Nevada · Ghost town
Virginia City
Twenty five thousand people at its peak, built on the first great American silver strike, and still standing well enough to walk through.
Position Storey County, Nevada · 39.3075, -119.6483
The Comstock Lode was found here in 1859 and it was one of the first major silver deposits in the United States. What followed was not a camp but a city: by the mid-1870s Virginia City held an estimated twenty five thousand residents and functioned as a centre of mining, finance and engineering at the same time.
That combination matters. The Comstock was where deep hard rock mining techniques were worked out, and the money it generated built a good deal of San Francisco. This was not a frontier settlement that happened to find ore, it was an industrial centre with a stock exchange.
Output fell away after 1878 and the population followed it down, but an unusual amount of the built town survived. Whole commercial blocks are intact, which is why Virginia City reads as a preserved town rather than a ruin, and why it now works largely on visitors.
Go expecting a busy place. This is the most visited site of its kind in Nevada, which is a very different experience from standing alone at a stone foundation in the desert.
Facts checked against the Wikipedia article Virginia City, Nevada. The words above are ours.