Old Haunts and Forgotten Roads - Ghost Town Tour

[Music] [Music] good morning everyone it is stephen and andrea from pin in the atlas and as you can hear it's very quiet very peaceful where exactly are we this morning well we are in the small town of cochise we're starting our ghost town tour and this is the first one now cochise was named after that famous apache chief cochise who is buried not far from here in cochise stronghold now cochise was actually a fuel stop for the southern pacific railroad so it wasn't a mining town and the railroad used to stop right outside this hotel behind me the cochise hotel built in 1897 was the main stop and it was built by a railroad telegrapher by the name of john rath he also had a wells fargo office in the front room of the hotel now today the town of cochise only has about 50 residents but it used to have 3 000. i do have a fun fact about the hotel behind me can you remember big nose kate who was the girlfriend of doc holliday from tombstone well she used to work here just after doc holliday died true story so today as you can see the cochise hotel looks empty but it is not abandoned it has been turned into a bed and breakfast and i think it would be a really wonderful place to stay like i mentioned earlier it's really peaceful out here the only noise you might get and you'd get a lot of it is directly across railroad still passes through here [Music] one thing i love about these buildings is those porches the big wrap around porches and see they've furnished it perfectly with a rocking chair that's where you want to be on a summer afternoon there's the cochise hotel which is now the bed and breakfast and then this building right next to it now if you can see up there on the sign you can just barely make out the outline of like a donkey and a gentleman with the cowboy hat on pulling it or holding it doesn't look like the mule's too happy to be being full does it got some of the old antiques resting against the side of the building here like those metal rings outside the wagon wheels some bales of wire old wood burning stove possibly so this building used to be the general store now there are only three buildings from the 1800s late 1800s that survived to this day one being this building the original church the other two we filmed earlier the hotel which is now the bed and breakfast and the general store which had the donkey on the front and unfortunately everything is all locked up i can't even give you a sneak peek of what uh it looks like inside probably looks like a church [Music] now we're not sure if this building is original or when it was built there's nothing kind of uh out here a plaque or anything but the faro bank [Music] it's interesting nonetheless [Music] see they could have hung original banner or sign up for this [Music] we have walked through the entire town now and have discovered something we don't believe cochise is technically a ghost town one because there seems to be a lot of residents that still live here almost every place we pass seems to be occupied and two they still have an operating post office so i think that's going to wrap it up here in cochise where are we up to next well the next town is the town of pierce which is on the ghost town trail let's explore [Music] welcome to the town of pearce and our first stop is the pierce jail let's take a look wow welcome to jail how friendly is that [Music] now we don't know a whole lot about this jail what we do know is it's locked up tight like any really good jail should be but what we read on this information plaque here you can pause and read that if you would like to i'll just give you the gist of it it was built in 1915 at a cost of 615.45 it was then closed in the 1930s so they did get 15 good years out of it but it is still standing and looks to be in remarkable shape just do a walk around of the property here there's a whole bunch of uh broken up pieces there used to be something there but there's no information about it whatsoever so it's just a pile of rubble now and here's the back entrance so apparently there are two cells inside and they are divided by 10 inch thick walls and the only air vents there's six air vents they can see the one here there's one at the front and two on either side see if i can point in just one there and one there and that's just the air that would have gone through the jail must have been very dark and humid and disgusting inside so i've just signed our names in the journal let's see what else is around town welcome to pierce ghost town trail again these signs are so friendly so this was the old post office [Music] there you go you can pause and read so this beautiful building the post office served 2500 people back in the heyday but it was decommissioned in the late 1960s now it is a private residence [Music] what a place to call home [Music] now great little hear the wind chimes buy those in there [Music] just look at all the knickknacks out there [Music] incredible old saddle keeping that post nice and warm just beyond the store you got another old homestead of some sorts an old wagon here oh look at the old washing machine yeah looks like this could be a museum [Music] thanks you got a pathway walking around this old pickup truck here it's like old farming equipment lying [Music] around