A man built a house from 50,000 bottles in Nevada and the ruins are still standing

It’s four miles from Death Valley

Rhyolite sits in Nevada’s Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas and right up against the eastern edge of Death Valley National Park.

You can walk through the ruins of banks, a jail, a school, a train depot, and more, all without paying a dime. The Bureau of Land Management keeps the site open from sunrise to sunset every day.

The nearby town of Beatty, just four miles east, gives you a place to sleep and gas up. But the ghost town itself is the draw, and what you find there goes well beyond crumbling walls.

Two prospectors, a green rock and a gold rush

In 1904, Frank “Shorty” Harris and Ernest “Ed” Cross pulled high-grade gold ore out of the Bullfrog Hills. They named their claim Bullfrog for the green-hued rocks scattered around the area.

Word traveled fast. By 1905, Rhyolite had a name and a spot on the map in the heart of the Bullfrog Mining District.

What started as two tents became a town of several thousand people in just a couple of years.

Steel magnate Charles M. Schwab bought the Montgomery-Shoshone Mine in 1906 and poured money into building the place up.

Concrete sidewalks and an opera house in the desert

By 1907, Rhyolite had concrete sidewalks, electric lights, water mains and telephone lines. You could catch a baseball game, a symphony, or a Saturday night variety show.

The town ran a hospital, a school, a public swimming pool and a stock exchange. Three banks kept the money moving.

Multiple newspapers covered the action. Police and fire departments kept order, and two churches held Sunday services.

Most of the commercial buildings went up in stone and concrete instead of wood, which is why the ruins still stand today.

Three railroads rolled into one small town

Three railroads served Rhyolite at its peak: the Las Vegas and Tonopah, the Tonopah and Tidewater, and the Bullfrog-Goldfield. The first train pulled in on Dec. 14, 1906, carrying about 100 passengers.

Starting in 1907, the Las Vegas and Tonopah Railroad built a depot in the Mission Revival style that cost around $130,000. Local newspapers called it the finest train depot in the state.

Today, it stands as one of the best-preserved Mission Revival depots in Nevada, and you can walk right up to it.

The whole city emptied in less than a decade

The financial panic of 1907 hit Rhyolite hard. Investor confidence cracked, and the town started bleeding people.

By 1910, mines ran at a loss and the population had dropped fast. The Montgomery-Shoshone mine and mill shut down in March 1911.

The post office closed in 1913. The last train rolled out in 1914.

The power company cut the electricity in 1916. By 1920, only 14 people still called Rhyolite home.

A $90,000 bank that lasted less than two years

The John S. Cook and Company Bank Building is the ruin you’ll recognize from every photo of Rhyolite. The three-story building went up in 1908 at a cost of about $90,000.

Inside, Italian marble staircases led past imported stained-glass windows, mahogany trim and indoor plumbing. Despite all that, the bank operated for less than two years before closing around 1910.

The BLM added a historical marker in 2022. You can stand inside the shell and look straight through the empty windows at open desert.

50,000 bottles hold together one little house

In 1906, an Australian-born stonemason named Tom Kelly built a house out of roughly 50,000 beer, whiskey and medicine bottles held together with adobe mortar. He paid local kids 10 cents per wheelbarrow of bottles.

Kelly never lived in the house. He raffled it off at $5 a ticket, and the Bennett family won.

Dark amber bottles form the foundation, with mixed colors making up the walls.

The bottles sit in courses like bricks, and the whole thing is one of the last standing bottle houses in the country.

Paramount Pictures came here for the silent films

Hollywood found Rhyolite in the 1920s. Paramount Pictures restored the Bottle House and used it as a set for silent films.

The Cook Bank ruins showed up in movies for decades after that.

Tourism picked up once Death Valley became a national monument in the 1930s, and in 1937, someone turned the train depot into a casino and bar. It later served as a museum and curio shop into the 1970s.

Those film and tourism ties kept several structures standing that might have crumbled without the attention.

They tore down the town and moved it to Beatty

After the bust, people stripped Rhyolite for parts. Buildings came down, and the materials went four miles east to Beatty.

The Miners’ Union Hall became the Old Town Hall there. Workers moved two-room cabins and reassembled them as larger homes elsewhere.

Parts of many Rhyolite buildings went into building a school in Beatty.

What you walk through today is what nobody could haul away: the concrete and stone structures too heavy to move.

Life-size plaster figures stand in the open desert

Just south of the ghost town, the Goldwell Open Air Museum spreads across about eight acres of desert.

Belgian artist Albert Szukalski started it in 1984 with The Last Supper, a life-size plaster version of the famous scene. He made the figures by draping plaster-soaked burlap over live models.

You’ll also find Lady Desert: The Venus of Nevada, a 25-foot cinder block sculpture, and Tribute to Shorty Harris, a 24-foot steel prospector standing next to a penguin. The museum is free and open 24 hours a day.

Walk past the old jail and a school with no roof

You can explore the Porter Brothers Store ruin, built in 1906, which once served as the town’s main general merchandise shop.

The old jail still stands partially intact, one of the smaller structures that held together over the years. The schoolhouse ruins frame open desert through its empty windows.

BLM historical markers installed in 2022 tell the story at each major stop.

Give yourself one to two hours to walk the whole ghost town, and wear shoes that can handle loose ground.

Dogs, desert art and no entry fee anywhere

Rhyolite and the Goldwell Museum sit together along the same paved road off State Route 374, which connects Beatty to Death Valley. You pay nothing to enter either one.

The Goldwell visitor center and gift shop stay open Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., though they close at 2 p.m. in summer because of the heat.

Dogs can come along to the ghost town and may be off-leash in some areas. Between the ruins and the sculptures, you cover over a century of history and art in one stop.

Explore Rhyolite ghost town in Nevada

You can reach Rhyolite by driving about 120 miles northwest of Las Vegas and turning off State Route 374 about four miles west of Beatty.

The ghost town sits on federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management and stays open daily from sunrise to sunset with free admission. Beatty has gas, food and lodging if you need a base.

Most people pass through Rhyolite on their way to or from Death Valley via Daylight Pass, so it fits right into a bigger desert trip.

This article was created with AI assistance and human editing.

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