Metropolis—Nevada Ghost Town

They named their town “Metropolis.”  

 

Metropolis was the pipe dream of East Coast financiers at the Massachusetts-based Pacific Reclamation Corporation.  In 1910, Pacific Reclamation bought up 44,000 acres of Nevada high desert sagebrush, north of the present-day town of Wells.  Their plan was to dam a tributary to the East Humboldt River and use the water to make the desert bloom into a model agricultural community.  They planned out a town and began selling town plots and fields to eager settlers, many of whom were Mormons from neighboring Utah.  As Metropolis rose from the valley floor, it boasted a modern brick school building, a luxury hotel with hot and cold running water in each room, and its own rail spur off the Central Pacific line.  The town was shaping up into a first-rate community…

 

But by 1942, all the people were gone and Metropolis had died.  The East Coast financiers, as it happened, did not have a claim on the water that was essential to their scheme; the water had already been spoken for by the town of Lovelock, 200 miles down the Humboldt.  So the water was shut off, the fields dried up, the town emptied out, and a ghost town was all that was left of the pipe dream that was Metropolis.

 

There was a restless hot wind blowing on the June day I went to the ruins of Metropolis.  It rattled the sagebrush and blew fine dust in my eyes.  I was the only one there, save for the jack rabbits rustling through the brush.  The great doorway arch of the school still stands, the rest of the building having collapsed around it.  The hotel is a concrete pit scrawled with graffiti.  Oddly, there is more left of the Parthenon than there is of Metropolis.  People must have hauled off the houses, and maybe tore down the buildings to use the materials for other purposes.  Maybe they hauled off the dreams, too, and planted them in more forgiving soil.  All that’s left is the footprint of hopes, the might-have-beens.  Everything else has blown away in the fretful desert wind.