Fairview, Nevada: The Silver Ghost Town Behind the Navy's Bombing Range

Above: an abandoned mine and mill at Tonopah, Nevada, photographed for the Farm Security Administration in March 1940 — the headframe on the hillside, the pale tailings running across the flat, the sagebrush coming back. It is not Fairview. No photograph of Fairview has been found in any collection that permits reproduction, which is part of this story rather than incidental to it.

Nevada has a canon of ghost towns. Rhyolite, Belmont, Goldfield, Berlin, Aurora. They have signs, pamphlets, state park status, and in several cases a gift shop.

Fairview has none of that, and almost nobody writes about it.

Which is strange, because for about eighteen months it was one of the loudest places in the state. Two thousand people. Twenty-seven saloons. George Wingfield and George Nixon buying in. And then, half a century after it emptied out, the ground underneath it tore open in one of the twenty largest earthquakes ever recorded anywhere, and threw a piece of the highway twenty feet.

And then the Navy took the valley.

That is three separate reasons to be famous, and it is famous for none of them. This is why.

Where It Is, Precisely

The townsite is at 39.26639 north, 118.19750 west, about 4,670 feet up, in south-eastern Churchill County. Three independent sources agree on that to four decimal places, which for a ghost town is unusual and worth saying.

The cemetery is at 39.27168, −118.18856 — roughly a third of a mile north-north-east. They are the same place. If you reach one you are standing beside the other.

Fairview Peak, the 8,271-foot summit the district is named for, is three and a half miles south-south-east and more than three thousand feet above the town. People conflate the two constantly. The peak is a landmark; the town was down on the flat.

There is a fourth name to keep separate. Fairview Station, a Pony Express stop, sits about five and three-quarter miles further north again. Different thing, different decade, no connection beyond the word.

One Hundred and Fifty-One Lots

Silver was found here late in 1905. By January 1906 the Nevada Hills claim had been located, by March the Goldfield money was in, and by the summer the townsite was platted.

The speed of it is best measured not in people but in real estate. A Fallon paper, in the middle of March 1906, offering its readers a yardstick:

“As an instance of how quickly mining town realty is disposed of, lots in Fairview to the number of 151 have been disposed of, although the town is but a few weeks old.”

A hundred and fifty-one town lots sold in a place a few weeks old, in a county whose seat had fewer than a thousand people.

On the same front page, the editor allows himself one paragraph of something close to vertigo:

“Apropos the mining excitement now in progress, the Standard has received a number of requests from large dailies throughout the country asking for stories relative to the conditions as they really exist.”

Read that carefully. Big-city papers across the United States were writing to a small weekly in Fallon, Nevada, to ask what is actually happening out there. That is what a boom looks like from inside: the rest of the country can no longer tell how much of what it is reading is true, and writes to the nearest man who might know.

Sixty Miles by Automobile

The thing that is hard to picture now is how you got there.

The railhead was at Hazen. From Hazen to Fairview was sixty miles of desert road, and by the spring of 1906 that road was being run as a motor service — automobiles, in 1906, carrying passengers across sixty miles of Nevada to a silver camp that had existed for a few weeks.

The local paper was already agitating about it, and the complaint is a small masterpiece of frontier municipal politics. A rival line was proposed from Fairview to a station on the Hazen cut-off, ten miles shorter and over better ground. The editor's objection was not that it would fail but that it might succeed:

“Should the new automobile line meet with success it will not only work a hardship on the present owners of automobiles engaged in the Hazen-Fairview passenger traffic, but it will also redound greatly to the loss of outfitting trade by our local merchants.”

Spend the road money on our road, in other words, before somebody builds a better one somewhere else. It is the same argument every county in the West had about every railroad, highway and interchange for the following hundred years, being made about a dirt track in 1906.

And in the same column of local notes, the law arrives:

“A. B. Connelly, of Fairview, was in Fallon yesterday. He says that Fairview is gradually forging ahead and predicts a population of one thousand for the camp within the next sixty days. Mr. Connelly has lately been appointed a deputy by Sheriff Shirley, and it will be a part of his future duty to maintain order in his section.”

One deputy. For a camp he expected to reach a thousand people inside two months.

He undershot. By early 1907 there were about two thousand, with hotels, banks, assay offices, a newspaper, a union hall and twenty-seven saloons.

The Man Who Tried to Stop His Own Sale

In October 1907 a Reno mining page carried a story that is the whole psychology of a boom in four lines.

A property in the Fairview district called the Mizpah — a rival to the big Nevada Hills ground, at the same stage of development — had just been sold. The purchaser was D. J. Kennedy. The price was said to be a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, the greater portion in cash.

