Abandoned Towns

Town type

Mill, lumber and company ghost towns

Sawmill and logging towns, mill villages, resorts and other company towns built around a single employer.

51Town guides
26States

Town guides

51 mill, lumber and company town guides

Our complete guides, most-read first: history, what's left, current access, photos, maps and directions.

The green steel truss bridge that carried Route 66 over the Meramec River at Times Beach, between wooded banksGuide

Times Beach

38.51, -90.60

St. Louis County, Missouri

A summer resort town of the 1920s on the Meramec River that grew past 2,000 people. Dioxin in the oil sprayed on its dirt roads led to a federal…

State parkMill, lumber and companyRoute 66
A white two-storey frame house with green-trimmed windows, seen through live oaks hung with Spanish moss: the house said to be the only one in Rosewood that survived 1923Guide

Rosewood

29.24, -82.93

Levy County, Florida

A mostly Black town of a few hundred people near Cedar Key that white mobs attacked and burned in the first week of 1923. Its families fled and none…

Rural communityMill, lumber and company
Dune grass on the shore at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River, with the harbor piers and their light towers reaching into Lake MichiganGuide

Singapore

42.68, -86.21

Allegan County, Michigan

A lumber port at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River that printed its own money and then disappeared under the sand. Nothing of the town shows today.…

Buried under sandMill, lumber and company
The Appalachian Clubhouse at Elkmont: a long dark-stained wooden lodge with a stone chimney, metal roof and side porch among tall treesGuide

Elkmont

35.66, -83.58

Sevier County, Tennessee

A Little River Lumber Company town of 1908 that became a summer colony for Knoxville's well-off. The leases ran out in 1992, and the park has…

National parkMill, lumber and company
Aerial view of Lake Martin with the long, low Kowaliga Bridge crossing the water between wooded shoresGuide

Kowaliga

32.74, -85.97

Elmore County, Alabama

A formerly enslaved man built a 3,000-acre farm on Kowaliga Creek, and his son added a school, a timber company and a railroad. Lake Martin covered…

Mostly under the lakeFarm and ranch
Aerial view south along the Bayocean spit in 2022: a long sand beach between the Pacific and Tillamook Bay, with green hills in the foregroundGuide

Bayocean

45.53, -123.95

Tillamook County, Oregon

A planned resort with a hotel, a heated wave pool and about 2,000 people by 1914. Erosion took it house by house until the last building fell into…

County day-use areaMill, lumber and company
Looking down from a hill over a white frame church and a green miner's house to I-20, with the brick smokestack standing in the distanceGuide

Thurber

32.51, -98.42

Erath County, Texas

A company coal town that held perhaps 10,000 people around 1920 and was nearly empty twenty years later. Its brick smokestack still stands beside…

Museum · smokestackCoal mining
The Oklahoma Row tower in May 2018, five years before its removal: a ruined three-story concrete tower standing in lake water, with a chain-link fence and green woods behind itGuide

Monte Ne

36.29, -94.07

Benton County, Arkansas

A health resort and planned town built by the lawyer and author William "Coin" Harvey, with log hotels, a gondola and a pyramid that was never…

Mostly under Beaver LakeMill, lumber and company
The large cream-colored Batsto Mansion with its central tower and wide porch, behind a lawnGuide

Batsto Village

39.64, -74.65

Burlington County, New Jersey

An iron town that cast cannonballs for Washington's army, then made glass, then became Joseph Wharton's country estate. The state keeps it as it…

Open dailyOther mining and oil
Two old wooden houses with sagging porches, boarded windows and orange safety fencing, among trees in the Deserted VillageGuide

Feltville

40.68, -74.39

Union County, New Jersey

A stationer's model mill town of the 1840s, then a summer resort, then empty. Union County keeps it as the Deserted Village, open to walk every day…

Open dailyMill, lumber and company
The rusting steel truss of the old Hillman Bridge over the dark Suwannee River, with a railroad bridge behindGuide

Ellaville

30.39, -83.18

Madison County, Florida

A sawmill town where the Withlacoochee meets the Suwannee, founded by a man who became governor. It faded with the pine after 1900 and lost its post…

Ruins on public landMill, lumber and company
Raised beach houses on pilings at the edge of the Delaware Bay, with sand drifted across the road in front of themGuide

Sea Breeze

39.32, -75.32

Cumberland County, New Jersey

A steamboat resort on the Delaware Bay that lost its hotels to fire, its tavern to Hurricane Gloria and its seawall to the waves. The state bought…

Houses standing · 2025 photoMill, lumber and company
All 51 guides by state, A to Z

Alabama 1

Arizona 3

Arkansas 2

Connecticut 3

Florida 3

Georgia 3

Illinois 1

Indiana 2

Iowa 1

Kansas 2

Louisiana 2

Michigan 4

Minnesota 1

Mississippi 1

Missouri 1

New Jersey 5

New Mexico 1

New York 2

Oklahoma 1

Oregon 1

South Carolina 1

Tennessee 3

Texas 1

West Virginia 2

Wisconsin 3

Wyoming 1

Other town types