I bought a California ghost town for $1.4 million. Living here gets lonely
INTRODUCTION
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Brent Underwood about his experience moving to a Californian ghost town. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
1. When he was 30, Brent Underwood left Austin and moved to an abandoned mining town.
2. While restoring the town he's realized that people approach finding a purpose the wrong way.
3. Underwood spoke to Business Insider from 900 ft beneath ground level while sheltering from a snowstorm.
In 2018, my friend sent me a listing for Cerro Gordo, an abandoned mining town in California. "This might be your next project," he joked.
The idea of a remote town in the American West was very alluring to me. It reminded me of the old TV westerns my grandfather watched every day.
I was running a pretty popular bed and breakfast in Austin, but it felt like I was just searching for something to shake me up from the routine monotony.Buying this ghost town has done that. It cost $1.4 million — more than half was a loan from a hard money lender. The rest was mostly split between my friend and me, but a few other friends also chipped in.
Life in the middle of nowhere
On the surface, you understand it's going to be difficult when a place doesn't have running water and is at the end of an eight-mile dirt road an hour from the nearest stor
e.But I don't think you truly appreciate the logistical challenges until you're actually in it — until all your pipes freeze, or you're trudging through snow up to your waist to get to the outhouse.
It can be very lonely and isolating living in the middle of nowhere. Yesterday all my friends probably went to lunch together in Austin. But right now, I'm sitting 900 feet under a ghost town that's miles away from them.
As I've become more comfortable with the town, either the ghosts have become more comfortable with me, or I've become more comfortable with the sounds I thought were ghosts. But I did once see a shadowy figure in one of the bunkhouse windows and I've since avoided that building.
It takes perseverance to stay here though.
Since I arrived, Cerro Gordo has been hit with storms, fire, a flood, an earthquake, and a blizzard. It would be very easy to just throw in the towel and say, "This is too much. I got my taste of it."
I've had to develop a lot of skills — both practical and mental — to make it easier to exist every day.
Finding purpose
The trade-off is I get to do something I truly believe is important — I'm working to preserve the history of this town.
CONCLUSION
I've mined about 100 lbs of this mineral called galena that's still down here. You reduce it down to make batches of pure silver, which I then make into rings, pendants, and some silver coins that I might sell to fundraise for our museum.
If I hadn't made this life change, Cerro Gordo would've otherwise just been forgotten, like the hundreds of other towns that were set up in the American West. My hope is that this one has the chance to live on a little bit longer so people can draw inspiration from it like I have.
