Bodie, California

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

Main Street, Bodie, looking north past the cafe, Odd Fellows Hall and Miners Union Hall. Historic American Buildings Survey, photographed 1962. Library of Congress.

Sixty-five saloons along a mile of main street, and now nobody at all. Gold was found at Bodie in 1876 and the camp turned into a boomtown almost at once. At the peak, from late 1877 into 1880, somewhere between seven and ten thousand people lived there in about two thousand buildings, eight thousand three hundred and seventy-nine feet up in the Sierra. There was a Wells Fargo bank, there were newspapers, several volunteer fire companies, and a Chinatown of several hundred people. The decline began in 1880, as soon as there were better strikes in Montana, Arizona and Utah to leave for. Fire took much of the business district in 1932. The last mine closed in 1942, when the war stopped the work. Across the whole period from 1860 to 1941 the mines produced gold and silver worth something like eighty-five million dollars in today's money. About a hundred and ten of the hundred and seventy surviving buildings still stand, kept in what the state park calls arrested decay — not restored, simply stopped where they were, with the furniture still inside. Two hundred thousand people a year come to look at it. One legend has it that Bodie was California's second or third largest city by 1880. The census does not support that. If your family was at Bodie, add what you know below. Compiled by MyHistoryStone from published reference sources, August 2026. Corrections welcome.