Sanity
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Joined: 6/14/2006
From: Nampa, Idaho USA
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Owners of half of historic gold-mining town Rocky Bar advertise a ‘ghoulish' deal for the right buyer.
ROCKY BAR — As real estate ads go, Rocky Bar's is a browser-stopper.
"Always wanted a ghost town?" it asks. "What a way to amaze your friends and family! The entire town of Rocky Bar, Idaho, is for sale, and what a ‘ghoulish' deal it is."
An entire town — yours for $250,000, mineral and timber rights included.
The wording of the ad in a slick, Ketchum-based real estate magazine is actually a bit of a stretch. Only about half of the town is for sale — 8.9 acres of land, a rustic hotel building, a mine, a wading pool that won't hold water and the town jail.
On the other hand, how often is there a chance to buy even part of a ghost town? Larry Jones, who recently retired as Idaho's state historian, says there have been only a handful of similar instances in Idaho, "and usually there's never much left but the foundations."
Rocky Bar part-owner Bob Johnson said during a recent visit to the old mining town that he has "mixed feelings about selling, but we don't come up here anymore and neither do our kids. It needs somebody to keep an eye on things."
Johnson and his wife, Pat, have owned their half of Rocky Bar since the early 1980s. The old town sits in Elmore County between Featherville and Atlanta. "We just love the mountains," Pat Johnson said when asked what made them invest in a ghost town. "The four-wheeling, the hunting; you can hunt deer, elk and bearhere. And it's nice country."
Her husband agrees but says that's only part of the story. More than $6 million in gold was mined at Rocky Bar in the late 1800s. Bob Johnson wears a necklace with a gold nugget he found in a creek there.
He was mining in the Boise Basin when he learned in 1980 that his uncle, who owned part of the town at the time, had died and his uncle's wife wanted to sell it. Johnson bought it from her. "I bought it for the mining, but I also wanted to keep it in the family," he said. "They'd been mining by dragging a bucket through the stream.
"The bucket kept filling up with water so they drilled holes in the bottom of it. I looked at those holes and knew they'd missed a lot of the gold. We mined here from 1982 to 1988 and made enough to pay for the land."
The Johnsons live in Boise. They've spent free time in Rocky Bar for decades but in recent years found themselves going there less and less. They listed the property this spring with Ketchum real estate agent Marlow Geuin. "Since I first put it in the system, I must have gotten 300 e-mails from other real estate agents," Geuin said. "They couldn't believe I had a town for sale. And compared with Sun Valley, where a million gets you a condo, $250,000 is cheap. I've gotten inquiries from all over the country."
But no firm offers. A ghost town isn't for just anyone, regardless of the price.
A doctor was interested in it as the base for an extreme skiing operation he envisioned on towering Steel Mountain, but skiers would have to deal with a formidable climb from the base of the mountain back to the town. The Johnsons see an RV park for hunters as a possible option, but Rocky Bar has no power or running water. And not everyone who owns property there is enthusiastic about the prospect of a commercial enterprise that could change the ghost town's character.
"I'd like to see it become a historic site," artist Kerry Moosman said. Moosman, who lives part of the year in nearby Atlanta, owns the Masonic Hall, a house and a onetime saloon in Rocky Bar. "There's enough left with the jail, saloon, hotel, Masonic Hall and the cemeteries that it would make a nice interpretive site where people could learn about the history of Rocky Bar," he said.
It's history worth learning. Tranquil Rocky Bar once had stores, bars, fraternal lodges, two hotels, a photography studio, mines, mills, a Chinese district, a tailor, a shoemaker and a newspaper. It was one of the region's larger cities — population estimates vary from 500 to 1,500 — and was briefly the county seat of now-defunct Alturas County, which became all or parts of more than a dozen Idaho counties. Rocky Bar had its own wagon road from the Oregon Trail. The steep road over the pass from Rocky Bar to Atlanta claimed the lives of seven mail carriers and was considered the most dangerous in the U.S.
Historical icon Peg Leg Annie McInyre lost her legs in a blizzard there. Idaho's territorial secretary and acting governor, Clinton DeWitt Smith — who helped make Boise the capital by stealing the territorial seal and archives from Lewiston — was said to have keeled over and died during a chess game at Rocky Bar. He's buried in one of its two cemeteries. Though the people and most of the buildings that once made Rocky Bar a vibrant community are gone, Moosman said, "Its history still makes it significant."
Jones agreed.
"It would be nice to preserve the buildings that are still there," he said. "It deserves it because it was one of our earliest mining communities. It was one of the things that brought people to Idaho, and it's never been interpreted." Bob Johnson said he would be willing to donate the jail to the local Historical Society if it agreed to restore and maintain it.
Josh Newby-Harpole, director of the Mountain Home Historical Society, says he's interested. "Rocky Bar is on the National Register, so they could get tax credits for donating it," he said. "I explored the possibility of trying to purchase the town, but it's not in our budget."
No one has lived year-round in Rocky Bar for decades, and vandalism is a recurring problem. "People have paint-gun fights in the old buildings," Moosman said. "They peel up the floorboards looking for gold, tear off the siding. They'll take anything. If I have something I don't want, I take it to Rocky Bar and it's gone."
Newby-Harpole and others have raised the possibility of agencies and nonprofit groups working together to acquire the property and manage it as a historic site.
Financing, however, would remain an obstacle. Ultimately, the buyer may be someone "who just loves the outdoors and wants to get away from it all," Johnson said.
"It's a perfect place for that."
http://www.idahostatesman.com/localnews/story/87868.html
< Message edited by Sanity -- 6/11/2007 6:35:54 AM >
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Inside Every Liberal Is A Totalitarian Screaming To Get Out
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