History in a half-brick
What ruins reveal about America
LINDSAY BAKER walks through the streets of Thurber carrying a hoe. It is handy for killing rattlesnakes, which lurk in the long grass that has all but swallowed the town. He also uses it to scrape in the dirt for what the people who once lived there left behind. He finds some shards of an old medicine bottle, the cap of a salt-shaker and a half-brick with markings that date it sometime between 1904 and 1936. If a brush fire clears the grass, you'll see artefacts like this everywhere, explains Mr Baker, a historian whose boyish enthusiasm for ghost towns belies his years.
America has a lot of ghost towns. There are 1,000 in Texas alone. Thurber was once home to 10,000 people. Now there are only five. In its busy days, Thurber was a coal town. Immigrants flocked there from Italy, Poland and Mexico to dig up fuel for steam trains. The coal was also used to fire bricks made from local clay. The town boasted churches, baseball teams and even an opera house.
But then someone found oil in Texas. Before long, the trains started burning oil instead of coal. Thurber's mine closed in 1926. And since cheap oil prompted Texans to start using asphalt instead of bricks to pave their roads, Thurber's brick kiln closed, too.
The workers left. Their homes were sold for $50 to anyone who could carry them off. You can still see them in the surrounding countryside, serving as barns or storehouses. Little is left in Thurber itself but a smokestack, the graveyard (divided into Catholic, Protestant and black areas) and a few company buildings.
The story is not all wretched, however. Many workers found jobs in the oil business. The company that built Thurber struck oil and prospered. The old boss's daughter-in-law donated money for a museum to preserve Thurber's memory, which Mr Baker runs. His qualifications are ideal: besides teaching industrial history at nearby Tarleton State University, he is the author of “Ghost Towns of Texas” and “More Ghost Towns of Texas”.
Something about ghost towns grips the American imagination. They provide an eerie backdrop for movies, children's books and theme-park rides. Ghost-town enthusiasts devote countless weekends to searching out remote examples, photographing them and posting their findings on websites such as www.ghosttowns.com. Typically, they give imprecise directions so that only the most committed ghost-towners can follow their footsteps.
Ghost towns are sad places, but also monuments to American dynamism. When work moves, so do Americans. With so much space, especially in the West, it can make sense to let a town die. But its memory may live on. Ghost towns give people a tangible connection to a mysterious past, says Mr Baker. Others treat history more playfully. On a hill near Thurber, someone has built a hunting lodge in the shape of a Scottish castle.
From the print edition: United States