Ellsworth, Nevada: The Silver Camp in the Paradise Range

Turn off Nevada Route 844 a few miles short of Ione and follow the graded road west into the Paradise Range, and the valley closes in behind you fast. The sagebrush thickens, the canyon narrows, and then, in a fold of the hills where the water used to run, the stone walls begin. Roofless rooms. A doorway framing nothing but sky. The pale scar of a mill site on the slope above. This is Ellsworth, and it has been emptying out, in fits and starts, for a hundred and fifty years.

It was never a great camp. It never had a railroad, never had a newspaper, never got its name into the songs. What Ellsworth had was a rich little vein of silver, a stamp mill that started a boom in 1870, a couple hundred people who believed in the place, and a stubborn refusal to stay dead that carried it, on and off, almost to living memory. For a ghost town in the loneliest part of Nye County, that is a long and interesting life. Here is what we know of it.

Silver in the Paradise Range

The silver was found in December 1863, and as was so often the case in Nevada, the men who get the credit were shown where to look. Native people of the region led a pair of prospectors to the outcrop in the Paradise Range, and within months the news had brought enough men into the canyon to organize the Mammoth Mining District in 1864, with Sam McKeon, A. T. Hatch, and a handful of others putting their names to the district's rules. This was the same spring the territory was racing toward statehood, and the same season the great rush into Ione was underway a few canyons to the east. The Paradise Range was suddenly a place men wanted to be.

Two camps sprang up almost on top of each other. The first was laid out in February 1864 and called Mammoth, after the district, then renamed Weston. The second was staked out in May 1864 by Hatch and a partner named Evans, right alongside its rival, and christened Ellsworth. The name honored a Colonel Ellsworth, and in the fourth year of the Civil War there was really only one Colonel Ellsworth a Union-minded town would have had in mind: Elmer Ellsworth, the young officer shot down in Alexandria in 1861 and mourned across the North as the war's first martyr. The old district record does not spell out the connection, but a new town named Ellsworth in 1864 was wearing its loyalties on its sleeve. In time the two camps simply grew together, and the Ellsworth name won.

The Esta Buena and the Boom of 1870

For its first six years Ellsworth was a camp waiting for a mill. There was ore, and some of it was spectacular. The best of it came out of the Esta Buena, a mine owned by Don Manuel San Pedro of nearby Grantsville, whose gray copper ore was said to run as high as $1,600 to the ton, with milled rock paying up to $325. In an era when a working miner earned three or four dollars a day, those were figures that made men walk a long way. A post office opened on March 7, 1866, which is as good a sign as any that the camp intended to stay.

The turn came in 1870, when a ten-stamp mill went up and the ore that had been piling on the dumps finally had somewhere to go. That was Ellsworth's boom, and it was a real one by the standards of the Paradise Range: the population climbed past two hundred, more than thirty permanent buildings went up along the canyon, and before the rush was over the camp was running two ten-stamp mills and a Chilean mill, the great grinding wheel the Mexican and South American miners had brought north with them. Stone was the building material because stone was what the canyon offered, and that is the reason anything is still standing today.

The Long Fade

Silver camps die the way they are born, quickly, and Ellsworth's good years were few. The main mill shut down in 1874. It fired up again briefly in 1877 to work through its own tailings and some ore hauled over from the Alexander mine at Grantsville, and then went quiet for good. The post office, that faithful barometer of a Nevada town's pulse, closed on December 29, 1884. In April 1895 the mill itself was taken apart and hauled off to Union, a few miles up the Ione valley, and with it went the last real reason for anyone to stay.

But Ellsworth would not quite lie down. A small strike in 1906 raised a camp of thirty called Corrine that was gone by the end of the year. The Return mine reopened in 1910, the Mexican mine in 1916 under a new company, and in 1919 the district turned out some $57,000 in metal. Through the early 1920s there was a mill moved in from Liberty, a twelve-stamp mill and cyanide plant run by the New Return company, and a new round of hopeful names on the claim maps. Then the ground shifted under the old silver camp entirely: in 1929 the mines went back to work for tungsten, the hard-steel metal the twentieth century wanted far more than it wanted silver, and a man named Jim Corlett ran a mill in the canyon through the 1930s and into the Second World War. The federal order that shut down non-essential mining in 1944 closed him too. Corlett stayed on, though, and by one account some kind of work continued in the Ellsworth hills until his death around 1970. For a camp that "died" in 1884, that is a remarkable second act.

The Family That Was Headed Here

Ellsworth has one more claim on Nevada's memory, and it is the saddest one. Readers of our story on the Le Beau sisters' graves at Four Mile Flat will remember that the family who buried three little girls on the salt flat below Sand Mountain was said to be bound for Ellsworth, where the parents afterward settled. The camp was only a few years old then, the Esta Buena was turning out its first rich ore, and a French-Canadian family crossing the central overland road would have heard of it the way everyone heard of a new strike: as a place to start over. Sixty miles of alkali and sagebrush separate those three graves from these stone walls. It is worth standing in the canyon for a moment and thinking about what it cost some people to get here.