The headline, though, is about the seller:

“Original Owner Makes Rich Strike and Trys to Stop Sale But Without Success.”

He had agreed to sell. Then, before the deal closed, his men cut into good ore. He tried to get out of it. He could not.

There is no record of what he found, what Kennedy got, or what either man thought about it afterwards. What survives is the shape of the thing, which is the shape of every mining district that ever existed: everybody is one week away from being right, and the contracts are signed in the week before.

The Mill, and the Two Moves

Fairview did not stay put. It moved twice.

The first move was up toward the mines. The second was into a narrow canyon, and then out of it again when the town outgrew it, to a site near the mill that everyone called Upper Fairview. By about 1914 the original lower townsite — the one with the hundred and fifty-one lots — had been abandoned in favour of the upper one. There was even a separate Upper Fairview post office for a few months in 1907 and 1908.

That is why the ground is confusing today, and why people argue about where Fairview “is.” There are at least two Fairviews and a mill site, strung up a hillside, each of them emptied in turn.

The mill is the reason the second one existed. The district had no stamp mill at first, which meant ore went out by wagon — sixty miles of it — and only ore rich enough to justify the haul was worth mining at all. In 1911 the Nevada Hills Mining Company finally built one. Accounts of its size differ; it was somewhere between a hundred and two hundred tons a day, which in this district was enormous.

It came five years late. By the time it was running, the outside money that had made the boom was long gone — interest collapsed after 1908, the newspaper closed, and most of the two thousand had moved on to the next thing. The mill was built for a town that had already left.

It ran until 1917. Leasers picked at the ground into the twenties. The post office closed on the thirty-first of May 1919, which is the administrative moment a place stops being a place.

The Company That Became an Oil Lease

Here is the ending nobody tells, and it is better than the usual one.

The Nevada Hills Mining Company did not go bankrupt and vanish. It reorganised. And in February 1924, five years after the Fairview post office closed, its secretary was mailing out a circular to shareholders announcing the company's new business.

Six hundred and ten acres of oil leases in the Kern and Midway fields of California.

The circular is careful to say that the blocks are proven or partly proven oil lands, not wildcat territory, and that they adjoin or are partly surrounded by the producing ground of the large companies. One lease in the Kern River field already had a completed well on it and two more about half finished.

Think about what that document is. A Nevada silver company, formed to work a hillside in Churchill County, had become a vehicle for buying California oil ground. The mine was finished, the mill was cold, the town was gone — and the corporation walked out of the state and went into a different mineral entirely, carrying its shareholders with it.

The town died. The company just changed what it was looking for.

Seven Minutes Past Three

By the 1950s there was almost nobody left. Ed and Sylvia Stratton lived at Fairview into that decade; only the rock foundation of their cabin survives, with an old refrigerator beside it.

1954 was a bad year for this stretch of Nevada before December ever arrived. On the sixth of July a magnitude 6.8 shook Fallon hard enough to bring down chimneys and wreck unreinforced brick; twelve sailors were hurt at the naval air station, canals on the Newlands project failed by liquefaction, and President Eisenhower declared a disaster area. On the twenty-fourth of August another, magnitude 6.6, tore north from the first scarp and added twelve more miles of broken ground.

Then, at seven minutes past three on the morning of the sixteenth of December 1954, the fault under Fairview Peak let go at magnitude 7.3.

Four minutes and twenty seconds later, Dixie Valley followed at 6.6 to 6.9.

The numbers underneath are what make it a textbook event. The Fairview Peak fault moved nine feet six inches sideways and twelve feet vertically. At Bell Flat the normal slip reached nearly twelve feet. Scarps stood seven metres high. The total surface rupture ran about a hundred kilometres, with another forty-seven in Dixie Valley on a separate fault, and offsets recorded across an area sixty miles by twenty.

The highway took it directly. US 50 buckled and cracked, and in places the road dropped by more than a metre and a half.

The morning after, a Reno paper ran a photograph with this caption:

“CHUNK OF PAVEMENT dislodged by the earthquake yesterday morning is examined by Wendell Wheat. This picture was taken near Fairview Peak close to the 'quake's epicenter. This piece of paving material was tossed 20 feet from its original location.”

A slab of the Lincoln Highway, thrown twenty feet.

And the casualty list is the strangest part of it. Fallon suffered only a few cracked chimneys. At Frenchman Station, heavy furniture was dislodged and the damage was called minor. The largest earthquake in the recorded history of the Great Basin went off under a district that no longer had anybody in it to hurt.

A Movement Not Noted in Any Previous Earthquake

Eleven months later, a Nevada geologist took the Fairview Peak data to the national convention of the Geological Society of America in New Orleans.

