Bonnie Claire is a

ghost town Ghost Town(s) or Ghosttown may refer to: * Ghost town, a town that has been abandoned Film and television * Ghost Town (1936 film), ''Ghost Town'' (1936 film), an American Western film by Harry L. Fraser * Ghost Town (1956 film), ''Ghost Town'' ...

located in

Nye County Nye County is a county in the U.S. state of Nevada. As of the 2020 census, the population was 51,591. Its county seat is Tonopah. At , Nye is Nevada's largest county by area and the third-largest county in the contiguous United States, behi ...

Nevada Nevada ( ; ) is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, Western region of the United States. It is bordered by Oregon to the northwest, Idaho to the northeast, California to the west, Arizona to the southeast, and Utah to the east. N ...

. The settlement is located on the edge of Sarcobatus Flat adjacent to Nevada State Route 267. The mines of Slate Ridge lie to the northwest and the northernmost spur of the

Amargosa Range The Amargosa Range is a mountain range in Inyo County, California and Nye County, Nevada. The range runs along most of the eastern side of California's Death Valley, separating it from Nevada's Amargosa Desert. The U-shaped Amargosa River flows ...

, the

Grapevine Mountains The Grapevine Mountains are a mountain range located along the border of Inyo County, California and Nye County, Nevada in the United States. The mountain range is about long and lies in a northwest-southeasterly direction along the Nevada-Califor ...

, is just to the south of the townsite. Bonnie Claire Flat extends to the southwest between the Slate Ridge and the Grapevines to the California border.

History

The town had its beginnings in 1906 to support the gold mines in the Slate Ridge area. It replaced an earlier camp known as Thorp's Wells which had started in the 1880s to process the ore from Gold Mountain. When the Bullfrog-Goldfield Railroad arrived in 1906 followed by the

Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad The Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad was a railroad built by William A. Clark that ran northwest from a connection with the mainline of the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad at Las Vegas, Nevada to the gold mines at Goldfield. The SPL ...

business boomed and the site was renamed. After the mines played out the town declined after 1914. In the 1920s the town became a supply point for the construction of

Scotty's Castle Scotty's Castle (also known as Death Valley Ranch) is a two-story Mission Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival style villa located in the Grapevine Mountains of northern Death Valley in Death Valley National Park, California, US. Scotty's Castl ...

located in Death Valley about 20 miles to the southwest. The post office was called Thorp from June 1905 until July 1909 and then renamed to Bonnie Claire from July 1909 until it closed in December 1931. In 2005 Tonogold Resources initiated the "Bonnie Claire Gold Tailings Project" to rework 12 million tons of tailings. This project, at Bonnie Claire, followed shortly after Tonogold's successful reworking of Big Mill's tailings.

References

Ghost towns in Nye County, Nevada Historic districts in Nevada Ghost towns in Nevada {{US-ghost-town-stub