The Florida Railroad Museum ( reporting mark FGCX ) is a railroad museum located in Parrish, Florida . The museum operates a heritage railroad and offers round-trip tourist excursions along six miles of the former Seaboard Air Line Sarasota Subdivision in Manatee County between Parrish and Willow .
71-491: The museum was founded in 1981 as the Florida Gulf Coast Railroad Museum, and has been operating weekend excursions out of Parrish since 1992. The museum is also active in the ghost town of Willow, where it has maintenance facilities. At Willow, there is a railroad spur that leads east off of the mainline to a Florida Power & Light Company plant. CSX Transportation provides rail service to
142-505: A border zone . Large-scale geographic exclusion zones have been established after major disasters in which radioactive particles were released into the environment: Two exclusion zones (5 nautical miles (9.3 km; 5.8 mi) and 7 nautical miles (13 km; 8.1 mi)) were established temporarily in the Baltic Sea following the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage . Dangers to navigation included loss of buoyancy inside
213-473: A restraining order is issued, an exclusion zone is an area that the respondent is prohibited from entering—often an area surrounding the petitioner's home or workplace. For example, if a Wisconsin harassment restraining order or domestic abuse restraining order is violated, the court may order GPS monitoring of the respondent. If the exclusion zone is breached, the GPS technology notifies law enforcement and
284-420: A "bust" (e.g., catastrophic resource price collapse). A gold rush often brought intensive but short-lived economic activity to a remote village, only to leave a ghost town once the resource was depleted. Boomtowns can often decrease in size as quickly as they grew. Sometimes, all, or nearly all, of the population can desert the town, resulting in a ghost town. The dismantling of a boomtown can often occur on
355-524: A Florida state railroad museum in 1984 when it received statutory recognition by the Florida Legislature as meeting the following four criteria: its purpose is to preserve railroad history, it is devoted primarily to the history of railroading, it is open to the public, and it operates as a non-profit organization. It is open Saturdays and Sundays from 10a.m. to 4p.m. year-round. The train departs from Parrish at 11a.m. and 2p.m. on these days, and
426-514: A one-room schoolhouse. Another example of infrastructure remaining is the former town of Weston, Illinois , that voted itself out of existence and turned the land over for construction of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory . Many houses and even a few barns remain, used for housing visiting scientists and storing maintenance equipment, while roads that used to cross through the site have been blocked off at
497-570: A part in the abandonment of settlements within Europe. Two examples are Pripyat and Chernobyl . After the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, Both cities were evacuated due to dangerous radiation levels within the area. As of today, Pripyat remains completely abandoned, and Chernobyl has around 500 remaining inhabitants. Another example is Todoque in Spain. During the 2021 Cumbre Vieja volcanic eruption ,
568-444: A planned basis. Mining companies nowadays will create a temporary company town to service a mine site, building all the accommodations, shops and services required, and then remove them once the resource has been extracted. Modular buildings can be used to facilitate the process. In some cases, multiple factors may remove the economic basis for a community; some former mining towns on U.S. Route 66 suffered both mine closures when
639-452: A recent economic and holiday population surge. Another town, Sungai Lembing , Malaysia, was almost deserted due to closure of a tin mine in 1986 was revived in 2001 and has become a tourist destination since then. Foncebadón , a village in León , Spain, that was mostly abandoned and only inhabited by a mother and son, is slowly being revived owing to the ever-increasing stream of pilgrims on
710-434: A result of a natural or human-made disaster or other causes; they restrict the term to settlements that were deserted because they were no longer economically viable. Some believe that any settlement with visible tangible remains should not be called a ghost town; others say, conversely, that a ghost town should contain the tangible remains of buildings. Whether or not the settlement must be completely deserted, or may contain
781-798: A result of protests by the Westboro Baptist Church at the funerals of soldiers killed in the Iraq War , 29 states and the US Congress created exclusion zones around soldiers' funerals. In 2005, the Parliament of the United Kingdom created a one kilometre exclusion zone around itself. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law... abridging...
