Monday, June 1, 2015

On the Road Again… Apologies to Willie… A story in several chapters




Chapter 1… Stuck in Hawthorne, Again…  

But Hawthorne Nevada isn’t Lodi…  and I am not a down and out singer, and I have a way out…
Its near the center of Nevada, at the south end of Walker Lake… Its not somewhere you go to vacation… but the people here are really nice… everyone… occasionally suspicious, but once they talk to you nice

Its home to the largest ammunition depot in the world… they have bombs and strange explosives here and much of the local population is employed as guards… they have guns… but once they talk to you they are really nice and helpful…  I may have spoken to 4 or 5 of them… apparently I may be suspicious at first glance… 

I am here for a railroad history conference… Hawthorne had a railroad from 1881 to 1904… today it has a different railroad to ship explosives and bombs and things that go “boom”…. That railroad was built in 1939 when they built the world’s largest ammunition depot here… Yesterday we got to ride the new railroad… standing on the side walkways of the locomotives… 



Today we are exploring Mina…  Once a railroad town… a junction… but the last train pulled out 20 years ago, and now it’s a  marginal desert community on Hwy 95…  No store, no gas, but there is a good hamburger stand and the Mina Club, a bar…  There is a row if identical railroad houses… then a few slightly larger, presumably for “management”… there are railroad sheds in back yards and at least a couple of box cars scattered about.  Our group numbering 60+ wandered the streets, presumably startling and confusing the locals… Then back to Hawthorne… again… 

In Hawthorne one of our numbers finds an interesting building on a side street…. It appears to be a very small railroad depot… moved here from elsewhere…  Andrew and I inspect measure, photograph and paint sample and conclude that it is a 1870’s Central Pacific building, likely moved into the area in 1904, and abandoned by the railroad by 1910…. Then moved here as a house…  Weird finds like this are why we are here… 

Chapter 2… Ghost towns….

Today we headed further south… to Belleville and Candelaria and other places, once inhabited and thriving, and now rarely noted on maps… only foundations and rusty cans remain… 

Belleville was a mill town… there were two large silver mills, processing the ore from Candelaria… Belleville had a reliable water source, Candelaria did not and milling needs water…  Belleville died when Candelria found water and the milling moved elsewhere… Belleville remained a railroad stop, but when the mills left they turned off the water and the railroad had to haul water in tankcars…   The mill foundations are impressive… massive… the rusty can scatter significant… there is still a cemetery up the canyon… 

Beyond, well up the canyon and over a couple of low divides is Candelaria… the mining town… there are still ruins of a couple of stone stores, a few dug out cabins, more cans and the round hole in the ground that marked the railroad’s turntable… much of the higher works and the railroad line have been wiped out by modern strip mining, their pits but mostly the waste piles… 

We continue, looking for Tonopah Jct…. then on to Sodaville…  Here was another railroad town, but the landowner wanted too much for the water rights, and the railroad moved its facilities (but not the tracks) to Mina, 4 miles north… but there was a mill here…. We walked the ground, found the mill foundations, and took a modern picture to match a historic picture…  along the way we found a snowball in the desert… a maked “SNOWBALL” fire brick from England…  Then back to Hawthorne, again… 

Next time, on to Death Valley….


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