Bingham Canyon - Destroyed by Success?

The first blog post of the year brings you a card from a bona fida lost place, Bingham Canyon Utah.
The card is not dated but is though to be from the 1920s.

Bingham Canyon Utah was once a busy little town which attracted a workforce from all over the world. So what happened to turn it into a ghost town?

 
The Beginnings
As with a couple of the other North America towns featured here, Bingham County was a mining town .  It's named after Thomas and Sanford Bingham the brothers who founded the town in 1848. Initially the area was farmland until gold and silver ores were discovered there in the 1860s, the building of a railway a decade later, plus a switch to mining copper helped expand the mines and consequently the town grew too.

The Boom
The early 20th century saw the Bingham Canyon continue to grow, at its peak in the 1910s  the town stretched for about 7 miles and the ethnically diverse population numbered around 15,000. It was considered a true melting pot with communities from all over Europe making up the workforce of the mine. 90% of which was born outside of the USA.

The Decline
Bingham county faced two problems. The first  being that the geography of the place made  urban development difficult. Other  townships were set up and the population of Bingham Canyon began to move out.
Ironically, it was the success of the mine itself which caused the biggest problem for the town. As it became more successful and expansive it encroached on the residential settlement also mechanisation rather than human resources were increasingly used meaning fewer jobs and fewer reasons to stay in the area. This downward its 31 inhabitants voted in favour of disincorporation.
A year later the remaining buildings were razed.


Today
Bingham Canyon Mine is still in operation. In fact it  is the largest man-made excavation in the world and is considered to have produced more copper than any other mine in history it also National Historic Monument Status.  
All land once occupied by Bingham Canyon has been consumed by the mine and no trace of the town exists today making it a genuine lost place.  
  

Gilman, Colorado

Gilman, Colorado as with Centralia is a former mining town, also in common with Centralia it was abandoned relatively recently but it doesn't seem to be as famous as Centralia.

Now on private property it is strictly out of bounds without permission though some photographs of the town in its abandoned  and sadly vandalised state do exist.

It was founded in 1886 during the Colorado Silver Boom and centred on the now flooded Eagle Mine. The boom ended in 1893 and many towns became ghost towns in the period immediately afterwards. However, Gilman survived until 1984 even though it was nearly destroyed by a fire in 1899. As with Centralia, Gilman was quite a thriving town in its heyday with theatres, shops, hotels and schools.


The abandonment of the town was ordered by the Environmental Protection Agency due to toxic pollutions and contaminated water, but by this point the mines were not profitable either.

As you can see from the card (undated but from the 1907-1914 period) the town is rather high up. It sits at an elevation of  2,700 metres on a cliff of around 180 metres high.

The town today is relatively well preserved and includes cars and trucks left behind by their owners.

For photographs of the town today, as well as information on other ghost towns I recommend the below link.

http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/co/gilman.html

For a detailed history and some really cool photos check out the below.

http://substreet.org/gilman-colorado/

Centralia, PA

The above image is a postcard of Centralia, Pennsylvania dated 1914. A postcard from a place which no longer has a ZIP code.

Centralia was a mining town in the sate of Pennsylvania and although never a bustling place, it did have a sizeable population with hotels, churches and, as seen in the postcard, shops and tree-lined avenues.
The 20th century was not kind to the town, as WWI raged on, young men who normally have been working in the mines were enlisted and mining declined, there was further tragedy in 1929 when The Wall Street crash resulted in five mines being closed.
Worse was yet to come when in 1962 a coal seam fire ignited and is still burning today. This led to the town being almost totally abandoned and most of the buildings levelled. In 2013 there were 7 people living in the town and once these people leave it is unlikely the place will ever have a permanent  population again, though it remains a popular tourist destination.