Friday 3 August 2012

A Great Line From Any Western,

'this town ain't big enough for the both of us!'


but what if you owned the town and was its sheriff, mayor and judge? 3 days ago the town of Woodside Emery County came up for sale, Mike Metzger's clients are selling more than 700 acres on either side of state Route 6 in Emery County that is home to one of Utah's railroad ghost towns, 'it includes the service station, the geyser, some of the old buildings from the town and 706.70 acres that is straddled alongside the Price River,' said Metzger, who works for Bridge Realty in Price,

the sale also includes water rights and partial mineral rights for the property, as well as ownership of the "free-range llamas" which are currently the town's only inhabitants, Woodside got its start in 1881, it was called Lower Crossing then and was used by the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad as a water stop, the town grew to include several stores, a blacksmith shop and even a school, the population peaked around 1920, when about 300 people called Woodside home, then the railroad consolidated its operations, moving 45 miles northwest to Helper in Carbon County, 'when the railroad had no more use for (Woodside), it was just kind of doomed to a slow death,' said Edward Geary, a retired BYU professor and the author of "A History of Emery County"

the town got a brief reprieve in the late 1930s when the highway was built and a cold water geyser — created decades earlier by railroad workers seeking fresh water for their steam engines — became a minor sensation with tourists, 'they had signs up and down the highway and they built up a board fence so you couldn't see it without paying admission and going inside,' Geary said, noting that at one time the so-called "Roadside Geyser" was blasting a column of water about 75 feet in the air every 40 minutes, better still it rumoured to have has an abandoned gold mine on the plot as part of the deal, the price for all of this? just $3,900,000 dollars, now where can I get my sheriffs badge made?

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