The town that became Garnet was not built to last. The miners who raised its buildings in the 1890s were more interested in what lay beneath the ground than in the permanence of what they constructed above it, and the structures they put up reflected that priority. They were small, quick to heat, and lacking the foundations that would have given them any claim to permanence. That so many of them still stand, more than a century after the last serious mining ended, is a function of the dry mountain air and the elevation of the Garnet Range rather than any intention on the part of the men who built them.

Placer gold was found in the Garnet Mountains as early as the mid-1860s, when miners working their way north from the played-out placers of California and Colorado discovered color in the creeks draining the range. The First Chance Gulch, Bear Creek, and the other drainages of the northern Garnet Range yielded enough gold to sustain a small population of placer miners through the late 1860s and into the 1870s, but the free-floating gold diminished as the surface deposits were worked out, and the miners who remained began searching for the quartz veins that had been the source of the placer gold. The veins were there, but the roads were not, and the extracting and smelting technology of the early territorial period was not adequate to work them profitably. The mountains attracted and then released their miners in the familiar pattern of the placer era.

The collapse of the silver market in 1893, when Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the price of silver fell precipitously, sent thousands of unemployed silver miners looking for gold. The Garnet Mountains, which had been largely quiet since the placer era, suddenly looked attractive again. Miners began to trickle back into the range, and in 1895 Dr. Armistead Mitchell erected a stamp mill at the head of First Chance Gulch to crush the gold-bearing quartz that the earlier miners had identified but been unable to work. Around Mitchell's mill grew the town, which was originally called Mitchell but became known as Garnet in 1897 after the semi-precious ruby-colored stones found throughout the area.

The boom that followed Mitchell's mill was real. Sam Ritchey hit a rich vein of ore in his Nancy Hanks mine just west of the town, and by January 1898 nearly a thousand people lived in Garnet. The town had four stores, four hotels, three livery stables, two barber shops, a union hall, a school with forty-one students, a butcher shop, a candy shop, a doctor's office, an assay office, and thirteen saloons. About twenty mines were operating in the district, and the haphazard community that had grown up around them had the energy and the disorder of a genuine boom town. The buildings stood on existing or future mining claims, and the town's layout reflected the priorities of the men who built it: get the ore out first, worry about the streets later.

The Nancy Hanks mine yielded approximately $300,000 worth of gold, and the total production from all the Garnet mines reached an estimated $950,000 by 1917. These were respectable numbers for a small mountain district, but they were not the figures of a major mining camp, and after 1900 the gold became scarcer and harder to mine. Many mine owners began leasing their claims to smaller operators rather than working them directly, a pattern that typically indicated a district in decline. By 1905 the population had shrunk to about 150, and the town's commercial life had contracted accordingly.

A fire in the business district in 1912 destroyed many of the commercial buildings that had survived the first decade of decline, and most of the remaining residents moved away to take defense-related jobs during the First World War. By the early 1920s Garnet was a ghost town, its cabins abandoned with furnishings in place, as though the residents had merely stepped out for the afternoon. Frank Davey continued to run the store, and the hotel stood intact, but the community that had once housed a thousand people had been reduced to a handful of holdouts.

President Roosevelt's decision in 1934 to raise the price of gold from $16 to $32 an ounce brought Garnet back to life. A new wave of miners moved into the abandoned cabins and began reworking the mines and the dumps, extracting gold that had not been worth mining at the old price. The revival lasted until the Second World War, when the War Production Board curtailed the use of dynamite for domestic purposes, making hard-rock mining impractical. The miners departed again, and Garnet became a ghost town for the second time. Frank Davey and a few others remained, but the community was finished as a mining camp.

The Bureau of Land Management and the Garnet Preservation Association have worked together since the 1970s to stabilize and preserve the surviving structures. Garnet is now recognized as Montana's most intact ghost town, a designation that reflects both the quality of what survives and the effort that has gone into protecting it.

What Remains Today

Garnet retains more than thirty structures from its mining era, including cabins, a hotel, a saloon, a jail, a school, a blacksmith shop, and the remains of the mining infrastructure. The buildings are in varying states of preservation, with some stabilized by the preservation program and others in the process of natural decay. The town is managed jointly by the Bureau of Land Management and the Garnet Preservation Association, and it is open to visitors year-round, with guided tours available in summer.

The surrounding Garnet Range contains additional evidence of the mining era, including mine shafts, waste rock piles, and the remnants of the infrastructure that supported the district's operations. Winter visitors can access Garnet by snowmobile from the Bear Creek Road, and the BLM maintains warming cabins that can be rented for overnight stays.

Visiting

Garnet is located in Granite County approximately thirty miles east of Missoula, accessible via Bear Creek Road from Highway 200 east of Missoula or via Garnet Range Road from the Drummond area. The road to Garnet is unpaved and can be rough in wet conditions; a high-clearance vehicle is recommended. The site is managed by the Bureau of Land Management's Missoula Field Office, which can provide current road and access information.

Missoula is the nearest city with visitor services and is located approximately an hour west on Highway 200 and Interstate 90. The Garnet Preservation Association maintains a website with current information about visiting conditions, preservation projects, and the history of the town.