America has a lot of ghost towns. There are 1,000 in Texas alone. Thurber was once home to 10,000 people. Now there are only five. In its busy days, Thurber was a coal town. Immigrants flocked there from Italy, Poland and Mexico to dig up fuel for steam trains. The coal was also used to fire bricks made from local clay. The town boasted churches, baseball teams and even an opera house.
Ghost towns are sad places, but also monuments to American dynamism. When work moves, so do Americans. With so much space, especially in the West, it can make sense to let a town die.
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