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#1732791944274852-423: A rocket launch, in particular when the rocket goes errant. Because the flight termination system destroys the rocket in that case, launches are scrubbed or postponed when someone or something enters the launch corridor to prevent damage or harm created by the falling remains of the rocket. Exclusion zones are commonly used in the construction industry worldwide. For this purpose they are defined locations to prohibit
923-422: A shift towards fly-in fly-out arrangements over building a company town , in order to avoid the development of ghost towns once a mining resource has been fully extracted. The Middle East has many ghost towns and ruins that were created when the shifting of politics or the fall of empires caused capital cities to be socially or economically unviable, such as Ctesiphon . The rise of real-estate speculation and
994-420: A small population, is also a matter for debate. Generally, though, the term is used in a looser sense, encompassing any and all of these definitions. American author Lambert Florin defined a ghost town as "a shadowy semblance of a former self." Factors leading to the abandonment of towns include depleted natural resources, economic activity shifting elsewhere, railroads and roads bypassing or no longer accessing
1065-650: A string of ghost towns in areas such as the Solana Valley . Traditional agricultural practices such as sheep and goat rearing, on which the mountain village economy was based, were not taken over by the local youth, especially after the lifestyle changes that swept over rural Spain during the second half of the 20th century. Examples for ghost towns in Italy include the medieval village of Fabbriche di Careggine near Lago di Vagli , in province of Lucca , in Tuscany ,
1136-468: A town's life. In 1944, occupying German Waffen-SS troops murdered almost the entire population of the French village Oradour-sur-Glane . A new settlement was built nearby after the war, but the old town was left depopulated on the orders of President Charles de Gaulle , as a permanent memorial. In Germany, numerous smaller towns and villages in the former eastern territories were completely destroyed in
1207-991: Is an abandoned settlement, usually one that contains substantial visible remaining buildings and infrastructure such as roads. A town often becomes a ghost town because the economic activity that supported it (usually industrial or agricultural) has failed or ended for any reason (e.g. a host ore deposit exhausted by mining ). The town may have also declined because of natural or human-caused disasters such as floods , prolonged droughts, extreme heat or extreme cold, government actions, uncontrolled lawlessness, war, pollution, or nuclear and radiation-related accidents and incidents . The term can sometimes refer to cities, towns, and neighborhoods that, though still populated, are significantly less so than in past years; for example, those affected by high levels of unemployment and dereliction. Some ghost towns, especially those that preserve period-specific architecture, have become tourist attractions. Some examples are Bannack, Montana and Oatman, Arizona in
1278-455: Is an exclusion zone on the island of Montserrat , where the long-dormant Soufrière Hills volcano started erupting in 1995 and has continued erupting since. It encompasses the south part of the island, accounting for over half of its land mass and most areas of the island which were populated before the volcano erupted. The volcano destroyed the island's urban center and capital Plymouth , as well as many other villages and neighborhoods. The zone
1349-481: Is now home to more than four million people. Wars and rebellions in some African countries have left many towns and villages deserted. Since 2003, when President François Bozizé came to power, thousands of citizens of the Central African Republic have been forced to flee their homes as a result of the escalating conflict between armed rebels and government troops. Villages accused of supporting
1420-439: Is now strictly enforced; entry into most of the destroyed areas is prohibited, while some areas are subject to restrictions during volcanic activity or open only as a "daytime entry zone". Before the launch of a missile or launch vehicle, the area surrounding the launch site and underneath the trajectory of the rocket, called the launch corridor, is cleared. That way, spectators, aviators, seamen and ground controllers are safe from
1491-466: The Sperrgebiet ("forbidden zone"), effectively criminalizing new settlement. The small mining towns of this area, among them Pomona , Elizabeth Bay and Kolmanskop , were exempt from this ban, but the denial of new land claims soon rendered all of them ghost towns. The town of Dhanushkodi , India is a ghost town. It was destroyed during the 1964 Rameswaram cyclone and remains uninhabited in
