Lida (Nevada)
Coordinates: 37 ° 27'29 " N , 117 ° 29'53" W.
Lida is a ghost town in Esmeralda County in the state of Nevada .
location
North of Nevada State Route 266 lies at the exit of Lida Canyon on the southern slope of the Palmetto Mountains at an altitude of 1,878 meters. Lida Junction on US Highway 95 is around 28 kilometers east, and is about the same distance to the west to the border with the state of California .
history
Before the arrival of European settlers, the surrounding mountains were the main target of the Shoshone and Paiute forays , as the pines and cacti located here provided a source of food. The first, mainly Mexican and Indian prospectors reached the arid and repellent area in the middle of the 19th century, but found silver deposits here and in the nearby Tule Canyon .
Similar to Palmetto , located around 20 kilometers to the west, the intensification of mining began around 1867 when a mining district was established. The United States Postal Service opened a post office on March 17, 1873, but in ignorance of the exact location of the town first assigned it to Inyo County , before this was corrected about a month later. A road to Silver Peak was laid as the main artery , from where there was already a connection to Wadsworth on the Central Pacific Railroad . Steam- powered ore mills using the water from local springs were built, but richer ores were shipped to Belmont and Austin for processing .
As early as the 1880s, as in the entire state, the importance of mining declined, but the discoveries at Goldfield and Tonopah led to a new but brief boom. In 1905 around 300 people lived in Lida, mainly as a service center for the surrounding mines. Water from the surrounding springs was piped to Goldfield, and a vehicle road to Big Pine was opened in 1905. But this boom ended as early as 1907 and a slow but steady decline began. The post office was closed in late 1918 and rebuilt in Gold Point .
Today Lida is still inhabited, at least seasonally, but there are no public facilities apart from an information board on the State Route south across the road from the town.
