Ghost Town Tuesday Part 2 - Electric Boogaloo

You know what? I think it's the term "ghost town" that makes ghost towns so interesting. If you named them "Previously inhabited locations (P.I.L.)" I bet ghost town visitations would be way down. No one want to visit a PIL.

Anyway, with that in mind, let's visit another one of utah's PILs by the name of Newhouse. If you misspell it and google "New House", then you get a bunch of prices for "Currently inhabited locations (CIL), which isn't all that interesting. Newhouse is somewhere in this zone....

You may notice that this zone overlaps with the Frisco zone from last week. Turns out the two buggers were pretty close to each other. When Frisco High played Newhouse High, I bet it was considered the "big game". In fact, it was probably the only game. And likely ended with all the players getting "consumption" or a bad case of "the vapors" and passing away. Old timey life was hard.

The story of Newhouse begins in 1870 and starts out with pretty humble beginnings. There really wasn't any mining (or miming) to speak of at that point, so probably the people who chose to live out there were the type of people you wouldn't want living next to you anyway. It was the sort of situation where dust was probably the leading concern of the village. And can you blame them?

All that changed in 1900 when a fellow named Samuel Newhouse bought a promising new prospect to the east of the town. There doesn't seem to be any pictures of Mr. Newhouse (for whom I'm assuming the town was named), but it really feels like there should be some imagery...Let's go with this guy...

There. Anyway, Mr. Newhouse had a dream to build a perfect little community and strike it rich with his new mine.

The mine in question is the famous (not famous) Cactus Mine, where silver and copper had been discovered. This place....

That's what it looks like now anyway. It used to be cooler. Newhouse took the dusty, stinky existing community and built a fancy dancehall, a restaurant and a bar located a mile out of town. The real pride and joy of Newhouse was the fully dust-free clubhouse at the center of town. Within it, a man could find both a library AND pool tables. Yes, it was good to be alive. But not for poor Mr. Newhouse. He died prior to the completion of the town.

These were probably sad times for the town of Newhouse. But luckily Mr. Newhouse II (his brother Matt) showed up and completed the town and started up the mine. He also built one of these...

A dome! Now Frisco couldn't lord their dome-dominance over the proud Newhouse folk. This dome was used to make charcoal, much in the same mannor as the Frisco domes. But this one is still in great shape. Yes, things were great in Newhouse, and stayed that way for a good 7 or 8 years until the mine puttered out of cactus ore.

Again, without a mine there really wasn't a reason to stay in Newhouse. The clubhouse was abandoned, and by 1914 the Cactus mine had been torn down and the good folks of Newhouse were no more.

If you head out to Newhouse nowadays, prepared to be disappointed. The clubhouse is gone. So is the bar. In fact, pretty much everything but the city dump has diappeared. But what a dump!

Also, off in the distance, this strange building is still standing...

Was it a mirage? Was I seeing the ghost of the clubhouse? Naw, it was just an old house that looked like it would give you tetanus and not feel bad about it. Anway, that's all the pictures I got of Newhouse. In the long run I suppose you could say that Frisco won the battle because there's more of it remaining, but if you really think about it neither of them really won at all. Makes you think.