ABOUT THE PROJECT
Nevada is a state full of ghosts.
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When precious ores were discovered in the American West, eager treasure-hunters stampeded to the goldfields, then the silver mines, then larger-scale extraction sites for copper and other mineral wealth. Where they stopped to dig or tunnel or pan, they built towns. When the lode petered out, most of the treasure-hunters moved on. The towns stayed, slowly falling into ruin under the hot Great Basin sun. Their ghosts remain: sometimes snagged on the decayed or decaying ruins of the townsite, but often as no more than names on a map.
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Wonder. Golconda. Metropolis. Bristol Wells. Midas. Rhyolite. Treasure City. The list goes on. It’s estimated that there are more than 500 ghost towns in Nevada – which means that the Silver State has more ghosts than living towns. Each ghost had its history. Each had its own character. Each has its memories.
Those memories are fading, by and large. As empty saloons, ruined courthouse buildings, and derelict post offices sag into the encroaching sagebrush, the past grows further away, less distinct, more mythic. New settlements spring up. Established ones grow. And Nevada’s ghosts shred into yet more ethereal tatters, threatening to blow away in the relentless desert wind.
The ghostification of Nevada’s towns is not just an historical phenomenon. During the Great Recession, the town of Empire, in far northern Nevada, more or less closed down. It was a company town, and the company (United States Gypsum) shut down its Empire sheetrock plant. The post office in town closed, and Empire’s ZIP code was eliminated. Today, some folks still live in Empire, the way some folks still live in Manhattan or Beatty. But for now, the town is a shell of its former self. A ghost.
Today, the United States Postal Service maintains post offices in at least 128 Nevada locations. A sizable minority of these are in the state’s major metropolises: Las Vegas, Henderson, Reno, Sparks. But most of Nevada’s post offices can be found in far-flung settlements, rural ghosts which have retained vestiges of life longer than one might expect.
These post offices are fascinating to us. A post office is something like a stamp of official approval: there are enough people living in a particular vicinity, and enough mail generated, that the Postal Service chooses to maintain a post office there. Where there is a post office, there is a town. Where there is a town, there is community. There are memories not yet forgotten.
So we intend to visit every post office in Nevada. We intend to see those towns before they fully transform into ghosts and crumble into history. When we can, we will talk to locals about their town, about their memories, about the place of their post office in their lives. We will photograph these towns and their post offices. We will share our impressions in blogs on this website. And from every Nevada post office, we will send a postcard back to our Reno home, physical proof of the invisible mail-carrying networks that crisscross our state and our nation.
This project resembles something like ethnography. We’ll have a lot of information by the time we finish. But really, we’re doing this to satisfy our curiosity and from FOMO. We wonder what these post offices must be like, and what the people are like who work them. And we’re wary of Empire’s history repeating itself elsewhere. We want to visit these post offices soon, before they become another footnote in the history books.
If you want to follow along on this quest, you can do that here at this website: we’ll post photographs and write-ups of our excursions, and perhaps occasionally video or audio interviews. You can follow us on Instagram or Twitter.
We’d love to hear from you: if you have thoughts about the Nevada Postal Project, resources on Nevada history or the USPS, or connections in the Postal Service, please send us an email. We’d particularly love to hear from folks who currently or formerly worked for the Postal Service in Nevada, but we welcome all sorts of interactivity.
If you want us to send you one of our Nevada Postal Project postcards from a rural Nevada post office, send us your address and we’ll send you a postcard! If you'd like to cover the cost of a postage stamp (or more), feel free to donate - but we’ll send you a postcard even if you can’t donate.
Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have post offices to visit.
