In Brief
Rush, Arkansas is a real ghost town along the Buffalo River, where a zinc boom drew nearly 5,000 people before the mines closed and emptied it to 344. The general store, the smelter, and the houses still stand in the forest, abandoned.
The Full Story
Rush, Arkansas sits empty in the Ozark forest, along Rush Creek where it runs into the Buffalo River. The general store still stands. So does the blacksmith shop, the old smelter, and a line of small wooden houses called House Row. Nearly 5,000 people once lived here. Now the forest has it, and the only sound is the creek.
The town existed because of a mistake. In 1886, prospectors built a rock smelter along the creek to pull silver out of the ore they'd been finding in the rocks. In a test run in January 1887, the smelter belched green zinc-oxide fumes in a spectacular display, and the silver they'd predicted never collected in the sand molds. The ore wasn't silver. It was zinc.
That accident built the town. The Morning Star Mine grew into the largest operation in the district, and one day a miner pulled a single mass of pure zinc ore from it that weighed roughly 13,000 pounds — a chunk that won blue ribbons at two World's Fairs, Chicago in 1893 and St. Louis in 1904. When World War I drove up demand for brass, the mines ran hard and the population climbed somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000.
On June 10, 1916, a 30-ton slab of the Morning Star Mine's ceiling came down. It killed two miners and trapped a third. Jim Moore lay with his right arm and both legs pinned under the rubble, and for more than three hours he stayed still and calm, directing the work as crews freed him with jacks.
When the war ended, zinc prices collapsed and the mines went quiet. By 1920 the population was 344. The Morning Star closed around 1930. The post office held on into the mid-1950s, then closed too.
Visitors say there are sounds in the ruins, and a miner who isn't there. None of that is on record. What's on record is the silence — a whole town the forest reclaimed, the buildings still standing where 5,000 people walked away.
