Calico is a silver-mining ghost town in the Calico Mountains of California’s Mojave Desert, in San Bernardino County near present-day Barstow and Yermo. A major silver strike in 1881 built the camp rapidly, and over roughly the following decade its mines produced an estimated $20 million in silver, supporting a peak population of around 1,200 served by saloons, stores, a school, and its own newspaper.
The town’s fortunes were bound tightly to the price of silver, which the federal government had propped up through silver-purchase legislation. When that support was withdrawn — the Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed in 1893 — silver prices collapsed, and Calico’s mines became unprofitable. A secondary boom in borax, specifically the mineral colemanite mined nearby, briefly cushioned the decline, but it too faded.
By the late 1890s the post office and other institutions were closing, and by about 1907 the town was effectively abandoned, its buildings left to the desert. Calico illustrates the classic single-commodity boom-and-bust pattern, compounded by its dependence on a politically determined metal price rather than on enduring industrial demand.
In the 1950s Walter Knott, founder of Knott’s Berry Farm — who had family ties to the original camp — purchased Calico and restored or rebuilt much of it as a tourist attraction. He donated the site to San Bernardino County in 1966, and it operates today as Calico Ghost Town Regional Park, a restored heritage destination with no permanent residents beyond park and concession staff.
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.