Oroville · US

Old Molson Historic Site

On a flat bench of land a few miles from the Washington–British Columbia border, the Old Molson Historic Site preserves the weathered bones of a town that gold built, a railroad fattened and a mine exhaustion emptied. Today it is an open-air museum: a scatter of full-scale pioneer buildings, sheds of antique farming and mining equipment and a handful of structures you can still step inside, all set against the wide, high-desert sky of the Okanogan country. What makes Old Molson more than just a cluster of old barns is the story embedded in them. This was a real boomtown, complete with a hotel, a theater and a genuinely bitter two-decade feud over which site was the legitimate town—down to a bank that was dragged on skids from one lot to another and a post office snatched while the postmaster was at lunch. Set up in 1960 by a local resident to remember that past, the ghost town lets you walk the same ground and read the drama yourself, free of charge, any day the sun is up.