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#17327919442741562-469: The Chernobyl disaster of 1986, dangerously high levels of nuclear contamination escaped into the surrounding area, and nearly 200 towns and villages in Ukraine and neighbouring Belarus were evacuated, including the cities of Pripyat and Chernobyl . The area was so contaminated that many of the evacuees were never permitted to return to their homes. Pripyat is the most famous of these abandoned towns; it
1633-699: The Interstate highway system replaced the railroads as the favored means of transportation. Ghost towns are common in mining or mill towns in all the western states, and many eastern and southern states as well. Residents are compelled to leave in search of more productive areas when the resources that had created an employment boom in these towns were eventually exhausted. Sometimes a ghost town consists of many abandoned buildings as in Bodie, California , or standing ruins as in Rhyolite, Nevada , while elsewhere only
1704-604: The National Register of Historic Places . Starting in 2002, an attempt to declare an official ghost town in California stalled when the adherents of the town of Bodie and those of Calico , in Southern California , could not agree on the most deserving settlement for the recognition. A compromise was eventually reached—Bodie became the official state gold rush ghost town, while Calico was named
1775-591: The Stanford Battle Area , were commandeered by the War Office for use as training grounds for British and US troops. Although this was intended to be a temporary measure, the residents were never allowed to return, and the villages have been used for military training ever since. Three miles or 5 km southeast of Imber is Copehill Down , a deserted village purpose-built for training in urban warfare . Disasters & natural disasters have played
1846-689: The Family Lines System. This would lead to the Seaboard System and that would become a part of CSX Transportation in the 1980s, although the segment from Durant to Willow was pulled up in 1986. The line is currently part of the CSX Palmetto Subdivision's Parrish Spur. It is Class I track with jointed, 75-pound rails. The Florida Railroad Museum is one of three Official State Railroad Museums in Florida. It became
1917-847: The U.S. when NASA acquired land to construct the John C. Stennis Space Center (SSC), a rocket testing facility in Hancock County, Mississippi (on the Mississippi side of the Pearl River , which is the Mississippi – Louisiana state line). This required NASA to acquire a large (approximately 34-square-mile or 88-square-kilometre) buffer zone because of the loud noise and potential dangers associated with testing such rockets. Five thinly populated rural Mississippi communities (Gainesville, Logtown, Napoleon, Santa Rosa, and Westonia), plus
1988-608: The United States, and Canada, where housing is often used as an investment rather than for habitation. Railroads and roads bypassing or no longer reaching a town can also create a ghost town. This was the case in many of the ghost towns along Ontario's historic Opeongo Line , and along U.S. Route 66 after motorists bypassed the latter on the faster moving highways I-44 and I-40 . Some ghost towns were founded along railways where steam trains would stop at periodic intervals for repairs or to take on water. Amboy, California ,
2059-784: The United States; Barkerville, British Columbia in Canada; Craco and Pompeii in Italy; Aghdam in Azerbaijan; Kolmanskop in Namibia; Pripyat and Chernobyl in Ukraine; Dhanushkodi in India; Fordlândia in Brazil and Villa Epecuén in Argentina. T. Lindsey Baker, author of Ghost Towns of Texas , defines a ghost town as "a town for which the reason for being no longer exists." Some writers discount settlements that were abandoned as
2130-406: The aftermath. Many abandoned towns and settlements in the former Soviet Union were established near Gulag labour camps to supply necessary services. Since most of these camps were abandoned in the 1950s, the towns were abandoned as well. One such town is located near the former Gulag camp called Butugychag (also called Lower Butugychag). Other towns were deserted due to deindustrialisation and
2201-514: The country, were wiped out due to the Great Famine in the latter half of the 19th century, and the years of economic decline that followed. Catastrophic environmental damage caused by long-term contamination can also create a ghost town. Some notable examples are Times Beach, Missouri , whose residents were exposed to a high level of dioxins , and Wittenoom, Western Australia , which was once Australia's largest source of blue asbestos , but
