ghost town
A ghost town, deserted city, extinct town, or abandoned city is an abandoned settlement, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economi ...
Ellis County, Kansas
Ellis County is a county located in the U.S. state of Kansas. Its county seat and most populous city is Hays. As of the 2020 census, the county population was 28,934.
The county was named for George Ellis, a first lieutenant of the Twelfth ...
, United States.
History
Chetolah was founded in the 1880s when promoters laid out a town site and built a hotel, livery stable, and store. The Chetolah Town Site Company was incorporated in 1888 and then renamed the Chetolah Land and Town Company in 1889. The company had plans for a railroad connection, but no such connection was ever built.
The initial settlement was unsuccessful, but the town revived in the 1890s with the purported discovery of
gold
Gold is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol Au (from Latin ) and atomic number 79. In its pure form, it is a brightness, bright, slightly orange-yellow, dense, soft, malleable, and ductile metal. Chemically, gold is a transition metal ...
in the grey
Carlile Shale
The Carlile Shale is a Turonian age Upper Cretaceous, Upper/Late Cretaceous series shale geologic Formation (geology), formation in the central-western United States, including in the Great Plains region of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico ...
of the surrounding hills. A three-year
gold rush
A gold rush or gold fever is a discovery of gold—sometimes accompanied by other precious metals and rare-earth minerals—that brings an onrush of miners seeking their fortune. Major gold rushes took place in the 19th century in Australia, ...
ensued, and the town grew as promoters attempted various schemes for recovering alleged traces of gold from the shales along the
Smoky Hill River
The Smoky Hill River is a river in the central Great Plains of North America, running through Colorado and Kansas.
Names
The Smoky Hill is named from the Smoky Hills region of north-central Kansas through which it flows. American Indians li ...
. The hotel reopened and a bridge was built across the river into the settlement. Following failure of the gold rush, which both the first Kansas state geologist, Erasmus Haworth, and
Thomas Edison
Thomas Alva Edison (February11, 1847October18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures. These inventions, ...
had previously declared a hoax, Chetolah was abandoned and became a
ghost town
A ghost town, deserted city, extinct town, or abandoned city is an abandoned settlement, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economi ...
. Today, very little remains of the settlement.
See also
*
List of ghost towns in Kansas
This is an incomplete list of ghost towns in the state of Kansas.
Causes
Many reasons exist as to why a community becomes abandoned (or nearly so).
*Transportation: With the development of major highways and interstates, people were willing ...
Mancos Shale
The Mancos Shale or Mancos Group is a Late Cretaceous (Upper Cretaceous) geologic formation of the Western United States.
The Mancos Shale was first described by Cross and Purington in 1899 and was named for exposures near the town of Mancos, C ...
encompasses shale corelating with the
Carlile Shale
The Carlile Shale is a Turonian age Upper Cretaceous, Upper/Late Cretaceous series shale geologic Formation (geology), formation in the central-western United States, including in the Great Plains region of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico ...