In the news - Entire California ghost town wiped out by the Dixie Fire

 Although not paranormal, investigators often like to visit abandoned towns in the U.S. West, known as Ghost Towns. In the news earlier this month, however, one ghost town in California was consumed by fire. Here's the story from the San Francisco Gate news.

(Image: Historic drawing of Rich Bar, California. Archival / Unknown)

Entire California ghost town wiped out by the Dixie Fire

San Francisco Gate News, Aug. 5, 2021

A historic Northern California ghost town in the Sierra foothills has been decimated by the giant, still-raging Dixie Fire.

The state-designated historical landmark has been abandoned now for half a century, and last week the 250,000-acre Dixie Fire left its historic buildings in ashes, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. (SFGATE and the San Francisco Chronicle are both owned by Hearst but operate independently of each other).

Among the casualties is the Kellogg House that was lived in until the 1970s. Built in 1852 with lumber from the sawmill at Rich Bar, the property sat above the roaring gold camp in the Feather River Canyon. Gone too is the mining outpost, the remaining homesteads and the historic cemetery.

While the stories told by miners of an actual lake of gold were apocryphal, the town was a hugely successful during its boom in the 1850s. As with so many California gold towns, along with the riches came the vice and criminality. The Feather River Bulletin once wrote of the riotous scene there in 1850: "Upon hearing of the new strike at Rich Bar those in the Middle Fork area packed up their shirts, trousers, pans and cups and struggled northwest across the mountains in search of a dream.

"They swarmed over the Sierra mountains by the thousands, every color and nationality, and every sort of character, from low-down, thieving, conniving scallywags; to prim, proper, upstanding citizens."

According to the local museum, the town reportedly pulled $23 million in gold out of the ground and river in its first few decades, before its inevitable decline when the gold ran dry.

Last year, new owners Ivan Coffman and Kurt Brock purchased the 1,200-square-foot Kellogg House and had plans to restore it and even mine again. The fire has left them with an unsure future, and they are still currently under evacuation orders, reports the Chronicle.

The Dixie Fire began July 13, likely due to a tree falling on PG&E power lines near the town of Paradise (which was destroyed in 2018 in the Camp Fire, also ignited by a faulty PG&E transmission line). It has burned 274,139 acres and is currently 35% contained, according to Cal Fire.