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2272-487: The deserted mountain village Craco located in Basilicata , which has served as a filming location, and the ghost village Roveraia, in the municipality of Loro Ciuffenna , in province of Arezzo , situated near Pratovalle . During World War II it was an important partisan base and it was definitively abandoned in the 1980s, when the last family who lived here, left the village. . Two projects have been proposed for
2343-737: The development of ghost towns. Tyneham , in Dorset , was requisitioned for military exercises during the Second World War , and remains unpopulated, being littered with unexploded munitions from regular shelling. A few ghost towns have managed to get a second life, and this happens through a variety of reasons. One of these reasons is heritage tourism generating a new economy able to support residents. For example, Walhalla, Victoria , Australia, became almost deserted after its gold mine ceased operation in 1914, but owing to its accessibility and proximity to other attractive locations, it has had
2414-637: The economic crises of the early 1990s attributed to post-Soviet conflicts – one example being Tkvarcheli in Georgia, a coal mining town that suffered a drastic population decline as a result of the War in Abkhazia in the early 1990s. Although in 2010s Chinese ghost cities became a frequent feature of discourse regarding China's economy and urbanization , under-occupied cities filled up. Writing in 2023, academic and former UK diplomat Kerry Brown described
2485-410: The edges of the property, with gatehouses or barricades to prevent unsupervised access. Construction of dams has produced ghost towns that have been left underwater. Examples include: Some towns become deserted when their populations were massacred , deported, or expelled. Examples include Kayaköy, an ancient Greek city abandoned in 1923 as result of population exchange between Greece and Turkey and
2556-431: The entire population to flee. Upon seizing the city, Armenian forces destroyed much of the town to discourage Azerbaijanis from returning. More damage occurred in the following decades when locals looted the abandoned town for building materials. It is currently almost entirely ruined and uninhabited. Natural and human-made disasters can create ghost towns. For example, after being flooded more than 30 times since their town
2627-413: The entry of personnel into danger areas, established through the risk assessment process for a construction activity. Typically, exclusion zones are set up and maintained around plant and below work at height. With regard to protesting, an exclusion zone is an area that protesters are legally prohibited from protesting in. Exclusion zones often exist around seats of government and abortion clinics . As
2698-497: The excursions from Parrish to Willow last about an hour and a half round trip. The museum also offers specials events throughout the year such as Day Out With Thomas, Pumpkin Patch Express, and North Pole Express. AMTK 133 AMTK 114 [REDACTED] Media related to Florida Gulf Coast Railroad Museum at Wikimedia Commons Ghost town A ghost town , deserted city , extinct town , or abandoned city
2769-510: The foundations of former buildings remain as in Graysonia, Arkansas . Old mining camps that have lost most of their population at some stage of their history such as Aspen , Deadwood , Oatman , Tombstone and Virginia City are sometimes referred to as ghost towns although they are presently active towns and cities. Many U.S. ghost towns, such as South Pass City in Wyoming are listed on
2840-754: The gas plumes and accidental ignition of the gas. Border zones are areas where movement, property ownership or other activity is prohibited or restricted by legislation. Unlike regular territory, border zones are under administrative control of the border authorities. Entrance is generally only with an individual permit. Entering a border zone without authorization is a crime or misdemeanor and grounds for arrest. Border zones are instituted to pinpoint illegal intruders, conceal and obscure and prevent interference with border security procedures and equipment, and thus aid border guards with their work. For example, Russia maintains sizable border zones . Similarly, exclusion zones have been established due to natural disasters. There
2911-595: The idea of Chinese ghost cities as a popular bandwagon which was shown to be a myth. The town of Namie , along with several other towns in Fukushima Prefecture , Japan, was temporarily evacuated as a result of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster following the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami . Following ongoing decontamination works, several portions of Namie have been fully reopened to residents, allowing reconstruction and renovation of
