9 Small Towns in America Worth the Detour

Wallace is six blocks of brick in a narrow canyon, hemmed in by mountains on every side. The buildings went up fast after a fire in 1890 and were built to last, which is why the streetscape still reads as one piece rather than a survivor here and there.

It is still a mining town rather than a museum of one — the Lucky Friday mine operates nearby — and the town treats its own history with a straight face and a sense of humor at the same time.

The story

Silver was found in the Coeur d’Alene district in the 1880s, and Wallace became its center. A fire in 1890 cleared the wooden town; the replacement went up in brick, which is the town you see today.

The district also produced some of the most violent labor conflict in American mining, including dynamiting of a mill in 1899 and federal troops occupying the valley. That history is not hidden here — it’s in the museums.

The last chapter is the interstate. Wallace fought the routing of I-90 through downtown for years and won by getting the historic district listed, forcing the highway onto a viaduct above the town.

The streets follow the canyon, so nothing in Old Bisbee is on a grid and very little is level. Brick and stone buildings from the early 1900s climb the slope above Main Street; between them, concrete staircases do the work roads can’t.

After the mines closed the cheap housing pulled in artists and dropouts, and that layer never left. The result is a mining town with galleries in the storefronts and a genuinely odd sense of humor.

The story

Copper was found in the Mule Mountains in the 1870s, and Phelps Dodge turned Bisbee into one of the richest mining districts in the world. At its peak it was among the largest towns between St. Louis and San Francisco.

The Lavender Pit, an open-pit operation started in the 1950s, ate a chunk of the landscape south of downtown before mining ended in 1975.

The town emptied, prices collapsed, and a counterculture population moved into the vacant Victorian housing — which is why a company town now has this many galleries.

There is no grid here at all. Roads wrap the contours, stone retaining walls hold up whole blocks, and staircases connect streets that are stacked vertically rather than laid side by side.

The town runs on visitors — galleries, music rooms, small kitchens and a long-standing arts population — but the built environment is the real reason to stop.

The story

Springs in these hollows had a reputation for healing long before 1879, when the town was founded and grew explosively into a health resort.

Railroad access brought grand hotels, including the Crescent, and the town built upward on limestone ledges because there was nowhere flat to build outward.

The medical claims faded, the boom ended, and the town coasted for decades — which is exactly why the Victorian fabric survived to be restored by an arts revival in the later twentieth century.

The town is eight blocks long because that is all the flat ground there is. The main street is largely late-1800s brick, and the mountains close the view at both ends.

It functions as a base: jeep roads and hiking trails leave from the edge of town in several directions, and the hot springs pool is what people do afterward.

The story

Ouray was founded in 1876 on silver and named for a Ute chief. The mines above town, including the Camp Bird, were productive enough to fund the brick main street that still stands.

The road south — the Million Dollar Highway over Red Mountain Pass — was built on the bones of a nineteenth-century toll road engineered by Otto Mears, and it remains one of the most exposed paved roads in the country.

When mining faded, the geology stayed: canyons, hot water and ice. The town’s modern economy was built on all three.

The town has two levels. Water Street runs along the harbor with the 1880s commercial buildings; the residential bluff above it holds the houses the same boom paid for, reached by long public stairs.

Wooden boatbuilding is still an active trade here, not a heritage display, and it shapes the waterfront and the calendar.

The story

Founded in 1851, Port Townsend became the customs port of entry for Puget Sound and boomed on the expectation of a transcontinental rail terminus.

When the railroad chose Seattle and the economy crashed in the 1890s, construction stopped mid-stride. Nothing was replaced because nothing new was built.

Fort Worden, one of three coastal artillery forts guarding the entrance to the sound, later became a state park; its parade ground and officers’ row are open to walk.

Main Street is brick and stone, largely nineteenth century, and short enough to walk in twenty minutes. The theatre sits at the middle of it, facing the Martha Washington Inn.

The town is the practical base for the Creeper Trail and for the high country around Mount Rogers, which is why the sidewalks are full of both theatregoers and people in bike shoes.

The story

Abingdon was chartered in 1778 on the Great Road, the main route into the southwest Virginia frontier, and the early road-town layout is still readable in the street plan.

The railroad that became the Virginia Creeper hauled timber and freight through the mountains to Whitetop until the line closed in the 1970s; the roadbed became the trail.

The Barter Theatre opened during the Depression with a simple proposition: admission could be paid in produce. It survived, went professional, and became the state theatre.

Front Street runs along the water with the old houses on one side and docks on the other. Behind it, a grid of quiet residential streets holds one of the better-preserved colonial-era housing stocks in the state.

The Old Burying Ground, shaded and full of eighteenth-century markers, sits a couple of blocks inland and is worth the ten minutes.

The story

Beaufort was laid out in 1713 as a port and privateering-era harbor, and the inlet made it strategically useful long before it made it scenic.

Shipbuilding, fishing and menhaden processing carried the town through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the working waterfront never fully left.

In 1996, a wreck matching Blackbeard’s flagship was located in the inlet. Two decades of recovery work followed, and the finds are conserved and displayed locally.

They are not one municipality and locals will tell you so. But they share a river, a highway and an economy, and a visitor moving between them is doing what people who live here do daily.

Thomas is the arts and music side: galleries, a coffee roaster, the opera house, the Purple Fiddle. Davis is the outdoor side: outfitters, breakfast before a hike, and the road up to the falls.

The story

Both towns were built around 1880s coal and timber operations on the Blackwater. Thomas’s Front Street was constructed against the riverbank because the valley left no other room, and the buildings still cantilever over the water.

Coal declined and both towns emptied. Cheap buildings and mountain access eventually drew artists, musicians and outdoor businesses.

The surrounding highlands — Canaan Valley, Dolly Sods, Blackwater Canyon — were logged nearly bare a century ago. What grew back is the high-elevation landscape people now drive hours to see.

The town is built on a bend of the Galena River in terrain the last glaciers missed, so the hills are steep and the streets stack in layers connected by long public staircases.

Main Street is now shops, kitchens and antiques, but the buildings above the storefronts are the reason to look up.

The story

Galena grew on lead mining in the 1820s–40s and became a major Mississippi steamboat port — for a time it moved more freight than Chicago.

The river silted up, the railroads reorganized commerce, and the boom ended. Without money to rebuild, the town kept what it had already built.

Grant was living in Galena and working in his family’s leather goods store when the Civil War began. He left as a civilian and returned a general; the town gave him a house.