The Ghost Town of Metropolis - Nevada's Garden of Eden

[Music] look at this vast desert expanse it goes on forever and it's so hot and dry here it's the kind of hot and dry where you're kicking up dust as you're walking along and if you don't get water within a few hours you're going to collapse this is the perfect place for me to set up my 40 000 acre almost 10 000 population farming city that sounds like a dumb idea but that's exactly what the brainiacs at the pacific reclamation company of new york attempted out here and well you know that didn't go well at all [Music] harry l pierce was the visionary behind the plans for this artificial oasis he wanted to prove that with proper irrigation a community can thrive even in the harshest of environments it's a sound theory for sure it would and briefly did work but the success of this specific town simply wasn't meant to be while harry might have genuinely seen this town as an opportunity to prove his theory the pacific reclamation company saw it as an opportunity to con people they promoted the region as having plenty of water plenty of sunlight and being a naturally fertile farmland even before harry's irrigation plans were put into practice they lied so blatantly in their advertising of metropolis they claimed that metropolis was the home of vast orchards and they showed pictures of these orchards in their advertisements but these orchards were over 25 miles away in another town harry and the pacific reclamation company got off to an excellent start with the city they bought 40 000 acres of unused desert in 1909 and spent the following two years drumming up support for the concept one of their largest allies was the mormon church who saw the american west's deserts as their promised land and wanted to encourage its cultivation i'm sure a lot of the town's successes were built on the good faith of that relationship 95 of the town's eventual citizens were mormons by 1911 surveyors had laid out the plans for the city allocating thousands of lots and countless streets to be built crisscrossing the sands and sagebrush lots within the town sold for between 100 and 300 while farmland sold for around 15 an acre however if you wanted irrigated farmland that could cost you up to 75 an acre people started moving in and building immediately there was such a boom that the southern pacific railroad built a line to the city within the first year of development not very many even successful cities got that one right away also in 1911 the plans to irrigate the town commenced about 12 miles to the north is bishop creek water would need to be diverted from here and brought to the city to do this the reclamation company built a large dam and they built that dam out of millions and millions of bricks recovered from the destroyed city of san francisco after the 1906 earthquake and fire a small tent village popped up at the foot of the dam during its construction but this too eventually became a ghost town though there is nothing that remains of it as metropolis grew a 50-room brick hotel named hotel metropolis was built downtown with running water in every room a brick schoolhouse was built named the lincoln school an amusement hall and several other multi-purpose buildings all of these buildings were built to last using brick and mortar several of these projects individually approaching a 100 000 price tag in 1911 money all of these built to demonstrate the company's triumph over the harsh desert perhaps it seemed this wasn't so much of a con after all thanks to an oddly wet rainy season in 1912 hopes for metropolis grew the farms were flourishing the local coyote population had to be killed off though as they were attacking livestock and pets but cause and effect seemed to elude the people of metropolis now they had another problem a cuddly furry cute problem known as rabbits also crickets but they're not cute they were eating up all the crops that the city was growing leading to the beginnings of a famine another and much more concerning laps in planning developed in 1913. well it turns out when they dammed up the water and started sucking all of it out of the river and putting it out here into the farms and into the many restaurants and houses throughout the city well there were farmers downstream who were a little pissed about not having any more water left for them so they sued the pacific reclamation company and a few others who were involved the judge decided that well the company is obviously at fault the ranchers were here first they need water and this is a bloated enterprise that's taking up way too much water from the region so what the judge decided is that the city was only allowed to take enough water for 4 000 residents not the 7500 who were here the city started to collapse a three-year drought began shortly after that court decision was made and later that year the pacific reclamation company filed for bankruptcy it lingered for a few more years vainly seeking other ways to promote the town but the limitation on water prevented a city of this size from sustaining itself and what was there began to degrade as more people moved out typhus broke out across the town forcing even more people to flee life in metropolis normalized however for the rest of the 1910s as enough people had left metropolis that there was now plenty of water for those who stayed despite this the pacific reclamation company went under in 1920 and shortly after the railroad stopped its service to metropolis the population of the city hung around 200 people for a while but fires further decimated what was left hotel metropolis the crowning jewel of the city burned down in the 1930s and the last shops in the town closed up the school closed in the 1940s and the town was completely abandoned by 1950 the ruins of metropolis lie within elko county nevada far from any major road or settlement the entry arch of the old lincoln school still stands as a gravestone to this abandoned enterprise [Music] this is all that remains of the school house classes were held in it for kids of all ages from when it was built circa 1912 all the way up until 1947. that's 35 years of service that's quite a lot for a boomtown entering the school there would have been wooden doors right here big cathedral style doors stairs going down on either side and a wide stairwell going up very little remains up here where it was where it's exposed to the weather these would have been vertical vertical columns supporting the next floor up one still stands three have fallen this arch behind me the image of this is one of the things that got me started on ghost towns i saw this and i was captivated by them this is honestly the first time i've actually been to this town though i've always made it to other ones but we went out of our way this time because i heard they're planning to tear this down just rumors maybe they're not but it is becoming unstable and i think the man is afraid that it's gonna fall down on someone's head so because this is the archway that got me first fascinated by these towns and as a consequence the west i had to come see it before anything happened to it if that beam slips out it's going down [Music] this is the basement if there was more below us there'd be a stairwell somewhere anything no that's it unlike most of these towns there's quite a bit left of these buildings walking through it you go from different rooms and go from one room to another rather than just walking across the blank foundation like in many of the other towns it feels civilized this town feels like a real town that you can relate to is this a chalkboard i think this is a chalkboard it's you step down into this central meeting area you go down the stairs classroom classroom classroom classroom step down here [Music] so many reminders of the distant past here at the remains of hotel metropolis the bank vaults on the ground floor and basement still stand and are often mistaken to be the hotel's elevator shaft the hotel did have an electric elevator but this is not it as you can see it's not a shaft there's nowhere for the elevator to go through many hotels of the time out west doubled as banks so these vaults would have safeguarded the valuables of hotel guests while also holding the payrolls of many companies in metropolis at the far end of the city's remains is the metropolis cemetery with many well-kept graves some of which are quite recent in the housing district the remains of a few huts line a bending street an old automobile in a faded driveway metropolis was a dream that hit the ground running and once had hopes for claiming the elko county seat perhaps even the capital of nevada but poor planning and the harsh desert environment dried those hopes up and the town died of thirst so next time you're thinking about building a city just remember the desert is hot and dry and probably not the place to do it unless there is ample water nearby don't think that there won't that you know you could just get it because you can't someone's gonna sue you you

Channel: Part-Time Explorer

Views: 311,337

Keywords: ghosttown, nevada, metropolis, elko

Id: 3IYbyJATnUc

Length: 11min 49sec (709 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 15 2021