grew up in the first years of the 20th century around rich deposits of cinnabar — mercury sulfide ore — in the remote Chihuahuan Desert of far West Texas, near the Rio Grande and the rugged country that would later become Big Bend National Park. The dominant operator was the Chisos Mining Company, organized in 1903 by Chicago businessman Howard E. Perry — who had acquired the cinnabar-bearing land as payment of a debt — whose mines and reduction furnaces turned the district into the largest single mercury, or quicksilver, producer in the United States.
For roughly four decades the Terlingua Quicksilver District supplied a strategic but narrow commodity used in detonators, instruments, and industrial processes. Production peaked at about 7,200 flasks in 1917, and by 1922 the district accounted for roughly 40 percent of all quicksilver mined in the United States. Around the mines Perry built a classic company town: a store, a school, housing, offices, and his own hilltop mansion, sustaining a population variously estimated in the low thousands during the 1910s and 1920s in one of the most isolated inhabited corners of Texas.
The town’s fortunes, however, rose and fell with a single volatile metal. When mercury prices fell back from their wartime peaks and the most accessible high-grade ore was worked out, the Chisos Mining Company declared insolvency on October 1, 1942. The mines passed to the Esperado Mining Company, which shut them down by the end of World War II, and the population scattered. Terlingua became a genuine ghost town — stone ruins, a hillside cemetery, and abandoned mine workings baking in the desert.
Unlike many mercury camps, Terlingua found a second life. From the 1960s onward — anchored by the famous Terlingua chili cook-off first held in 1967 — the ghost town reinvented itself as a desert tourism, arts, and music outpost serving visitors to Big Bend. Today a small revived community of residents, restaurants, lodging, and outfitters occupies the same ground, so that Terlingua is at once a preserved set of mining ruins and a living, if eccentric, settlement.