Visiting Ellsworth Today

Ellsworth lies about ten to twelve miles west of Ione in the Paradise Range, on the west side of the Ione valley, in the northwestern corner of Nye County. The approach is by unpaved road and calls for a high-clearance vehicle, a full tank, and the understanding that there is no help out here; the nearest services are a long way off in any direction. What remains is mostly stone: the walls of a dozen or more buildings, foundations, the mill site, scattered iron, and the quiet. Please leave it all exactly as you find it. The ruins have survived a century and a half of weather and a good deal of careless digging, and every brick and bottle that walks away takes a little of the story with it.

If you are making the drive, Ellsworth pairs naturally with Ione, the 1863 silver camp that briefly served as the first seat of Nye County and still has a few residents, and with the better-preserved stone ruins of Grantsville and Berlin, the latter now a state park with its ichthyosaur fossils. Together they make a day in the Shoshone and Paradise ranges that is as good a look at the 1860s Nevada silver frontier as you can get.

At a Glance: Ellsworth, Nevada

• Silver was discovered in the Paradise Range in December 1863; the Mammoth Mining District was organized in 1864.
• The town was laid out in May 1864 by A. T. Hatch and Evans beside a rival camp called Mammoth, later Weston; the two merged under the Ellsworth name, which honored a Colonel Ellsworth, almost certainly Elmer Ellsworth, the Union's first fallen officer.
• The Esta Buena mine, owned by Don Manuel San Pedro of Grantsville, produced gray copper-silver ore reported as high as $1,600 per ton.
• A ten-stamp mill built in 1870 set off the boom: a population over 200, more than thirty permanent buildings, and eventually two stamp mills and a Chilean mill.
• The post office ran from March 7, 1866, to December 29, 1884. The main mill closed in 1874 and was moved to Union in 1895.
• Small revivals followed in 1906, 1910, 1916, and the 1920s; tungsten mining began in 1929 and Jim Corlett ran a mill until the 1944 wartime shutdown, with some work continuing until about 1970.
• The site, about 10 to 12 miles west of Ione in Nye County, holds extensive stone ruins reachable by high-clearance dirt road.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is Ellsworth, Nevada?

In the Paradise Range of northwestern Nye County, roughly ten to twelve miles west of Ione and on the west side of the Ione valley. It is reached by unpaved road off Nevada Route 844; a high-clearance vehicle is strongly recommended.

When was Ellsworth founded, and why that name?

The townsite was laid out in May 1864, a few months after silver was found in the range and the Mammoth Mining District was organized. It was named for a Colonel Ellsworth, which in 1864 almost certainly meant Elmer Ellsworth, the celebrated young Union officer killed in 1861.

What was mined at Ellsworth?

Silver first, from gray copper ore rich enough to run $1,600 a ton in the best pockets of the Esta Buena mine. In the twentieth century the district was reworked for tungsten, with some gold and mercury, and a mill operated in the canyon as late as 1944.

What is left to see?

A good deal for a camp this remote: stone walls and foundations of more than a dozen buildings, the mill site, and scattered mining iron. Everything is protected by federal and state law and should be left in place.

Is Ellsworth connected to the Le Beau sisters' graves?

Yes. The Le Beau family, who buried three daughters at Four Mile Flat near Sand Mountain in the mid-1860s, were on their way to Ellsworth and are said to have settled there afterward.

Conclusion

Nevada's famous camps, Virginia City and Tonopah and Goldfield, are famous because they were big. Ellsworth is worth remembering because it was small and would not quit. A silver find in 1863, a boom in 1870, a death in 1884, and then sixty more years of men walking back up the canyon to try again, right up to a tungsten mill grinding through the Second World War. The stone walls in the Paradise Range are what that persistence looks like once the people are gone.

We are always drawn to the places where Nevada's history is still out there to be touched. To bring a piece of the silver-camp era home, explore our curated collection at The Eclection.

Resources & Further Reading

For deeper study, these are reliable, non-commercial starting points:

• Online Nevada Encyclopedia — articles on Nevada history, people, and places.
• Forgotten Nevada: Ellsworth — a detailed site history drawing on the 1881 county history and later district records.
• Nevada Bureau of Mines and Geology — mining district records and geologic reports for Nye County.
• Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park — the preserved mining town nearest to Ellsworth, with visitor information for the area.

Hero photograph: the Ione Road (Nye County Route 21) leaving Ione, Nevada, looking across the Paradise Range country where Ellsworth lies. Photograph by Famartin, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.