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2982-530: The last two years of the war. These territories later became part of Poland and the Soviet Union , and many of the smaller settlements were never rebuilt or repopulated, for example Kłomino ( Westfalenhof ), Pstrąże ( Pstransse ), and Janowa Góra ( Johannesberg ). Some villages in England were also abandoned during the war, but for different reasons. Imber , on Salisbury Plain , and several villages in
3053-629: The locality was severely affected. Hundreds of buildings which also includes Church of Saint Pius X, the health center, the headquarters of the neighborhood association, the School of Early Childhood Education, and Los Campitos Elementary School and the Todoque Elementary and the Infant Education School, and by October 10, new lava flows destroyed the buildings that were still standing, leaving the town practically erased from
3124-505: The map. An example in the UK of a ghost village which was abandoned before it was ever occupied is at Polphail , Argyll and Bute . The planned development of an oil rig construction facility nearby never materialised, and a village built to house the workers and their families became deserted the moment the building contractors finished their work. War activities, displacements and complete destruction of cities as result of intense fighting were
3195-471: The most notable are Anyox , Kitsault , and Ocean Falls . Some ghost towns have revived their economies and populations due to historical and eco-tourism, such as Barkerville ; once the largest town north of Kamloops , it is now a year-round provincial museum. In Quebec, Val-Jalbert is a well-known tourist ghost town; founded in 1901 around a mechanical pulp mill that became obsolete when paper mills began to break down wood fibre by chemical means, it
3266-525: The nation's second-largest city with 1 million people, was a village of only a few thousand people before colonization. Alexandria , the second-largest city of Egypt, was a flourishing city in the Ancient era, but declined during the Middle Ages. It underwent a dramatic revival during the 19th century; from a population of 5,000 in 1806, it grew into a city of more than 200,000 inhabitants by 1882, and
3337-464: The northern portion of a sixth ( Pearlington ), along with 700 families in residence, had to be completely relocated away from the facility. Sometimes the town might cease to officially exist, but the physical infrastructure remains. For example, the five Mississippi communities that had to be abandoned to build SSC still have remnants of those communities within the facility itself. These include city streets, now overgrown with forest flora and fauna, and
3408-567: The official state silver rush ghost town. Exclusion zone An exclusion zone is a territorial division established for various, case-specific purposes. Per the United States Department of Defense , an exclusion zone is a territory where an authority prohibits specific activities in a specific geographic area (see military exclusion zone ). These temporary or permanent zones are created for control of populations for safety, crowd control, or military purposes, or as
3479-642: The original French village at Oradour-sur-Glane which was destroyed on 10 June 1944 when 642 of its 663 inhabitants were killed by a German Waffen-SS company. A new village was built after the war on a nearby site, and the ruins of the original have been maintained as a memorial. Another example is Aghdam , a city in Azerbaijan . Armenian forces occupied Aghdam in July 1993 during the First Nagorno-Karabakh War . The heavy fighting forced
3550-518: The plant. The area of Willow is accessible from Willow Road east off of US 301 . The museum has a fence around its facilities at Willow and cameras for security. It has constructed a new depot at Willow within this secured property. The railroad line that the Florida Railroad Museum uses is a very small part of a 55-mile route that was built south from Durant to Manatee County and into Sarasota with construction starting in 1895. It
3621-530: The reason for abandonment can arise from a town's intended economic function shifting to another, nearby place. This happened to Collingwood, Queensland , in Outback Australia when nearby Winton outperformed Collingwood as a regional centre for the livestock-raising industry. The railway reached Winton in 1899, linking it with the rest of Queensland , and Collingwood was a ghost town by the following year. More broadly across Australia, there has been
