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Travelog: Photographing in the Ghost Town of Goldfield, Nevada

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
As always in this series, the object is to take pictures with film. I also tried to document with digital and also to survey the rich place before setting up my 8x10 camera. My digital pictures are in no way meant to compete with the real film photographs.

This was an event of Jim Galli's and Per Volquartz's Tonopah workshop 2011. The town still has inhabitants although it's a tiny fragment of it's former self, hardly surviving with the scattered tourists coming to this sun bleached part of forgotten Nevada. This place is THE goldmine for photographic opportunity.

Goldfield is an unincorporated community and the county seat of Esmeralda County, Nevada, United States, with a resident population of 440 at the 2000 census. It is located about 240 miles (390 km) southeast of Carson City, along U.S. Route 95.
Goldfield was a boomtown in the first decade of the 20th century due to the discovery of gold — between 1903 and 1940, Goldfield's mines produced more than $86 million. Much of the town was destroyed by a fire in 1924, although several buildings survived and remain today, notably the Goldfield Hotel, the Consolidated Mines Building (the communications center of the town until 1963) and the schoolhouse. Gold exploration still continues in and around the town today.

Gold was discovered at Goldfield in 1902, its year of inception. By 1904 the Goldfield district produced about 800 tons of ore, valued at $2,300,000, 30% of the state's production that year. This remarkable production caused Goldfield to grow rapidly, and it soon became the largest town in the state with over 20,000 people.[1] One prominent, or notorious, early Goldfield resident was George Graham Rice, a former check forger, newspaperman, and racetrack tipster, turned mining stock promoter. The collapse of his Sullivan Trust Company and its associated mining stocks caused the failure of the Goldfield State Bank in 1907. Rice quickly left Goldfield, but continued to promote mining shares for another quarter-century.[2][3] Another prominent resident from 1908 was George Wingfield, one of Nevada's entrepreneurs, who built the Goldfield Hotel.In collaboration with his partner George S. Nixon (who was to become a US Senator in 1904), Wingfield started in Belmont, Nevada in 1901 and then saw the potential of Goldfield after mining at Tonopah, only a few miles north, took off. It was Wingfield who made his fortune in Goldfield by forming the Goldfield Consolidated Mining Company. Between 1903 and 1918, mining in two towns was to grown from $2.8 million to $48.6 million. [4]

Wyatt and Virgil Earp came to Goldfield in 1904. Virgil was hired as a Goldfield deputy sheriff in January 1905. In April he contracted pneumonia and after six months of illness he died on October 18, 1905. Wyatt Earp left Goldfield shortly afterward.[5]
Source
 

Jim Galli

Member
Goldfield Nevada Pinkham-Smith

Sinks_Horiz7x11s.jpg

sinks, horiz

DodgeS.jpg

dodge sedan, final eve light

WashingMachineFrontPorch16PinkhamS.jpg

washing machine, front porch

This Pinkham IV 16" continues to surprise and delight. You'd almost throw the negs away thinking there's nothing but mush, then when you scan, they're gorgeous. Whata lens!

also posted at LFForum
 
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