Field guide

Finding Ghost Towns With LIDAR

The federal government keeps a list of places that used to exist and don't any more. There are 16,525 of them with coordinates attached. Most have never been detected.

In short A ghost town is the best kind of permission you can ask for: nobody has hunted it in fifty years, and the ground remembers more than the map does. The US Board on Geographic Names keeps a file of features it has formally retired — places that were real, were named, and are gone. That file is the starting point. Elevation data is what turns a dot on a map into a spot you can stand on.

The ghost towns layer is built into the map. Run a search — try the free demo first, no account.

1. What counts as a ghost town

Most people picture the Western version — a main street with false-front buildings still standing, somewhere in Nevada. Those exist, and they are almost all on private land or inside a state park, and they have been detected to death.

The useful kind is duller and far more common. A post office that operated for eleven years and closed in 1903. A rail siding with a section house and four families. A mill village that emptied when the mill burned. A crossroads with a store, a church and a school that the highway bypassed in 1927. None of these leave a skyline. They leave foundations, a well, a dump, and a lot of dropped metal.

That last part is what matters. A place does not have to have been big to be worth walking. It has to have had people standing around in it, losing things, for a couple of decades.

2. Where the list comes from

The US Geological Survey maintains the Geographic Names Information System — the official record of what every place in the country is called. Less well known is that it also keeps a separate file of historical features: entries the Board on Geographic Names has formally retired because the thing they name is no longer there.

That file holds 26,296 records. Filtered to the classes worth walking to, and to the ones that actually carry coordinates, it comes to 16,525 mapped places:

10,706 vanished populated places — towns, camps, villages, settlements
2,184 former civil divisions — districts and precincts that were dissolved
1,908 old military sites — forts, camps, posts and batteries
1,727 old crossings — fords and ferries, which is where roads used to go

One gap is worth knowing about before you go looking for it. Roughly 4,400 more historical populated places exist in that file with no coordinates at all — GNIS has the name, the state and the county, and nothing else. They cannot be put on a map by anyone, including us. If a town you know about isn't showing, that may be why rather than an oversight.

3. What a vanished town leaves behind

Buildings rot, burn or get salvaged. What survives is the ground they disturbed, and the ground holds that disturbance for centuries. In elevation data you are looking for four things.

Rectangles. Nature does not make right angles. A foundation, even robbed out for its stone, leaves a rectangular depression or a rectangular rim. In a Local Relief Model these read as clean blue boxes or thin warm outlines. A cluster of them along a common alignment is a street.

Cellar holes. A house with a cellar leaves a hole that partly fills but rarely disappears. It shows as a small, sharply-edged pit — steep walls and a flat floor, which is a very different shape from the soft bowl a natural sinkhole makes.

Roads that stop going anywhere. Sunken lanes, wagon cuts and abandoned rail grades all cut the landscape in straight or gently curved lines that ignore modern property boundaries. A road that runs from nowhere to nowhere is usually running to something that was there when it was built.

The dump. Every settlement had one, usually downhill and downwind, often in a gully or behind a ridge. It rarely shows as a shape — it shows as the place nobody built on, slightly mounded, near the edge of everything else.

4. Why the dot is only a starting point

This is the part people get wrong, and it costs whole afternoons.

GNIS coordinates are not survey marks. Many were derived decades ago from the centre of a section on an old topographic sheet, or from where a cartographer put a label. A dot can be a few hundred metres from anything you can actually stand on, and for a town that spread along a road it is anybody's guess which end of it the coordinate landed on.

So treat the dot as a search centre, not a target. Drop a pin there, scan a radius around it, and look for the shapes above rather than expecting an X to mark a spot. If a first scan comes back flat, move a few hundred metres along the nearest old road or watercourse and scan again. Towns sit beside water and on routes, not in the middle of fields.

5. Pairing it with the mining camps layer

The ghost towns layer tells you where people lived. It does not tell you why they were there. For a large slice of the American West the answer is the mining camps layer — 44,677 past-producer metal mines from the USGS mineral database, gold, silver, copper, lead and the rest.

Switch both on together and the pattern does the explaining. A vanished populated place with a tight cluster of workings around it was a mining camp, and it emptied when the ore ran out. That tells you the date range, it tells you the population was transient and cash-carrying, and it tells you roughly where the living happened versus where the digging happened — which are not the same ground and are usually a short walk apart.

A vanished place with no workings near it was there for another reason — a crossing, a mill, a railway, a church. Different date, different rubbish, different finds.

6. A working method

Turn on ghost towns and zoom in. The layer draws from zoom 9, so start at a county and work down. Yellow dots are vanished towns, orange old military sites, cyan old crossings, green former civil divisions.
Click one and read the county. The name plus the county is enough to search a state historical society or a county history online, which is where the dates and the story live. GNIS gives you the where, not the when.
Scan around it, not at it. Drop a pin and run a search. If the relief map is flat, move and repeat rather than concluding the town is a myth.
Look for the rectangles first. Right angles are the fastest signal that a human was involved. Everything else follows from finding one.
Check who owns it before you go. A vanished town is still somebody's field. See permission and legal basics — and note that a ghost town inside a reservation or a national park is not available to you at any price.
Knock with specifics. "There was a settlement called Bethel on your back forty until about 1890 and I'd like to look for it" is a far better conversation than "can I detect on your land".

More guides

Detecting Near Civil War Battlefields — The protected core is off limits — the study area around it often isn't. How to tell the two apart before you knock.
Finding Old Mining Camps — 44,677 abandoned metal mines, what the camp left behind as opposed to the workings, and why the two are a short walk apart.
Finding Old Homestead Sites With LIDAR — What a vanished foundation, root cellar or filled-in farm road looks like in elevation data, and how to tell them from natural ground.
LiDAR Hillshade Maps for Metal Detecting — Hillshade, slope, Local Relief Model and sky-view openness, and a practical workflow for reading them together.
Historical Maps for Metal Detecting — Where to get old maps free, what the symbols mean, and how to line a century-old sheet up with the ground you are standing on.
Detecting Along the Westward Trails — What survives of the Oregon, California, Pony Express and Santa Fe routes, and how ruts and swales read in terrain data.
Permission and Legal Basics Before You Dig — Private land, public land and protected sites are three very different situations. General ground rules, not legal advice.

All 16,525 vanished places are on the map already — one toggle, no download, no GIS.

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