South Pass City State Historic Site

The town grew from one gold lode. The Carissa was found in 1867 on the hill above Willow Creek, and within a year South Pass City had hundreds of buildings, about a thousand people and claims staked along the gulch. The Carissa was the largest and most productive mine in the Sweetwater district, but its ore ran deep and needed costly machinery, and the boom it started was short. In 1885 Bolivar Roberts, brother of one of the lode's first claimants, gathered the Carissa and its neighbors into the Carissa Gold Mining Company. The mine was worked, leased out and reworked on and off into the twentieth century, and when it finally closed in 1954 its machinery was stripped out and sold.

The state bought the townsite in 1966 as a seventy-fifth birthday present to Wyoming, and the historic district now takes in more than seventy structures, among them a stamp mill and the remains of brick kilns. In 2003 the state bought the 200-acre Carissa property too, made the old workings safe and spent ten years putting ore-processing equipment back into the mill, restoring it to its appearance of 1929. Guided tours now run the machinery. The site is two miles off WY-28 south of Lander.