When most Australians hear the name ‘Ballarat’ they think of the gold mining town in Victoria. What most Australians don’t know is that Ballarat has a copy cat town in the middle of Mojave desert in California. A copy cat town that suffered a very different fate to its namesake down under. On our recent road trip through the California desert to Nevada, we heard about this ghost town and immediately decided to take a detour to visit.
We pulled up to a ramshackle little visitors centre and were greeted immediately by a darling of a man who welcomed us warmly. His name is Rock. He’s been living in Ballarat for the past twelve years and is the sole resident of the ghost town.
His trailer out the back is solar powered and he has a mobile, replenish-able water supply. He heads into Ridgecrest, the nearest town, about once a week for supplies. As we were wandering around looking at the old photos, he offered us a sip of his apple pie flavoured, homemade moonshine.
It was just about the smoothest, most delicious home made whisky I’ve ever tasted. He asked where we were from and we said Australia, pointing out that we live near a town called Ballarat in Victoria. His face lit up and he said that his Ballarat was named by an Australian miner who happened to be there when they named the town and he was from Ballarat in Australia. The cheeky bugger went and stole the name. I bet he thought no one would ever find out.
Rock’s Ballarat was founded in 1897 but was completely abandoned, save a handful of residents, by 1917. In its hey day it had 400 to 500 residents and like all good prospecting towns of the early 1900s it boasted a decent high street with booming businesses including seven saloons, three hotels, a school, a jail, a morgue and a post office.
As the nearby mines dried up and closed towards the late 1910s, The Other Ballarat slowly became desolate, except for a few determined prospectors.
The town remained empty for decades until the 1960s when Charles Manson (who by the way is still alive – is that weird to anyone else? edit – he has now died after I published this) and his ‘family’ stopped by for a short time when they were hiding out in the desert. The infamous murderer even carved his name into the door frame of the Ballarat town morgue.
Inside the visitors centre, Rock has pictures on the wall of the town when it thrived. It’s such an eerie feeling looking at a photograph of a bustling saloon and seeing the crumbled remains of the building standing just outside the door.
There are around thirty working towns and cities in the Mojave desert to date and it’s baffling why some towns survived and others disappeared. Ballarat died because of nearby mine closures but Ridgecrest is just 40 miles away and the census in 1950 reported a population of 2028 people – why did Ridgecrest flourish while Ballarat quietly slipped away?
I guess it doesn’t really matter. Ballarat is now a place for drinking apple pie moonshine with Rock.
Have you ever been to a ghost town? If you’ve ever visited one, let me know. I’m keen to add more to my list!
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