Professor David B. Slemmons, of the Mackay School of Mines at the University of Nevada, was to tell the convention that the December 1954 shocks had not only taken their place among the twenty largest earthquakes ever recorded, but had produced a type of movement not noted in any previous earthquake. He described the action as a tilt.

The chart published alongside that story is worth keeping in mind. It listed the four major Nevada earthquakes since 1915: Pleasant Valley in 1915, Excelsior Mountain in 1934, Fallon–Stillwater in the summer of 1954, and Dixie Valley that December. Two of the four happened in the same year, within a hundred miles of each other.

The Coast and Geodetic Survey mapped how far it was felt: the whole of Nevada except the southernmost tip, a good part of central and northern California, and portions of Idaho, Wyoming and Utah. A water tank in Sacramento, two hundred miles away, took twenty thousand dollars of damage.

Fairview, in other words, is not an obscure ghost town that happens to sit near a fault. It sits on one of the most studied pieces of ground in American earthquake geology, and the scarps are still out there, because nothing has been built over them and nothing ever will be.

The Land, Same Year

Turn to the same page of the same newspaper that carried the earthquake map in November 1955, two columns to the right, and there is the other half of Fairview's modern history.

“Withdrawal Inquiry Asked.”

A congressman named Clair Engle, who chaired the House interior and insular affairs committee, had written to the assistant secretary of the interior asking him to halt the withdrawal of public land for military purposes until an investigation could be completed. What prompted him, the story says plainly, were Navy requests for huge acreages of public land in California and in Nevada.

Engle's own sentence, under a sub-head reading 'Grab' Hinted:

“I have felt for a long time that the department of defense takes more land than it needs.”

He added that each service wanted gunnery ranges of its own when some of them could be used jointly, and said he would initiate an inquiry as soon as Congress reconvened in January. Two of the disputes that prompted the letter are named: the Fallon gunnery range in northwestern Nevada, and the Saline range in Death Valley. Nevada's own congressman, Clifton Young, called the announcement excellent news and a long-needed inquiry into a matter of vital concern to the western states.

So the two things that define Fairview today — the broken ground and the closed gate — arrive in the record within eleven months of each other, and on the same sheet of newsprint.

The range won. The Fallon complex now runs to four training ranges and some eighty-four thousand acres of targets, with airspace over six and a half million. Target Bravo-17 sits in Restricted Area 4804, twenty-three nautical miles east-south-east of the air station, between the Sand Spring Mountains and Fairview Peak. That is the ground Fairview is on the edge of.

Can You Actually Get There

This is the question everybody asks about Fairview and nobody answers cleanly, so here is the honest version, with its contradictions left in.

What survives on the ground: the bank vault from the first townsite — a squat, fortress-like block, the single most-photographed thing in the district — plus mill ruins and foundations at Upper Fairview, scattered rock footings, and the Stratton cabin's base with its refrigerator.

What the sources say about reaching it:

Two of them state that the vault can be seen from US Highway 50. The same page that says so also states that the site is fenced within the restricted bounds of the air station and that, as of December 2025, access is prohibited.

A Nevada ghost-town writer who went in during 2025 puts it differently and more usefully. The Navy, that account says, cut off access from the valley because it is a live bombing range; getting in now means going over a mountain top with some really steep hills, and it requires an ATV, a skilled driver and someone who knows where they are going. The writer reached the mills at Upper Fairview on a side-by-side with a guided group, and notes that the old townsites themselves are on restricted land. A full-size vehicle, the account adds, is too tall and top-heavy for the descent.

The range's own land status explains why both can be true. Of the ground around Bravo-17, 33,400 acres primarily to the south are closed to the public, while 68,600 acres to the north are open for public use. The townsite sits near that line, hard against the highway on the north side. You can look at it from a public road. Walking to it is a different legal question, and the valley approach from the south and west — the obvious one, the one on the map — goes through the range.

What anyone can do today, legally and immediately: stop at Nevada State Historical Marker No. 202, on US 50 about five miles east of State Route 839.

And before going any further than that: get the restricted-area boundary from the Navy rather than from a blog. Restricted Area 4804 is charted, it appears on aeronautical sectionals and in the range's own environmental documents, and the difference between the closed acreage and the open acreage is the entire question.

What Is Not Settled

Where exactly the boundary runs. No source consulted gives the Restricted Area 4804 line against the townsite coordinate. Everything about access depends on it and nobody publishes it next to the thing people want to visit.

How much the district actually produced. One account says $4.17 million in silver; another says $2 million in gold and silver. The mill is variously 100 and 200 tons a day. These are not small discrepancies and no figure here should be quoted without saying whose it is.

