The Californian ghost town of Eagle Mountain is coming back to life. Decades after the closure of post offices, schools and gas stations, the city in Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, has now been sold to an anonymous buyer. For 22.5 million dollars, the new owner, owner of the previously unknown company Ecology Mountain Holdings, gets the ruins of a few dozen residential buildings, a disused iron mine and several concrete buildings.
Eagle Mountain was founded in the early years after World War II by the German-born industrialist Henry J. Kaiser in the southeast of Joshua Tree National Park. At that time, more than 4000 miners and their families lived in the desert city with schools, a public swimming pool and several churches.
When environmental concerns arose in the seventies, the first families left Eagle Mountain. After the announcement by the Kaiser Corporation in the early eighties that it would shut down the mine in the coming years, shops and schools also closed.
For several years, the California Department of Corrections housed inmates in the abandoned buildings before the facility was closed in 2003 after a riot that left several dead and injured. Since then, several attempts to revive Eagle Mountain had failed. What the buyer plans for the desert city remains open for the time being, according to the website SFGATE.