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#17327919442743692-573: The reason for their complete abandonment. Examples are Marinka and Soledar in Donbas in Ukraine . Canada has several ghost towns in parts of British Columbia , Alberta , Ontario , Saskatchewan , Newfoundland and Labrador , and Quebec . Some were logging towns or dual mining and logging sites, often developed at the behest of the company . In Alberta and Saskatchewan, most ghost towns were once farming communities that have since died off due to
3763-562: The rebels, such as Beogombo Deux near Paoua , are ransacked by government soldiers. Those who are not killed have no choice but to escape to refugee camps. The instability in the region also leaves organized and well-equipped bandits free to terrorize the populace, often leaving villages abandoned in their wake. Elsewhere in Africa, the town of Lukangol was burnt to the ground during tribal clashes in South Sudan . Before its destruction,
3834-699: The recovery of the village: in 2011 the proposal of Movimento Libero Perseo "Roveraia eco - lab", based on sustainability, and in 2019 there was a proposal aiming to recover the village with a mix of functions called "Ecomuseum of Pratomagno". In the United Kingdom, thousands of villages were abandoned during the Middle Ages, as a result of Black Death , revolts, and enclosure , the process by which vast amounts of farmland became privately owned. Since there are rarely any visible remains of these settlements, they are not generally considered ghost towns; instead, they are referred to in archaeological circles as deserted medieval villages . Sometimes, wars and genocide end
3905-551: The removal of the railway through the town or the bypass of a highway. The ghost towns in British Columbia were predominantly mining towns and prospecting camps as well as canneries and, in one or two cases, large smelter and pulp mill towns. British Columbia has more ghost towns than any other jurisdiction on the North American continent, with more than 1,500 abandoned or semi-abandoned towns and localities. Among
3976-502: The resources were depleted and loss of highway traffic as US 66 was diverted from places like Oatman, Arizona , onto a more direct path. Mine and pulp mill closures have led to many ghost towns in British Columbia, Canada, including several relatively recent ones: Ocean Falls , which closed in 1973 after the pulp mill was decommissioned; Kitsault , whose molybdenum mine shut down after only 18 months in 1982; and Cassiar , whose asbestos mine operated from 1952 to 1992. In other cases,
4047-458: The resulting possibility of real-estate bubbles (sometimes due to outright overbuilding by land developers) may also trigger the appearance of certain elements of a ghost town, as real-estate prices initially rise (whereupon affordable housing becomes less available) and then later fall for a variety of reasons that are often tied to economic cycles and/or marketing hubris. This has been observed to occur in various countries, including Spain, China,
4118-501: The right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." The existence of exclusion zones is based on court rulings that allow the government to regulate the time, place, and manner of protests. An exclusion zone is related to a free speech zone . Protesters are required to picket in a free speech zone, thus rendering the area around the free speech zone to be an exclusion zone. When
4189-649: The road to Santiago de Compostela . Some ghost towns (e.g. Riace , Muñotello ) are being repopulated by respectively refugees and homeless people . In Riace, this was accomplished by a scheme funded by the Italian government which offers the housing to refugees and in Muñotello it was accomplished through an NGO ( Madrina Foundation ). In Algeria, many cities became hamlets after the end of Late Antiquity . They were revived with shifts in population during and after French colonization of Algeria . Oran , currently
4260-580: The town had a population of 20,000. The Libyan town of Tawergha had a population of around 25,000 before it was abandoned during the 2011 civil war , and it has remained empty since. Many of the ghost towns in mineral-rich Africa are former mining towns. Shortly after the start of the 1908 diamond rush in German South-West Africa , now known as Namibia , the German Imperial government claimed sole mining rights by creating
4331-558: The town's buildings to be undertaken and resettlement of the area to take place. Urbanization – the migration of a country's rural population into the cities – has left many European towns and villages deserted. An increasing number of settlements in Bulgaria are becoming ghost towns for this reason; at the time of the 2011 census, the country had 181 uninhabited settlements. In Hungary, dozens of villages are also threatened with abandonment. The first village officially declared as "dead"
