Western Mining History : Reliving the Industrial Revolution of the West

I am about to embark on a major new phase of Western Mining History. The short term goal will be to work a lot more regularly on updating the site, adding mining towns, scanning documents etc. The long term goal is quite exciting and will be detailed in coming months.

Although I have been keeping up with some of the recent updates on the WMH Facebook page, not everyone reads that page and there were some small changes not reported. I wanted to summarize everyone that has been going on in one post so that I can move forward knowing everyone has been caught up. So here goes:

Site Design and Structural Changes
A few months ago I replaced some of the site graphics with HTML and changed the overall color scheme a bit. The purpose of this was to make future site updates and changes a bit easier. This wasn't a big deal but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

Amazon book blocks have gone away. Unfortunately, keeping up with changes in the Amazon API cost as much as I was making on book referrals so it just wasn't worth it. I'll look for new ways to integrate recommended books in the future as I did feel this was a valuable part of the site.

On the state map pages (example: Nevada), I have divided the menu to the right of the map into two categories: active towns and ghost towns. I did this to accommodate the many new towns that will be profiled in the future that are ghost towns. I didn't want the ghost towns to take all the attention away from the active towns. I feel the mining towns that still have a populace, and still have mining-era historical buildings should continue to be the focus of this site and so those will always be displayed in a list above the ghost town list. For more info see my latest post on WMH Town Classification.

Content Updates
I'll list these newest to oldest:

Added 20 historical photos to the Goldfield, Nevada town profile.

Added Aurora, Nevada town profile.

Added Ward, Nevada town profile.

Added a bunch of historical photos to the Deadwood, South Dakota town profile.