Crumbling away

Festival

Friends of Rhyolite sponsor an annual festival, complete with actors in period costumes. The Rhyolite Festival will be March 31, April 1 and 2. For information, write Friends of Rhyolite, P.O. Box 128, Beatty, NV 89003.

RHYOLITE -- Standing on a high spot in the valley, one can see for miles across the desert. The wind whistles. An occasional plane flies overhead, then disappears into the clouds, leaving the distant hum of its engines.

Tourists drive up. Tourists leave. The same stories are told over and over, sometimes 100 times a day.

This is the story of 5,000 beer bottles held together by mud, a retired rancher and his wife living in a Holidaire trailer, a dismantled ghost town and a roof in need of repair.

This is Rhyolite.

"Eight winters I've been out here," Clint Boehringer of Eugene, Ore., says as he stands outside the famous Bottle House of Rhyolite. "I come here in October and leave in April."

With a white beard that brushes his chest, worn jeans, thick red suspenders and a talent for telling tales, the 82-year-old is as much an attraction as the Bottle House itself.

Clint and Ellen Boehringer are volunteers for the Bureau of Land Management -- caretakers of the ghost town of Rhyolite. They have an arduous task: tending to tourists and holding back the devastation from inclement weather.

Carloads of people arrive daily to see the Bottle House and the ruins of a once bustling mining town. During rain, snow or high winds, one of the hosts is out there telling the stories of Rhyolite's heyday.

The Boehringers take the winter shift while another couple have the summer duties. Rhyolite averages more than 70,000 visitors a year.

"Last winter we talked to 30,000 people," Ellen Boehringer said.

The Boehringers are more than just tour guides. They make emergency repairs when wind and floods attack the Bottle House -- but only as long as BLM, which owns the property, gives its permission.

More importantly, they ward off vandals and bottle thieves.

The Bottle House, a three-room house made out of bottles and mud nearly 100 years ago, is enclosed in a chain-link barbed-wire fence erected by the BLM to protect it. An American flag waves near the gate that the Boehringers lock at dusk and unlock in the morning.

The Bottle House is one of two buildings left intact in the once-booming mining town.

"It should stand here as part of the history of the West," Ellen Boehringer said.

What a history it has.

Rhyolite was founded in 1904 when prospectors Shorty Harris and Ed Cross discovered gold in the nearby mountains.

The gold strike, known as the Bullfrog Strike, turned into a gold rush with more than 2,000 claims. It caused mining towns to pop up throughout what became the Bullfrog District.

Rhyolite -- named for the volcanic rock in the area -- was the hub. More than 8,000 miners came to Rhyolite. Some brought wives, some brought families.

Soon the town had three water systems, electricity, telephones, a train line, three newspapers and an opera house. It also sported a Catholic church, a Presbyterian church, more than 50 saloons and a red-light district.

Bankers and stockbrokers came. Up went the Cook Bank, the Porter Brothers' general store, neighborhoods, a jail and a school that served 250 students.

What made Rhyolite unique for a mining town was the permanence built into it. When most mining towns were made of canvas tents, Rhyolite had concrete structures.

"Most things weren't very permanent," Andy Gudas, Friends of Rhyolite chairman, said. "They (people of Rhyolite) really thought it was going to last." The Friends of Rhyolite is a group dedicated to preserving the ghost town.

The Bottle House, built in 1905 by Tom Kelly, a 76-year-old man from Australia, is made of mud mortar and beer bottles. The materials may seem odd now, but they were common then, according to Ellen Boehringer.

Most people couldn't afford lumber, which was not plentiful in the desert. Before the railroad came through, people relied on wagons to bring in goods.

"You don't pay freight weight when the bartenders already paid the freight cost (for the alcohol) and threw the bottles out the back door," Ellen Boehringer said.

While it was common to see bottle houses then, it wasn't easy to find a house this well built, she said. "Mr. Kelly built an excellent house," Ellen Boehringer said.

However, Kelly never bothered to wash the bottles out. Many still have beer in them. One contains cricket carcasses.

When the house was complete in 1906, Kelly sold $5 raffle tickets, and when he had raised $2,000, he raffled it off. State and county records don't show who the lucky winner was because taxes were never paid.

Within 10 years, the town, which had attracted nearly 10,000 people, died.