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#17327919442744402-406: The town, human intervention, disasters, massacres, wars, the shifting of politics or fall of empires, and volcanic eruptions. A town can also be abandoned when it is part of an exclusion zone due to natural or human-made causes . Ghost towns may result when the single activity or resource that created a boomtown (e.g., nearby mine, mill or resort) is depleted or the resource economy undergoes
4473-460: Was Gyűrűfű [ hu ] in the late 1970s, but later it was repopulated as an eco-village . Some other depopulated villages were successfully saved as small rural resorts, such as Kán , Tornakápolna , Szanticska , Gorica , and Révfalu . In Spain, large zones of the mountainous Iberian System and the Pyrenees have undergone heavy depopulation since the early 20th century, leaving
4544-487: Was abandoned due to an uncontainable mine fire , which began in 1962 and still rages to this day; eventually the fire reached an abandoned mine underneath the nearby town of Byrnesville , which caused that mine to catch on fire too and forced the evacuation of that town as well. Ghost towns may also occasionally come into being due to an anticipated natural disaster – for example, the Canadian town of Lemieux, Ontario ,
4615-595: Was abandoned in 1991 after soil testing revealed that the community was built on an unstable bed of Leda clay . Two years after the last building in Lemieux was demolished, a landslide swept part of the former town-site into the South Nation River . Two decades earlier, the Canadian town of Saint-Jean-Vianney , Québec, also constructed on a Leda clay base, had been abandoned after a landslide on 4 May 1971, which swept away 41 homes, killing 31 people. Following
4686-527: Was abandoned when the mill closed in 1927 and re-opened as a park in 1960. Many ghost towns or abandoned communities exist in the American Great Plains , the rural areas of which have lost a third of their population since 1920. Thousands of communities in the northern plains states of Montana , Nebraska , North Dakota , and South Dakota became railroad ghost towns when a rail line failed to materialize. Hundreds of towns were abandoned as
4757-595: Was built for the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and had a population of almost 50,000 at the time of the disaster. Significant fatality rates from epidemics have produced ghost towns. Some places in eastern Arkansas were abandoned after more than 7,000 Arkansans died during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 and 1919. Several communities in Ireland, particularly in the west of
4828-780: Was first incorporated in 1902 as the United States & West Indies Railroad and Steamship Company. It became the Florida West Shore Railway on May 9, 1903. On November 4, 1909, it was acquired by the Seaboard Air Line Railroad Company. In 1967, the merger of the Seaboard Air Line and the Atlantic Coast Line created the Seaboard Coast Line . The Seaboard Coast Line would later become a part of
4899-579: Was founded in 1845, residents of Pattonsburg, Missouri , decided to relocate after two floods in 1993. With government help, the whole town was rebuilt 3 miles or 5 km away. Craco , a medieval village in the Italian region of Basilicata , was evacuated after a landslide in 1963. Nowadays it is a filming location for many movies, including The Passion of The Christ by Mel Gibson , Christ Stopped at Eboli by Francesco Rosi , The Nativity Story by Catherine Hardwicke and Quantum of Solace by Marc Forster . In 1984, Centralia, Pennsylvania ,
4970-688: Was part of one such series of villages along the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad across the Mojave Desert . River re-routing is another factor, one example being the towns along the Aral Sea . Ghost towns may be created when land is expropriated by a government, and residents are required to relocate. One example is the village of Tyneham in Dorset, England, acquired during World War II to build an artillery range. A similar situation occurred in
5041-509: Was shut down in 1966 due to health concerns. Treece and Picher , twin communities straddling the Kansas – Oklahoma border, were once one of the United States' largest sources of zinc and lead , but over a century of unregulated disposal of mine tailings led to groundwater contamination and lead poisoning in the town's children, eventually resulting in a mandatory Environmental Protection Agency buyout and evacuation. Contamination due to ammunition caused by military use may also lead to
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