{"id":604,"date":"2008-11-29T16:32:17","date_gmt":"2008-11-29T21:32:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/?p=604"},"modified":"2022-04-01T06:41:50","modified_gmt":"2022-04-01T11:41:50","slug":"ghost-towns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/ghost-towns\/","title":{"rendered":"Ghost Towns"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>This is Matildaville. Little remains of this early 19<sup>th<\/sup> Century settlement built to serve the &#8220;Patowmack Canal&#8221; in what is now <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nps.gov\/grfa\/index.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Great Falls Park<\/a>. It sits the Virginia side of the Potomac River. I wrote a whole lot more about Great Falls <a href=\"\/blog\/?p=22254\">and its history<\/a> previously. But that&#8217;s besides the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/graphics\/travel\/virginia\/matildaville_ghost_town.jpg\" alt=\"Matildaville on the Patowmack Canal. Photo by howderfamily.com; (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\"\/>\n\n\n\n<p>I got on a tangent as I researched my recent story on <a href=\"\/blog\/?p=595\">Aurora, Nevada<\/a>. That&#8217;s the little ghost town that once served as a county seat in two states simultaneously. Conflicting boundary led to all sorts of issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Anyway, I lost a couple of hours after I stumbled across an enjoyable site that I&#8217;d like to share with you. It&#8217;s called <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ghosttowns.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ghost Towns and History of the American West<\/a>. This website has apparently been around for a decade or more but somehow I&#8217;d never manged to run into it until now. I&#8217;m not sure how often the author updates it. The site has sort of an old-school feel to it but the forums are active and current.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I found the number of ghost towns identified to be rather surprising. Also I certainly enjoyed reading through a good number of them. While the site concentrates on the American West, it also contains materials for other locations throughout the United States as well as Canada. I&#8217;d expect abandoned towns in places like Arizona, but in Rhode Island? Yes, ruins exist practically everywhere. They&#8217;re ripe for discovery, visiting, or documenting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The little town I mention above does <em>not<\/em> appear on the website. Maybe I&#8217;ll have to do something about that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This is Matildaville. Little remains of this early 19th Century settlement built to serve the &#8220;Patowmack Canal&#8221; in what is now Great Falls Park. It sits the Virginia side of the Potomac River. I wrote a whole lot more about Great Falls and its history previously. But that&#8217;s besides the point. I got on a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,96,203],"tags":[1039,1049,1048,148,30],"class_list":["post-604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cities","category-history","category-tools","tag-ghost-town","tag-matildaville","tag-patowmack","tag-potomac","tag-virginia"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Ghost Towns - Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual Places<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Ghost towns are both historic and interesting to visit. Twelve Mile Circle found a website devoted to them.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/ghost-towns\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Ghost Towns - Twelve Mile Circle - An Appreciation of Unusual Places\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Ghost towns are both historic and interesting to visit. 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