When and how the Navy took it. The 1955 congressional fight is the first clear sighting in the record. The original withdrawal is earlier — wartime or just after — and it is sitting in the Federal Register and in Churchill County's own files, unread.

What the 1954 earthquake did to the ruins. A magnitude 7.3 went off three and a half miles from a town built of frame, stone and brick, much of which was still standing in 1954. Nobody appears to have written down what was left afterwards. The Strattons were living there and would have known.

Whether the scarps can still be walked. They are famous in the literature and photographed constantly by geologists. Whether the best of them are on the open side of the line is, again, the boundary question.

Resources & Further Reading

The townsite coordinates (39.26639, −118.19750) are given identically by the Wikipedia entry for Fairview, by Western Mining History and by Destination4x4; the cemetery coordinate (39.27168, −118.18856) and the Fairview Peak coordinate (39.22492, −118.15291) were read from Google Maps place records. The founding, the 1905 discovery, the March 1906 purchases by George Nixon and George Wingfield, the population of two thousand, the twenty-seven saloons, the two relocations and Upper Fairview, the 1911 Nevada Hills mill, the 1917 closure, the post office dates of 23 April 1906 to 31 May 1919, the surviving bank vault, and Ed and Sylvia Stratton are drawn from those three pages and from the Nevada ghost-town account cited below; where they disagree, this article says so.

The 151 lots, the requests from large dailies, the Hazen–Fairview automobile traffic and the proposed Shirtz line, and A. B. Connelly's appointment as deputy under Sheriff Shirley with his prediction of a thousand people in sixty days, are all from the front page of The Fallon Standard of 17 March 1906. The sale of the Fairview Mizpah to D. J. Kennedy for $125,000, and the headline recording that the original owner made a rich strike and tried to stop the sale without success, are from the Reno Evening Gazette of 11 October 1907, page 3. The Nevada Hills Reorganized Mining Company's 610 acres of oil leases in the Kern and Midway fields of California, announced by circular from its secretary H. Z. Peters, are reported in the Nevada State Journal of 1 February 1924, page 3.

The caption describing a chunk of pavement thrown twenty feet and examined by Wendell Wheat near the epicentre is from the Nevada State Journal of 17 December 1954, page 18. Professor David B. Slemmons of the Mackay School of Mines, the Geological Society of America convention in New Orleans, the description of the movement as one not noted in any previous earthquake, the chart of four major Nevada earthquakes since 1915, and the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey map of the felt area all appear on page 9 of the Reno Gazette-Journal of 5 November 1955 — the same page that carries Representative Clair Engle's request to halt military land withdrawals, his remark that the department of defense takes more land than it needs, the naming of the Fallon gunnery range and the Saline range in Death Valley, and Representative Clifton Young's response. Magnitudes, times, slip measurements, rupture lengths, the damage at Fallon and Frenchman Station, and the effects on US 50 are from the published account of the 1954 Rainbow Mountain–Fairview Peak–Dixie Valley earthquakes. Range locations, acreages and the public-access split come from the published description of the Fallon Range Training Complex.

• The 1954 Rainbow Mountain–Fairview Peak–Dixie Valley earthquakes — the full sequence of four shocks across one year, with the slip measurements and rupture lengths that make this one of the most-studied fault systems in the Great Basin.
• Western Mining History: Fairview — the clearest short account of the district's rise, the missing stamp mill, and the move up the hill to Upper Fairview.
• Nevada Ghost Towns & Beyond: Fairview — the only recent first-hand account located of actually getting in, including the route over the mountain and what it takes to drive it.
• Fallon Range Training Complex — the ranges, the restricted areas, and the acreages that are closed and open to the public.
• Center for Land Use Interpretation: Nevada's Dixie Valley — what is physically out there on the target ranges, from an organisation that went and looked.
• Hardin City, Nevada: The Ghost Town Built on Silver That Was Never There — the other end of the Nevada silver story, where the ore was imaginary from the start.
• George Wingfield: The Man Who Ran Nevada — one of the two men who bought into Fairview in March 1906, and what he did with the rest of the state.
• Twenty-Five Dollars a Ton: Poeville on Peavine Mountain — a camp that died of the same arithmetic, sixty miles from a mill.

A note on what is not here: no photograph of Fairview has been located in any collection that permits commercial reproduction, and the image at the head of this article is a different Nevada mining camp, identified as such. Where the record is contradictory — on production figures, on mill capacity, on whether the townsite can lawfully be reached — this article gives both readings rather than choosing the tidier one. Anyone intending to go should confirm the restricted-area boundary with the Navy before leaving the highway.