The history of North Mono
North Mono's recorded ground centres on Bodie, the gold-rush town founded after prospector W. S. Bodey's 1859 strike at Bodie Bluff. Main Street once held sixty-five saloons during the 1879 boom, before fire and decline left the ruins that California has preserved in 'arrested decay' since 1962.
Barber Shop sits on Main Street in Bodie, California, a gold-rush town founded after prospector W. S. Bodey found gold nearby in 1859. The street once held sixty-five saloons during Bodie's 1879 boom of up to 10,000 people, before fires, decline and a 1932 blaze reduced it to the preserved ruins visitors see today.
A prospector finds gold and dies before seeing the town
Bodie is a ghost town in Mono County, California, now preserved as a state historic park where visitors can walk its empty streets. Main Street once ran a mile long, lined with stores, saloons and the Bodie, California. Today around a hundred buildings still stand, their shelves and furniture left exactly as owners abandoned them.
The town is named for W. S. Bodey, a prospector from Poughkeepsie, New York, who sailed around Cape Horn in 1848 to reach the California gold fields. In July 1859, Bodey found gold near a hill later called Bodie Bluff. Bodey never saw the camp grow. That November he died in a blizzard on a supply run to nearby Monoville, and his body was not found until spring. A sign painter later changed the spelling of the camp's name from "Bodey" to "Bodie," and it stuck.
The early camp grew slowly. A mill went up in 1861, and only around twenty miners worked the district through its first years. Fortunes changed in 1875, when the Bunker Hill Mine caved in and exposed rich new ore. The partners who owned it renamed it the Standard Company in 1877.
Sixty-five saloons line Main Street during the boom
Gold from the Standard Mine triggered a rush. By 1879, Bodie held somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 people, packed into more than 2,000 buildings. Sixty-five saloons lined Main Street alone. Murders, barroom brawls and stagecoach holdups were common enough that the phrase "Badman from Bodie" spread beyond the town. A reverend who visited in 1881 called it "a sea of sin, lashed by the tempests of lust and passion."
The boom did not last. By 1881, the richest ore was running out, and the population had already dropped to around 1,500.
Families stay on as fire twice strikes Main Street
Families replaced the single miners who left for new strikes in Montana and Arizona. In 1882 residents built the Methodist Church, which still stands on Main Street. A fire hit the town in 1886, by which time the population had already fallen to around 1,500.
A short-lived revival followed. In 1890, a new process let mills recover gold from old tailings, and the Standard Company built its own hydroelectric plant nearby in 1892, among the first long-distance power transmissions in the country. That July, fire tore through Main Street again and destroyed much of the west side of town.
Rosa May, a prostitute who lived in Bodie's red-light district, became part of local legend during these years. The story told in town says she nursed sick miners through an epidemic and died of the same illness herself. She was buried outside the cemetery fence.
A child with matches burns nearly all of Bodie
By the 1910 census, only 698 people remained, nearly all of them families who had stayed on after the single men moved on. The post office closed in 1917, and the last narrow-gauge railroad serving the mines was abandoned the same year. By 1920 only 120 people were left.
The story told around town blames a toddler nicknamed "Bodie Bill," who was said to have been playing with matches. Main Street, once a mile of stores and saloons, was reduced to a scatter of surviving buildings.
Mining ends and California buys the empty town
The last mine closed in 1942, after the War Production Board halted gold mining during World War II. The handful of remaining residents left soon after. The Cain family, who owned much of the town, hired caretakers to keep vandals out through the 1940s. By 1943 only three people were still living in Bodie.
California named Bodie a Historical Landmark in 1939 and a National Historic Landmark in 1961. The state bought the town in 1962 and opened it as Bodie State Historic Park, with 170 buildings still standing. Park managers chose a policy of "arrested decay": nothing rebuilt, nothing restored, just enough work done to stop the remaining buildings from collapsing further.
Main Street becomes state land, not private deeds
Bodie joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. In 1994, a federal act blocked new mining claims on the land and let the state buy out a bankrupt mining company's remaining claims. California named Bodie its official State Gold Rush Ghost Town in 2002.
The ground under Main Street itself was never platted into private house lots the way a living town would be. County records show it as park land, held by the state since 1962, rather than a chain of residential deeds. The buildings that still stand on it, like the Bodie, California, passed from mining companies and private owners into state hands in that same purchase. This ended more than a century of private ownership on the ground where the barber shop, the firehouse and the carpenter shop still stand.
More than a hundred buildings remain today, their shelves and furniture left as they were abandoned. Around 200,000 people visit each year to walk streets once lined with sixty-five saloons.
Main Street's surviving buildings stand roofless or shuttered, exactly as their last owners left them.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.