Granite Ghost Town

good morning everyone it is stephen and andrea from pin in the atlas look at that wonderful view i know it's a bit of a smoky summer morning but the temperature is absolutely perfect we're high in the mountains of montana and we're going to explore a ghost town that was founded in 1884 as a company town the population at its peak was 3 and it was once called montana's silver queen let's explore all right now this is something more familiar to us the remains of a stamp mill you can see there's still some of the the big timbers left over where the stamps would have been so this is pretty large it's comparable to uh to blair yeah this is it used to be a 20 stamp meal then it was replaced by an 80 stamp mill in 1885 and then in 1888 a hundred stamp meal was built ah there we go i have a fun fact about this a telegram was delayed it was to tell the workers to stop working but the miners carried on working and with the last blast on the last shift uncovered the mother lode of 40 million dollars worth of silver that was back in the 1880s this little building not much left to it it could have been uh just a workshop generator house some of that nature got an old pipe in here and a bunch of just nails on the the wall where things would have hung up the most impressive part see if i can do this correctly is the waste rock piles i'll just kind of start here i'm going to go up and investigate all of this but all of these it just this whole mountainside and you can see up there in the center of the screen there was a stone wall a bunch of ruins down here but it also continues down over the valley there's tons of little piles there continuing on down here and down into the valley that way as you can see there's more structures down there for us to investigate at the bottom of this very imposing structure you can see at the bottom just to the right of angie those are two ore shoots i found some square nails really lots of them i don't particularly want to venture in because i don't want to damage any of the structures and it looks a little bit precarious but hey look at these all square nails oh wow the whole board so i believe this was originally built in 1875. that's really neat to see that many just in one board and then and there's they're everywhere yeah all over the single one that's pretty cool isn't it almost every single one i can see is the square now those awesome and the little chipmunks come to say hello climbed up to the top to get a better view still not a way in we wouldn't anyway that's uh that looks really rickety but very impressive so that's the main shaft of the mine which plummets 1500 feet down there was a massive mill that encased this whole area but as you can see it's all completely fallen down and a lot of it has fallen down into the shaft but miners would work three eight hour shifts six days a week there's just scattered remnants of buildings everywhere you can still make out on that wall that's leaning the different cubbies for various types of parts pieces what have you they're all in a big old pile now at the far end we've got this very neat brick and stone structure very simple let's see in the back i've got a vent here i went through the ceiling and just opposite the brick structure was the first building we saw down below and you can make it out now these are ore shoots let's see there's one two four of them [Applause] that's neat oh this is still got the metal slide on it so this lovely stone building here was the superintendent's house and the front door is wide open so i guess we should hop inside and take a look yeah it was built in 1889 and this road was called silk stocking row look at that wallpaper isn't that amazing that's cool okay lots of rat poop and the floorboards are a little bit iffy i've followed through over there yeah and it's a shame the pesky vandals have graffitied wow this is really neat be very careful of my steps here into the next room very large the ceilings are very tall and it's two stories know where the stairwell would be back room here continues around where does this go hello as you can see the wallpaper on this as well whoops sorry i just hit a looser this floorboard here this is like it had shelving yeah so this could have been the uh the pantry mm-hmm back through the main room and what's in here just another very large room we're being watched i'm zoomed in a little bit but you can see up on the mountain we were up there earlier that's all those waste rock piles coming all the way down here and then this is another huge mine shaft yeah so this one went down approximately 1845 feet something like that yeah so this was uh oh i filled it in now it looks like it goes down approximately 15 feet yeah that's filled in they've done cement work all along the sides well i guess because also this this grate doesn't look like it's going to last too much longer yeah i wouldn't want to stand in the middle no so we do have a few other items we can take a look at just a massive pile of pipe here and at least this one got a few bits on there some plumber's tape looks like and then this over here look like some bull wheels and these two guys right here can correct me if i'm wrong these look like the elevators see there's the the wire on the top there cable to go through you can put some maybe supplies the