Methods Of Discovery

[MoonWalkThePlank]

Hey guys, I'm new here and this is my first post. Just wanted to start of by saying you have an awesome community here. I got so excited reading some of these posts and looking at the pictures that I almost pooped my pants.

I was thinking it would be cool to list some of your favorite methods for finding/discovering ghost towns.

-following old rail lines with google earth-
Do you think this would be productive? What would you look for?

 

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[Produce Guy]

Old maps of your town from say the early 1900's and up,try stores that cater to farmers;feed stores,try going to barbershops that have alot of old (in age) customers,tax collectors keep very good records of where houses or farms use to be.

 

[boogeyman]

History books, antique stores sometimes have old topo maps (I try to buy every old topo I can a few came in handy a couple years later). Historical societies even if their in another town. Google sometimes you have to work down a few pages, remember we're a small community and don't generate a lot of hits. Old GT books. Hit the libraries newspaper files.

 

[Mackaydon]

I would venture a guess that the listings of all US ghost towns are accessible online.
For example, the site referenced below names and locates 24 ghost towns in your state:
http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/ar/ar.html
Good Hunting,
Don.....

 

[George (MN)]

www.hometownlocator.com is a good one. You can get there a list of every town that has at least a person left, & some that don't. Under historical features they have things like ghost towns with nothing left, post offices, churches & schools that are no longer there, cemeteries. Natural features, current road & satellite maps with parks & schools can also be found there.

Genealogical sites can be good, but it seems there's too much to go through. A large one that's popular is Cyndis List.

Put into a search engine the name of a county you want to research followed by historical society. They almost always know at least most of the ghosts. Sometimes there is a link on the main county govt site to the Historical Society.

Type in the state you want followed by League of Cities. There should be a link to every incorporated place still existing. Places with under about 100 people don't normally incorporate these days, so most of those are probably towns that were much larger. Compare the tiny towns on the League of Cities site (2010 populations) & tiny towns & x-towns on hometownlocater to the 1895 online atlas.

Most old atlases listing populations for un-incorporated towns show populations that are double or triple what they really had. These figures may have been furnished by townsite promotors. For incorporated towns, the populations shown are the exact or preliminary US Census figures.

Wikipedia is also becoming a great site for ghost towns. But they only count totally abandoned places as ghosts. They also have short write-ups of most towns with at least a few people, both places that were larger & towns that never were much. Best wishes, George (MN)