Loading ...MARYSVILLE, Mont. — “They say that history repeats itself,” said Shauna Simpson, standing outside this town’s only retail business, the Marysville House, a bar and restaurant. “I say, ‘Let it.’ ”
Here, it just might.
Marysville, a dot of a town in the mountains near Helena, was covered in gold dust in its heyday in the late 1800s. It was home to one of the great mother-lode gold and silver fortunes of the West, the Drumlummon Mine. Then it petered out — familiar story — to near ghost-town status through the long decades after the mine closed around 1904. Streets never paved in the first place became rougher; abandoned Victorian-era clapboard faded to gray in the Montana snows. About 70 people still call it home.
Now the curtain is going up on the town’s second act: the Drumlummon’s current owners announced last month that they had discovered a new vein that could be as rich, or richer, than the first. If the vein goes deep into the mountain, following the pattern of the veins the old-timers chased with pick and shovel, the new strike could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, at least.
cont. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/us/02marysville.html?_r=1