How we research

Sources

We start from published records: state historical societies and archives, National Register of Historic Places nominations, land agencies (the Bureau of Land Management, the Forest Service, the National Park Service and state parks), county histories, newspapers, the US Geological Survey's place-name records and historic topographic maps, the US Census, and Wikipedia as a starting point. History and basic numbers such as founding dates and post office years may come from long-running ghost town directories, rewritten in our words. A dated, first-hand visitor report, such as a photo posted online with its date, can date a status. Every page lists the sources it relies on.

How guides are written

We use automated tools to help gather sources and draft guides. Every fact is checked against the sources listed on its page before it's published, and Gunnar Bengtsson, who runs the site, reads and edits guides before they go live and is responsible for what appears here.

Status and access

Whether a town is open, closed, private or gone is the claim readers act on, so it has the strictest rule: it must rest on the newest dated report we can find, which the guide names and dates, so you can judge how current it is. If we can't find a dated report at all, the status reads Not verified. An agency's or owner's access rules always win. Locked gates, posted land and reservations are called out. We don't describe a road's surface or say what vehicle it needs without a dated source.

Checking before publishing

A new guide is checked by a second reviewer before it is published. The reviewer opens every source and checks each date, count and distance against it, confirms that every photo shows this town and not a namesake elsewhere, checks that the map point sits next to the features the text describes, and makes sure legends are labelled as legends. A guide that fails goes back to be rewritten.

Record pages, the shorter pages for sites without a full guide, are compiled from the same public records and data sets and are not reviewed one by one. Where a field is unknown, the page says so.

Photos

We only use photos we're allowed to use: public domain, CC0, or Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY and CC BY-SA) licences, mostly from Wikimedia Commons, and photos visitors send us with permission to publish them. Every photo is credited on the page with its author and licence, linked to its source. Historic photos are captioned with their date where it's known.

Maps and drive times

Historic and modern topographic maps are from the USGS (public domain). State outlines are from the US Census. Drive times are estimates routed over OpenStreetMap roads with OSRM; dirt roads are usually slower than the estimate. Weather forecasts are from the National Weather Service.

Corrections

If something is wrong or out of date, email [email protected] with the page and what you know, ideally with a source or the date you were there. We check it, fix the page and update its last-checked date. Visitor reports sent through a guide's Share your visit form are read before anything is published.