9 American Ghost Towns That Died After 1945 — One Was Built to Die

Who were the seventy people living in a brand-new Nevada town in May 1955, and why did nobody ever hold a funeral for them? That town is the last of nine American places that became ghost towns after 1945, emptied by the atom, by coal and by water. The nine: Jeffrey City, Wyoming, a uranium town of about 4,000 that lost almost everyone after the mine closed in 1982; Butler, Tennessee, bought by the Tennessee Valley Authority for $35,000 in 1947 and flooded in 1948; Dawson, New Mexico, a coal town of 6,000 closed in 1950, where the cemetery of the 1913 and 1923 mine disasters is nearly all that remains; Hite, Utah, a uranium mill and ferry crossing drowned by Lake Powell in 1964; Centralia, Pennsylvania, where a mine fire has burned since 1962; Uravan, Colorado, scraped off the map in a cleanup that ran from 1986 to 2008; Monticello, California, under Lake Berryessa since 1957 and photographed in its last year by Dorothea Lange and Pirkle Jones; Sego, Utah, a coal camp on the National Register since 2017; and Survival Town on Yucca Flat, Nevada. Every chapter ends with what stands on that ground today, from census counts, federal records and reports from 2022 to 2026. Real places, real dates, and no campfire legends. Did your town lose a school, a mine, a valley or a main street? Tell us the name of the place and what used to stand there. Image credits: 28 photos from Wikimedia Commons / Openverse (CC BY 2.0, CC BY 3.0, CC BY-SA 2.0, CC BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 4.0, public domain) by Brian Stansberry, Dlogic, Arian Zwegers, Mredden ( talk ), Lyndi & Jason on Flickr, Eric Statzer, Dripwoods, inkknife_2000 (7.5 million views +); archival film: Prelinger Archives (public domain); stock video: Pixabay. #americanhistory #ghosttowns #abandonedamerica #atomicage