so yeah my bet would be it this is an outdoor museum [Music] so how old would that truck be 1940s would you say maybe a little earlier donkey in the background got short legs he's adorable great thing about these towns is they do have their history out on display like back here i believe that could have been like an original hoist that the oar cart sitting in now drop that down into the mine take the miners down bring the oar carts up sounds like fun so the commonwealth mine was actually opened in 1894 and over the course of its life it produced 88 million dollars of silver and 2.5 million dollars of gold it also had a 200 stamp meal that's massive that is huge wonder where the the remnants of that is i'd like to see that so this little general store here was built the same year as the post office in 1896 and the big store next door was built in 1900 that's quite a bit bigger so the town of pierce was named after a gentleman called james pierce now the story goes he was traveling through and stopped to rest and he was playing with a rock the rock broke open and gold was discovered inside true story now here's the other side of the uh the mercantile which the more you look at it the more it looks like it should have been a hotel i mean it's massive no it doesn't really have much of a second story there but still i wish it said it was a hotel so we're gonna carry on this direction see what else we can find here's the old pierce church which is on the national register of historic places [Music] unfortunately there's a no trespassing signs so we can't get in but this church was built in 1893 according to the sign [Music] anyways we'll show you the grounds [Music] and that's it so let's see if we can find the churchyard the cemetery we have made it to the historic pierce cemetery in memory of our store pioneers and their descendants who settled the sulphur springs valley they were farmers gamblers homesteaders laborers merchants miners ranchers and soldiers may they rest in peace and i also want to add to that mothers fathers sons daughters brothers sisters and babies nearly this entire section is filled with babies some unknown the marker might just say baby girl baby boy these two brothers look how they died back in 1909 they froze to death this gentleman right here is a hero and i salute him mr jefferson a burnette was in world war one passed away december 26th 1965. this man fought to defend our freedoms our rights to make a choice our right to live the life that we want to we should all stand up and recognize that another fallen soldier you paid the ultimate price don't let the battle he fought go in vain stand up and fight for these people stand up and fight for our freedom this i believe is quite defined sergeant george h platt he was a member of the union light guard seventh independent company ohio volunteer calvary it was established to serve as bodyguards and mountain escorts for president abraham lincoln what an honor burg vault this vault was exhumed in 2008 vaults protects the coffin inside [Music] so what's protecting the coffin now and why did they remove it very strange so here's the entire cemetery there's still quite a few unmarked graves which is something that we've been uh finding a lot in these historic and ghost town cemeteries it's quite sad it'd be a great thing to do just come out with some flowers put one on one of the grates let them know that they are not forgotten now we've driven around the other side of this little mountain here in front of us and you can see all the roads crisscrossing it we did see some mine entrances they are all closed off with some steel doors so we did not find any evidence of the 200 stamp mill which was would have been absolutely massive it only operated for four years because in 1900 it burnt down so now the population around 1919 was around 1500 people unfortunately though that steadily started to decline when the great depression hit and unfortunately things didn't get any better so by 1940 the whole mining operation completely closed and pierce became the ghost town we know it today so this house behind us is one of the original houses in pierce it was built in 1895 in tombstone and when the gold rush started it was literally packed up and brought here so this is where we're going to leave pierce and we're going to head on to the next ghost town of courtland see you there [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so unfortunately there's not an awful lot left of courtland however there is this old jail we weren't able to film inside because there was too much bad graffiti but here are some photos of the outside now this jail was built in 1909 with reinforced concrete it had two cells with two toilets at a cost of one thousand dollars but by the 1930s parts were removed and they were used elsewhere now i do have one fun fact about cortland there was only ever one murder here and it happened to be a waitress who shot her boyfriend during an argument over another woman go figure hell hath no fury like a woman scorned true story so here we are at gleason outside the gleason jail which was built in 1910 now the original building was actually only built of wood and this building replaced it let's take a look all right as we can see they've still got some halloween