On the southeastern edge of Joshua Tree National Park sits Eagle Mountain, once a thriving company town of roughly 4,000 people, now one of California's largest and best preserved ghost towns. Founded in 1948 by industrialist Henry J Kaiser to house workers for the adjoining Eagle Mountain iron mine, the town featured wide landscaped streets lined with more than 400 homes, a shopping centre, schools, a bowling alley and a fully staffed hospital serving the mining community and their families. When the mine closed in 1983 after 35 years of continuous operation, the town emptied out almost overnight, leaving behind an unusually intact snapshot of postwar American company town life, right down to the hospital that once treated its residents. Today, its empty streets, weathered storefronts and abandoned hospital corridors stand largely undisturbed, offering visitors and historians a rare, tangible glimpse into a self-sufficient mining community that flourished for decades before vanishing almost entirely from daily American life.
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