orc heart up in here possibly and then below attached the cage for the the miners themselves or maybe it was reversed and this is where all the tools went but there's two of them side by side that is really neat there's looks like some more modern ones over there and then that huge ore chute here we go i was going to say that's a ore car but uh don't see any of the other framing around it so that possibly had a different use but then there's these are those other two uh elevator cars i said these ones look more modern all metal very cool and this building here unsure of this one maybe richard you can help us out but i'm going to take a wild guess that this could be like a changing room or you know where you you hang up your your grubbies because there's four of them four individual ones but they also have like a false floor i don't uh don't know what that's all about and then these old pair of jeans don't think those are uh levi's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars or they wouldn't still be there and you got so they're all separated except this one had this one was open so this is the mining company office and as far as i can tell this was the brick vault used to be a two-story building and did you know that the last superintendent had a 16 foot by 16 foot hot water plunge a drying room and a reading room built for the workers of the of the mine and apparently this helped the miners from contracting pneumonia oh that's pretty cool true story one of the things that i always i mean we both think about is you get to a building like this it was somebody's home and you always kind of wonder who lived here i can answer that it was a lady by the name of may and she was the last resident here and she died in 1969 at the age of 75. she spent many many years up here as a watchman and also as a water commissioner oh okay thank you for that you're welcome we'll take a little peek inside but can you imagine being the only person living up here again we're miles in the middle of nowhere yeah up a rugged road and it's uh the town below is not too big so this is really neat do you think that could have been like a cellar or do you think that's just foundations that have caved in that's why i was looking at that pipe i don't know if there went water was feeding through that and maybe over time it had been leaking and caused the subsidence of the ground there as you can see that side of the house through uh that's just falling away this is pretty neat i bet uh well bird or pack rat's making it oh no it's pack rats making a nest up there this in the pretty wallpaper very neat [Applause] and then you can get a good look of how this is built right into the side of the mountain and wonder what was back here let's get some lights on i think that was her pantry wasn't it yeah see got some shelves a bunch of uh rat droppings in there now mouse dropping well those are huge so the size of jelly beans cute little bird's nest how cool is it look how tiny that is here along the outside now this was that room i pointed out earlier i said it's completely falling down and then we're back over here we think that's where the the storage was on the other side little porch back here the roofs caved in and then what's that up there no trip would be complete without a trip to the outhouse oh there we go a double so if she lived here by her house herself why did she have a double one for number one one for number two maybe and then back over this side there's some more uh structures that are no more this amazing building right here they just don't build them like this anymore this was the miners yeah the miners union hall it was uh three stories it even had a theater and they used to put 500 folding chairs up 500 it just goes to show you how big it was yeah and now there's only remnants of the first and partial of the second floor so these would have been just massive front openings here i don't so it was built in 1890 and it cost 23 000 and that was back then yeah give you a sense it also how far back it goes you can just see the the wood that still remains in the second story windows it used to also hold a library in here too and uh the main hall had 18 foot 18 feet ceiling wow or an 18-foot ceiling i should say and they used to hold dances here so opposite the miners hall there used to be a newspaper and we're on main street now and they had obviously loads of shops including 18 saloons i believe and then boarding houses restaurants there's even a hospital somewhere here and they used to have a masonic hall and an odd fellows hall fortunately this one has fallen down but the one next to it is still really well preserved yeah i don't know what this is i mean we're on main street so i'm wondering i wouldn't have thought it was a cabin although saying that bed there's an outlet for the fireplace or for the stove i should say yeah because i think it'd be way too small for some type of a shop so so prime location the resident of this place on main street this looks like a very heavily fortified building i'm guessing it's the uh it's the bank and it's the only bank in town i would imagine that this is just the safe that remains yeah otherwise it would be an extremely small bank but the walls are super thick we got metal in the doorway here and lining the roof so i think you're right you