St. Elmo was platted in 1880 by Griffith Evans and Charles Seitz high in Chalk Creek Canyon in the Sawatch Range, about 20 miles southwest of Buena Vista in Chaffee County, Colorado, at an elevation near 10,000 feet. Prospecting in the canyon dated to the early 1870s, and the discovery of the rich Mary Murphy lode south of the future townsite gave the Chalk Creek mining district its anchor. The town was first surveyed as “Forest City,” but the U.S. Post Office rejected the name because a Forest City already existed in California; Evans, reportedly reading the popular novel “St. Elmo,” supplied the substitute.
The town’s fortunes were bound to the Denver, South Park & Pacific Railroad, a Colorado narrow-gauge line that reached Chalk Creek in 1881 and continued up the canyon toward the Alpine Tunnel beneath the Continental Divide. With rail service, St. Elmo became a busy outfitting point — at its 1880s peak the community held roughly 2,000 people, with a main street of five hotels, mercantiles, saloons, dance halls, a telegraph office, a schoolhouse, and a newspaper. The Mary Murphy Mine, the district’s richest producer — extracting between 70 and 100 tons of ore daily and employing more than 250 men at its height — was the economic backbone, and St. Elmo prospered as the place miners came to resupply, ship ore, and spend their wages.
Decline tracked the mines. Output in the Chalk Creek district fell through the early 1900s, and the dwindling traffic could not sustain the railroad. When the line up Chalk Creek was discontinued in 1922 — residents fought the closure unsuccessfully as far as the U.S. Supreme Court, and the last train ran in 1926 — St. Elmo lost the lifeline that had justified its existence as a supply town. The Mary Murphy itself closed in 1925, and residents departed in the years that followed, leaving the Stark family — Anton, Anna, and their children, who ran the Home Comfort Hotel, store, telegraph office, and post office — among the last to keep the lights on.
Unlike camps that burned or collapsed entirely, St. Elmo survived largely intact because a small number of caretakers stayed on and later owners and a preservation group maintained the wooden buildings. The townsite and surrounding district were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Today St. Elmo is widely cited among the best-preserved ghost towns in Colorado, with dozens of original structures still lining the street and a general store that reopens seasonally for the many visitors who reach it by the Chalk Creek road.
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.
Oatman sits high in the Black Mountains of Mohave County in western Arizona, a former gold camp named for Olive Oatman, the young woman captured by Native Americans in the 1850s and later released near the area. The settlement that grew on the site exploded after a major gold discovery in 1915, when the United Eastern Mining Company opened ore bodies that would yield millions of dollars in gold over the following decade.
At its peak the town grew explosively — by some accounts to more than 3,500 people within a year of the strike, with later estimates running far higher — supporting a main street of hotels, stores, and saloons that served the miners working the surrounding Black Mountains. The richest ore, however, was finite. The United Eastern mine — the district’s largest producer, which yielded some $13.6 million in gold — closed in 1924 as its best ground was exhausted, and what gold mining remained was largely shut down during World War II by federal War Production Board order L-208, which halted non-essential gold operations in 1942.
What saved Oatman from immediate oblivion was its position on U.S. Route 66, which threaded over Sitgreaves Pass and through the town’s main street. Traffic from cross-country motorists kept its businesses alive even after the mines went quiet — until 1953, when a realignment of Route 66 (later subsumed into Interstate 40) bypassed the difficult mountain grade and diverted nearly all through-traffic away from the town, very nearly finishing it off.
Oatman clung to life and, from the latter 20th century onward, reinvented itself as a Wild-West heritage and Route 66 nostalgia destination. Today it is a small but lively tourist town of about 102 residents (2020 census), famous for the wild burros — descendants of the pack animals miners turned loose — that wander its main street, staged gunfight reenactments, and original buildings repurposed as shops and saloons. Drawing on the order of half a million visitors a year, it is best described not as a fully dead ghost town but as a near-abandoned mining town revived by tourism.