decorations out ah so what this skeleton is hanging off of was the original door from the wooden jail still in really good shape unfortunately it's all locked up i don't know whether or not you'll be able to see anything well we can definitely see the window at the other side that's about it well we can walk around the outside old wagon [Music] that's cool [Music] see they've made a well out of tires [Music] painted them to look like bricks where the bars used to be cemented in air vents [Music] bench isn't this an original iron and these are from another bench [Music] pickaxe head probably from old water pipe [Music] out back well they've got um grinding stones it belongs to the gleason jail [Music] and shot full of bullet holes by the looks of it [Music] you can see another air vent [Music] yeah birds made its home up there looks like that's going to do it for the jail here i've zoomed in to show you that there's a hoisting rig over there right by all those tailing piles and you can see the remains keep going along this hillside so this was an old copper mine it was discovered by john gleeson who was here mining turquoise because all of the native americans used to own this land and turquoise was their main source of income they would sell it to other tribes now there's one thing the town actually got burnt down in 1912 and there wasn't hardly anything left we just spotted some old ruins over here so we're gonna go take a look at them not sure if this is the old hospital maybe the old school but we'll get a closer look [Music] so there are some intriguing things about this building one is you see all those doors [Music] and there's some windows that are taller than them now you would think there'd be a second story something on here because we're going up the front steps and you see there's one step that's just gone [Music] but as you see andrea walking around that looks like ground level so i'm not sure how this entrance used to be out to see if we can find some old images of it so you got these columns that go up so it could have been quite tall at some point and then again over here the windows they all seem to be what should be ground floor let's go down inside there's those rows of windows [Music] so we're still trying to figure out if this was the school or the hospital [Music] obviously with her being only the foundations it's going to be very hard to determine that [Music] now see [Music] this was that main entrance this only shows one step that has crumbled away [Music] so this couldn't be the floor because i'd be hitting my head a very narrow opening here along the back there are steps going down into what would be basement level [Music] so unless this is all filled up with so much sediment that it feels higher and who knows perhaps underneath those front right there like i said it would have been a a very short roof for me personally maybe that was just some kind of a small storage area who knows but yet we still have no idea what this building was [Music] this here was a rather wide door double doors i'm assuming which are in hospitals and schools so still no answer here's an interesting piece of history one it is an absolutely gorgeous tree it's been here for a very long time [Music] second part about it though this used to be the jail tree before the jail was built it's got old chains in the tree and apparently the prisoners were chained to this metal rope and the children used to walk past and throw things at the prisoners least they were in the shade this is a very large tree let's see here though [Music] you can actually see where the tree has grown over the rope [Music] so if you think about it if the jail that we just saw was built in 1910 prior to that there was an old wooden jail this would have been 1900s or late 1800s that they used this as the jail tree i wonder if anybody was ever hung from this tree because it's big enough to be hung from as well it's some of those huge branches there are substantial limbs if you can make it out there some stone foundations in here it's the general store or what's left of it anyway [Music] looks like the one side's completely open [Music] seen some better days for sure [Music] wall and roof caped in and this is all adobe brick isn't it yeah it looks like it covered in a plaster and here you can see some holes in the floor so there must be a basement or if we can go around back and see if there's an entry point maybe get a different look at this because that's entirely too unsafe to even attempt to step anywhere near it [Music] now we're at the back of the general store there's a doorway here that leads towards the basement [Music] anything it's too interesting i wouldn't go in there yeah the whole floor is caped in and you can smell the mildew and the the wood rot definitely dangerous all right everyone that's going to do it for this first video on the ghost town trail stay tuned to see what next towns we get into and in the meantime get out there go put another pin in the atlas and we will see you on our next adventure [Music] now i do have one fun fact about cortland there was only ever one murder here and it happened to be a waitress who shot her boyfriend during an argument over another woman go figure hell hath no fury hell hath no fury like a woman scorned true story you