Rhyolite is a ghost town in Nye County,
in the U.S. state of Nevada. It is in the Bullfrog Hills, about 120 miles (190 km)
northwest of Las Vegas,
near the eastern edge of Death Valley.
The town began in early 1905 as one of several mining camps that sprang up
after a prospecting discovery in the surrounding
hills. During an ensuing gold rush,
thousands of gold-seekers, developers, miners and service providers flocked to
the Bullfrog Mining District. Many settled in Rhyolite, which lay in a
sheltered desert basin near the region's biggest producer, the Montgomery
Shoshone Mine.
Home of the bottle house -
Around 1905, during the Gold Rush, Tom Kelly built
his famous house in Rhyolite, NV with 51,000 beer bottles and adobe. He chose
bottles because "it's very difficult to build a house with lumber from a
Joshua tree." It took him about a year and a half to build the 3-room,
L-shaped building with gingerbread trim. The original cost of the
building was $2,500 but most of that money was spent on the wood and fixtures.
Some of the bottles were medicine bottles, but most were Busch beer bottle
throw-aways from the 50 bars in town.
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