Iowa's ghost towns are not the mining camps of the West, but many of them are mining camps all the same. Coal was dug in the state from the 1840s to 1994, and the Iowa DNR has mapped 3,071 mines. The industry grew fast from 1870, when the railroads leased coal land and ran their own mines, in a belt from Wapello County in the southeast to Boone County in the center, with dozens of company camps that were built cheaply because the average mine lasted about ten years. Buxton, Angus, Coal Valley and Zenorsville were camps of this kind. The rest of the list is Mormon Trail way stations of 1846 to 1852 like Mount Pisgah, mill and river towns the railroads passed by, such as Motor and Iowaville, six towns drowned by Lake Red Rock in 1969, and river villages emptied by floods: Littleport, mostly destroyed in 1999, and Elkport, bought out and demolished after 2004.
Little stands. Most sites are now cropland, a cemetery or a rusted sign at a crossroads, and the townsites of Buxton and Iowaville survive mainly as archaeological sites on farmland. The exceptions are worth the drive: Motor's six-story limestone mill of 1869 in a Clayton County park, the Mount Pisgah monument and pioneer cemetery in Union County, and the site of Preparation inside a Loess Hills state park.
Abandoned 
