Virginia City

In 1944 Charles Bovey came to Virginia City and found a man tearing the siding off an empty building for firewood. Bovey, a Great Falls man who had come west in 1926 to sweep floors at a flour mill and went on to sit in the state legislature, bought that building and then kept buying. With his wife, Sue, he spent the next three decades acquiring most of the old business district, restocking its stores with the goods and fixtures of their day and keeping the roofs on. People thought him a soft touch with money; the town is still standing because of it.

He had already been collecting old buildings for an exhibit called Old Town at the Great Falls fairgrounds. When the fair asked him to move it in the late 1950s, he bought what was left of Nevada City, a gold camp less than two miles up Alder Gulch that had all but vanished, and filled its empty lots with cabins, shops and barns hauled in from across Montana. By the time he died in 1978 there were more than a hundred structures.

Sue kept the company going until her death in 1988. Afterward the collection faced being sold off piece by piece, and in April 1997, at the end of the session, the Montana Legislature voted $6.5 million to buy it: about $5 million for the artifacts and $1.5 million for the land and some 249 buildings, outhouses and sheds included. The Montana Heritage Commission has run the two towns ever since. Virginia City itself was never emptied, and people live and work on its main street. A short rail line links it to Nevada City. The town is on MT-287, about seventy miles southeast of Butte.