Virginia City historic main street
— — the gold-rush street the century forgot to tear down.
Not only on a wall.
“Virginia City sits on a slope above Alder Gulch, where a small party of prospectors struck gold in May of 1863 and set off one of the richest placer rushes in the West. Within a year there were ten thousand people in the gulch. The town was the second territorial capital of Montana from 1865 to 1875, then emptied as the gold thinned. What kept the main street intact was the absence of a reason to replace it. Today most of the original wood-and-brick storefronts still line Wallace Street, preserved as a National Historic Landmark.
Virginia City historic main street, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Virginia City stands at 5,801 feet in Madison County, southwest Montana, on a hillside above Alder Gulch in the foothills of the Ruby Range. Bill Fairweather and his party struck gold in the gulch in May of 1863, and within a year the population of the camp reached an estimated ten thousand. The town served as the second territorial capital of Montana from 1865 to 1875, when the capital moved to Helena. Wallace Street and the surrounding blocks were declared a National Historic Landmark in 1961 and remain one of the most intact gold-rush townsites in the American West.
Most of Wallace Street is original. Wood-front saloons, brick mercantiles, and the 1875 Madison County Courthouse stand on their first foundations. The Bale of Hay Saloon, the Wells Fargo Express building, and the Content Corner brick block survived the long quiet decades because there was no economic pressure to replace them. In the 1940s Charles and Sue Bovey, a Montana ranching family, began buying and stabilising the buildings rather than restoring them to a tourist sheen; the State of Montana acquired the holdings in 1997 and keeps them on the same conservative principle.
Reached by Montana Highway 287 from Ennis, about a fourteen-mile drive over Virginia City Hill. The town is open year-round with limited services in winter; the main visitor season runs Memorial Day through late September, when the Virginia City Players run live melodrama in the 1898 Opera House and the Alder Gulch Short Line steam train connects Virginia City to nearby Nevada City. Yellowstone's west entrance at West Yellowstone lies about seventy miles east. The Boot Hill cemetery above town holds the graves of the five road agents hanged by the Montana Vigilantes in 1864.