It died for two reasons: It was fueled on speculation, and there never was very much gold, Gudas said.

Then came the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, followed by a financial panic in 1907. Investors lost their appetite for risk and pulled out of town.

In 1910 the street lights were turned off, and the general store closed. Rhyolite's population dwindled to 675.

In 1911 the Montgomery-Shoshone mine shut down. By 1924 Rhyolite was deserted.

Legend has it that Betsy Moffet was the last to leave. She died at the age of 110, still waiting for Rhyolite to come back. With the exception of Paramount Pictures using the Bottle House for a film in 1925, the town remained empty.

Over the years, people came to Rhyolite to recycle its goods. Houses were taken apart for their lumber or moved to other towns. Support structures were used in other buildings in other areas.

One house -- the only other one still intact -- was relocated in 1914, then returned in the 1960s.

"It doesn't take long to dismantle a town if you're hauling it away by boxcar loads," Ellen Boehringer said.

Then came the artifact collectors.

"When town closed up, some packed their belongings and took them away," she said. "Some left everything."

The collectors walked away with silverware, furniture, bottles and other remnants.

To keep artifacts in Rhyolite, some concerned Nevadans took it upon themselves in the 1950s to gather them up and lock them in the jail. But collectors broke the lock and stole the artifacts anyway. They tried again, this time welding the door shut. But the collectors dug a hole from behind the jail and stole more, Ellen Boehringer said.

"That jail was never broken out of, but broken into twice," she said.

In the 1950s robbers stole headstones from the cemetery where 250 people were buried, she said. "This town has been plundered thoroughly."

The Bottle House suffered its share of damage, too. Thieves using ice picks and knives gouged antique bottles from the house.

"There is a $5,000 fine for destruction of artifacts," Ellen Boehringer said. "Each bottle, that's an artifact."

In 1956 Tommy Thompson, a retired vaudeville accordion player, moved into the Bottle House with his wife -- an exotic dancer and snake charmer -- and grandson.

Although the house and property were owned by the government, Thompson charged visitors 25 cents for tours. The family collected bottle heads scattered throughout town and made salt and pepper shakers out of them to sell.

Thompson built a miniature neighborhood of wood houses decorated with mud and shards of glass as a playland for his grandchildren. It stands next to the Bottle House.

Thompson cared for the house through 1974, which was not authorized but probably saved it, historians agree.

But Thompson was not able to protect the house from the weather. On its north side, winds have blown mortar from between the bottles, leaving up to 4-inch deep indents. Floods have knocked out part of the wall on its south side.

Ellen Boehringer takes care of some minor repairs. If she were given permission, she says, she would shovel the dirt, sift the big rocks out and mix it with water and restore the building.

Before repairs can be made, the Bureau of Land Management has to approve them after coordinating with the State Historic Preservation Office.

The Friends of Rhyolite want to replace the roof, but are awaiting permission.

"That roof's been here for 95 years," Clint Boehringer said. "It needs some help.

"It's just been patched and repatched," he said. "This whole half blowed off three years ago at Christmastime. We repatched it with tar paper. Luckily it hasn't blowed off since. But that's not the way it's supposed to look. And the eaves are broken."

In the meantime, the group is looking for a licensed contractor. "We've gotten feelers out here," Clint Boehringer said. "But so far we haven't gotten an OK from the government."

The Bottle House is not the only structure still standing in Rhyolite -- just one of the few complete ones. Ruins of the jail, school, bank and some houses seem randomly plotted along the dirt roads. Walls of small rooms that Ellen Boehringer says were prostitute cribs stand about 3 feet tall.

A train station is enclosed in a chain-linked, barbed-wire fence to keep collectors from taking its molding.

The BLM is working on a land swap that would give it ownership of the train depot that belongs to Barrick Bullfrog Mines, according to Craig Mackinnon, manager of the BLM Tonopah field station. The agency would like to see the depot converted into a visitors center with interpretive trails.

"Those are the plans. They haven't been solidified," Mackinnon said. "But that's the direction we want to go."

Mackinnon can imagine that future, but it's easier for a Rhyolite visitor to imagine the past: the gun fights, drunken brawls and hustle and bustle of the busy town.

One paved road cuts through the Rhyolite, and it's easy to see a car approach from three miles away.

"This is my size town," Ellen Boehringer said. "It has just the right number of permanent residents."

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