Garnet’s prosperity came late in the Montana mining game. Although placer gold deposits were discovered in the 1870s in the Garnet Range, the country was so remote that prospectors looked elsewhere for easier strikes. The discovery of plentiful silver in western Montana and northern Idaho caused miners to abandon questionable gold claims and rush to get in on those bonanzas. But with the Silver Crash of 1893, miners looked again at older gold claims that had been staked but abandoned.
Many of those miners returned to the Garnet Range, where a small settlement was built around a stamp mill erected in 1895 by Armistead L. Mitchell. The community was originally called Mitchell in his honor, but by 1897, the year the town received its post office, it was known as Garnet, named for the semiprecious, rubylike mineral. The town’s population swelled to about a thousand by the end of the nineteenth century.
Garnet was unusual in that it was a peaceful community, more of a family place rather than a rowdy town of ne’er-do-wells. Although it had the usual saloons and brothels, it also featured refinements such as a doctor’s office, a candy store, family residences instead of miners’ shacks, and a miners’ union hall. That union hall was pivotal to the orderly atmosphere in Garnet: Every miner in Garnet was a member of the union, and disputes were resolved by the union. Miscreants either changed their ways or left town. There was a jail, but it served principally as a drunk tank.
The dusty dining room of the J. K. Wells Hotel in Garnet is exactly what ghost town seekers hope to find instead of empty, vandalized buildings. In its heyday around the turn of the twentieth century, the Wells was considered quite luxurious.
This is your first view as you walk from the parking lot to Garnet. Prominent in the lower center is Kelly’s Saloon. Next door stands Frank Davey’s store. The large, three-story building in the right background is the J. K. Wells Hotel.
The last resident of Garnet, Frank Davey, lived in the kitchen of the Wells Hotel. When he died in 1947, everything in the hotel was sold. Items on display are representative of what was once in a typical hotel kitchen.
Garnet’s boom was short. By 1905, the population had shrunk to less than two hundred, and a fire in 1912 caused many holdouts to leave. Only a few people remained after the United States entered World War I because war-related jobs were steadier and paid better than haphazard gold mining work.
During the Great Depression, Garnet saw a modest rebirth. Because employment opportunities were scarce, and because the price of gold had more than doubled to thirty-five dollars per ounce, about 250 people returned to rework old mines and waste dumps with improved technology that retrieved gold that earlier, cruder processing had missed. Then came World War II and the enactment of Law 208, closing mines that were not directly assisting the war effort. In 1942, the year the post office closed, the sole resident was Frank Davey, owner of the town’s last store. Sent a document by the Internal Revenue Service requiring him to sign in front of a witness, he gazed into his mirror, signed in both places, and noted to the IRS that he was the only resident of Garnet, Montana.
Davey died in 1947, and the auction of his effects served as the beginning of Garnet as a true ghost town.
WALKING AROUND GARNET
You will park your car in a lot that is about a six-minute walk from Garnet (a separate handicapped lot is closer to the townsite). You will be stepping back in time, and when you come to an overlook of Garnet, you might even gasp: You’ll be looking at more than a dozen log and wood-frame buildings under roof—and you won’t be seeing them all.
Immediately prior to entering the townsite are toilets, drinking water, and a stand with an excellent tour brochure. A few buildings in town are private, but most others are open for your inspection. Be sure to walk into Kelly’s Saloon, the first building on your left; Frank Davey’s Store and annex, next door to the saloon; and, across the street, Ole Dahl’s Saloon, a 1938 building from Garnet’s last hurrah, which now serves as a visitors’ center. The biggest treat comes from exploring the 1897 J. K. Wells Hotel. You can enter almost every room, all the way to the third floor.
Residences, the original post office, a blacksmith’s shop, and the town jail fan out across the meadow behind the center of town. The privately owned school-house stands west of the jail.
A separate walking tour goes north from the parking lot to the Sierra Mine workings. A brochure for that interpretive trail is available at the trailhead.
WHEN YOU GO
Garnet can be reached from two directions. Tour buses and vehicles pulling trailers arrive from the north, turning south off Montana Highway 200 at a sign between mile markers 22 and 23. Garnet is 11 miles down that road.
The second route is for backroads-loving ghost town enthusiasts. Get off Interstate 90 at either the Drummond Exit, Exit 153 (from the east) or the Bearmouth Exit, Exit 138 (from the west), and follow the frontage road to Bear Gulch Road (10 miles from Drummond or 5.5 miles from Bearmouth).
This road, better with a high-clearance vehicle, proceeds through placer detritus on a road that, despite the narrow canyons and steep grades, is excellent in good weather. You’ll pass historic mine workings and old cabins, because this is the route the Garnet pioneers took.
At 6.6 miles, the route splits. A longer, easier one goes right, while the original goes up First Chance Gulch, the more narrow, steep, and historic choice— and the only way I’ve gone in. You’ll be at the Garnet parking area in 3.1 miles from the beginning of First Chance Gulch.