Leesburg could serve as a model for what a deserted ghost town should be. You park your car next to a kiosk that features a series of highly informative signs that provide details of the townsite. Leesburg itself, with its approximately fifteen buildings, is a short walking-distance away. A tiny cemetery is a short walk from the town.
Preservationists of other such sites would do well to look at Leesburg. First, because of the parking area and the plaques, visitors know that this is not an abandoned site and that damaging anything would have severe consequences. Second, visitors learn an enormous amount from the signs, which one hopes would make people treat the site with the respect it deserves. And, finally, by putting this information away from the site instead of on signs in front of buildings, visitors, when walking into Leesburg, feel the desolation, the palpable sense of history, along with just enough eeriness to make people know they are in a special place.
Leesburg came to life in 1866 after Frank Sharkey and his party found placer gold in nearby creeks. Named by Confederate sympathizers for Robert E. Lee, Leesburg might have become just another quickly abandoned mining site with rich but shallow prospects. But in addition to placer gold, primary deposits were found in the hills, and hard-rock mining eventually brought three thousand gold-seekers to the town. Eventually, nearly a hundred businesses were established, including a newspaper. A competing town, named Grantsville by those who favored the Union side in the recently ended Civil War, developed east of Leesburg, but only the name Leesburg stuck. As primary deposits waned, hydraulic operations began in the presumably played-out placer deposits, and new fortunes were made. Supplies came from newly opened routes from Boise through Idaho City to Salmon, where pack trains kept Leesburg alive, even requiring sleighs and dogsleds during the winter months. We think of stagecoaches as being relics that were retired in the late 1800s, but, amazingly, until a truck road was completed in the early 1930s, Leesburg was served by four or five stages and freighters daily, according to Salmon resident Jim Caples, who rode the stage each summer from 1926 until 1930.
Leesburg’s main street features, from left, a butcher shop, a post office, a schoolhouse, and the tax assessor’s office.
The inside of the former post office is insulated, if that’s the right word, with newspapers from the 1950s.
Despite the road, Leesburg was moribund after World War II when the diggings finally gave out, but not before producing an estimated forty million dollars in gold.
WALKING AROUND LEESBURG
Those informative panels at the parking area give you detailed information on Leesburg, so I’ll just give a brief summary: The site includes residences, an 1890s tax assessor’s office, a 1935 schoolhouse, Mike and Maude Fraker’s 1937 post office (which has old newspapers glued to the walls for insulation), a 1902 butcher shop, an 1890s Chinese laundry (Chinese made up almost half the population in 1880), the stagecoach office, an 1870s stable that later became a saloon, a boardinghouse, the Leesburg Hotel, and more. The hotel once had a very genteel feature: It offered a covered walkway to the other side of the street.
You passed the entrance to the cemetery on your way to town. From the parking lot, head back down the road .3 of a mile, where you will see on your right a walkover across a buckrail fence. Five headstones, a metal fence, and a couple of wooden fences make up the graveyard.
WHEN YOU GO
Leesburg is 31.6 miles northwest of Salmon. From Salmon, which is 61 miles northwest of the turnoff to Gilmore, head south on U.S. Highway 93 for 5.1 miles to Forest Service Road 021 and turn west. In 13.4 miles, you’ll come to an intersection at a summit, but continue straight on FS Road 021. In another 2.8 miles, there’s another intersection: FS Road 021 continues to Cobalt; Forest Service Road 098 goes right to Leesburg, now 10.3 miles away. The entire route is a wide, smooth road, because it is the haul road for the Beartrack Mine, which is adjacent to Leesburg. Ignore the turnoff to the Beartrack Mine .3 of a mile before the townsite. FS Road 098 dead-ends at the Leesburg parking area.