Visualize a town with its own racetrack, two newspapers, five restaurants and a brick courthouse that cost a small fortune to construct, and then an almost empty shell within a generation. It's not the plot twist of a prestige TV show, but rather the ghost town of Belmont, Nevada: the place that millions of dollars in silver ore couldn't save from becoming abandoned.
According to a 1969 National Register of Historic Places nomination form for Belmont, filed with and added to the register by the National Park Service on June 13, 1972 (Nevada State Historic Preservation Office), the town’s population peaked at roughly 2,000 people during the 1870s, but by 1900 only “a score of people” (about 20) remained.
