Founded in 1904, Rhyolite once bustled with hotels, stores, restaurants, a three-story bank building and three power plants to supply electricity for all that activity. It boasted a hospital, school, and elaborate railroad depot, and telephone service tying it all together. Rhyolite seemed to have a future brighter than many mining camps its size. In fact, with its aura of permanence exemplified by buildings made of brick and stone, it hardly seemed a mining camp at all.

What it was, was a perfect example of the mining boom-and-bust town.

The boom got going in August, 1904, when prospectors Frank "Shorty" Harris and Ernest L. Cross discovered gold in an outcropping of green-colored rock -- hence the name "Bullfrog" for the district which would be established as a result of their find. By November of that year, the Rhyolite Township had been staked out, and miners were being offered free lots in the interest of building the communities. Things moved fast in those days, and miners drawn to the township were receiving mail delivery by February, 1905, the same month Rhyolite's first town meeting was held. By May, telephone service had begun, the Gold Exchange Bank was open for business, and the town's first newspaper, The Rhyolite Herald, was rolling off the press.

By 1906, the town would boast a school and a symphony orchestra. The same year, a drive was mounted at the Nevada State Legislature to form a "Bullfrog County" with Rhyolite as the county seat. The effort failed. As 1907 dawned, Rhyolite was the fourth-largest city in Nevada.

Flush times didn't last long. In 1909, the Bullfrog Bank and Trust closed its doors, to be followed in 1910 by the First National Bank of Rhyolite. The hospital was sold, and the Herald published its last issue, in 1911.

By 1916, electricity, too, was gone. In 1919, the post office was closed.

Rhyolite was effectively finished, felled by the vagaries of the gold market, most particularly the financial panic of 1907.

But, ironically, it exists a century later as one of the most picturesque -- and, indeed, most-photographed -- towns in the Silver State.

Don't miss Tom Kelly's bottle house, one of the finest examples of pure pluck and eccentricity in all of Nevada, a structure composed of thousands of beer, soda and medicine bottles -- perhaps as many as 60,000 -- which Tom completed building in 1906. Other extremely evocative structures include the 1908 Las Vegas-Tonopah Railroad Depot, the Cook Bank Building (which some say is the most photographed ruin in the State of Nevada), the Porter Brothers Store, Rhyolite School, and the town's jailhouse.

Lovingly tended by area history buffs and the Bureau of Land Management, Rhyolite -- a true survivor -- is one of Nevada's treasures.

Special thanks to Alan Baltazar for his wonderful history of the Bullfrog District.