Rhyolite is both the name of an extrusive form of granite, and a ghost town near Beatty, Nevada. The AAA Tour Book wasn't very good on specifying exactly how to find it; it described the road leading to it as being 2.5 miles west of Beatty on the road to Death Valley. We found a dirt road in about that location, but after a few miles of progressively uglier trails, the only thing we found were these cute wild donkeys. While the Jaguar has a full-time AWD system (40% front wheels, 60% rear wheels), it really isn't well-suited to off road, because it doesn't have a lot of ground clearance, so we decided not to get too adventuresome.
So we drove a bit more west on the main highway--and there was not only a sign pointing to Rhyolite, but a paved road! My wife and I have spent many happy hours wandering the deserts of the West looking for ghost towns, but seldom have we had a completely abandoned town so accessible.
Our first stop was the cemetery. Ghost town cemeteries provide not only poignant reminders of how short lives were back then, but especially how often infants and children died. This, by the way, is the major reason for the very short life expectancies of the seventeenth through early twentieth centuries. There were lots of adults who lived into their 70s and 80s--short life expectancy was largely (although not entirely) because so many children died from problems associated with poor public health.
Rhyolite's cemetery, in spite of the town being abandoned just before World War I, and for a town of more than 10,000 people, seems to be unusually sparse. Of course, that's not because there weren't a lot of burials, but because so few of the grave markers survive. It would appear that most of them were simple wooden boards, and in a harsh climate, little survives. One rather elaborate tomb marker used these colorful minerals, and I expect will last for centuries:
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One of the tipoffs that there are lots of people buried here, in spite of the absence of markers, is that there are a number of places where the ground is raised--because the coffin hasn't collapsed yet.
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It varies a good bit from place to place, but coffins become the norm during the nineteenth century, replacing burial in a sheet or shroud as had been common in previous centuries. Coffins were both legally required (for health reasons, to prevent contamination of ground water) and common social practice. You can tell where the grave is in many nineteenth century ghost town cemeteries because the water eventually caused the wood of the coffin to rot and collapse; here, where the climate is exceptionally dry, the coffins haven't collapsed, and the dirt mounded on top of the grave is still above grade.
Here are some grave markers that were made of stone, and are going to last for another century or more before they become unreadable, as is happening to many of the seventeenth century New England stones of my ancestors.
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A few of the markers are clearly being maintained by surviving family.
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There are even some recent burials.
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Here's where I get really, really angry: vandalism of grave markers. I suspect that a lot of this is done by people who are trying to avoid confronting the inevitability of death.
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Next entry will be about the town itself, which still has some astonishing ruins.
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