Rhyolite, NV Day Trip

Rhyolite, NV

Established in 1905, once gold was found the previous fall in the area. People started to come to Rhyolite in droves to get their piece of the pie. In just a few short years this town boomed into a full fledged city. It was the 2nd largest city in Nevada at the time in fact! They had electricity and running water, and even a train station where trains would come in throughout the day. The town had multiple banks, stores, and post office. This little city seemed to go from tents to brick buildings over night. The picture above is what it looked like at its peak.

Bobby and I drove 2 hours out to Beatty a couple weeks ago to go and visit this town, which is one of the largest 'ghost towns' in Nevada today. There are still standing buildings and an open air museum that this little old couple maintains. An artist has given some of his art to display which is really cool. I dont remember his name off hand, I'll look it up on the papers we have at home and update this when I find it. Anyway, here are some of the pictures from the open air museum at the welcome center.

Next it was on to the sights of the town! They have some really cool things still standing! First up was the bottle house. This house was made out of over 30,000 wiskey bottles!!! It was restored a few years ago, some of the bottles had been broken, so they dug bottles out of the foundation, and replaced the foundation then put those bottles in place of the broken ones. There is a large fence around this place so we couldn't go inside, they probably want to keep it nice, which is understandable, but I would have loved to go inside!

Bottle House

Strozzi Home

Here is a house (or what's left of it) that the Strozzi family lived in. It just so happened to be right next to the rail road and the pamplet we got said that the little girl who lived there always looked tired because the train would run right next to their house all night while she tried to sleep. Bobby asked if he could kick the house to see if the walls would stand up to his side kick... To that of course my answer was NO!!! lol men, always having to prove something right????

This next building is an old general store. It's amazing how some of these things are still around more than 100 years after they were built!! The history of this building is that it's been carted around quite alot. A family owned it, and the building was removed for quite some time, then brought back to Rhyolite in the 70's again. It sure has stood the test of time though!

Going back to the main road we came across a couple different banks. The first bank was the smaller of the two, and was in pretty bad shape. Here it is.

Cook Bank
Here is the Cook Bank! Cook Bank, was also in pretty bad shape, but you can see that it was once a magnificent building! In fact, it was the tallest of any other building in Rhyolite, and is said to be the building that you could see from anywhere in town. The bank had marble flooring imported from Italy, mahogany wood, and inside plumbing. The post office ran out of the basement of this building, which was the last business open in Rhyolite. This was my favorite building to take pictures of, it's absolutely exquisite.

here is what it looked like in 1908

Next was the Rhyolite school. This was the last big building that was built in Rhyolite. It cost $20,000 to build, and the town board floated a $20,000 bond to build it, but it wasn't paid off until 1972! The school is pretty much gutted out, and that's because the Beatty middle school recycled everything and used it for their school. here are some fun pictures of this building, it was my personal favorite, next to the cook bank.

Think we listened????

NoPe

Next is the train depot. This building cost $130,000 to builld, by far the most expensive building in the town. By this time, a lot of people had moved out of Rhyolite, the economy was going down and only a few hundred people remained to even use this depot.

I had a really wonderful time with my hubby to be, it took the entire day to do this and gave us some extra bonding time in the car....

"your going to fast" "Don't pass yet there's someone coming!" " are we there yet???" "I don't like this song" "can you not drive like a crazy person???" "your going to slow!" "I need food I'm hungry" "your speeding!!!" "shouldn't we stop for gas?"

hehehe, fun times =]

Here are some miscellaneous pictures...

A whole bunch of motorcycle guys were there when we got there.

I love this picture... I don't know why it just looks really cool to me

eeewww snakes!

Bobby loves this picture. I think he just likes to look at my butt ;-) I guess it does have a creative-ness to it.