Atlantic City pioneer mining
— a town the gold rush forgot to take with it.
Not only on a wall.
Atlantic City pioneer mining, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
“A wooden cluster of cabins and a saloon on a dirt road in Fremont County, with the sage running off toward South Pass. The gold strike of 1868 brought several hundred prospectors up the creek; most left within a few years. What stayed is the Carissa Saloon, a Catholic mission, a small cemetery, and the long quiet of a place that kept its own counsel after the rush moved on. from the studio
The place, in three passes.
Atlantic City sits in Fremont County, Wyoming, on the southern flank of the Wind River Range, about three miles east of South Pass City and roughly 7,800 feet up. The town grew out of the 1868 placer gold strike along Rock Creek, drew a few hundred miners through the 1870s, then thinned as the easy gravel ran out. A second life arrived in 1962 when U.S. Steel opened the Atlantic City Mine to work taconite iron ore for the Geneva Works in Utah; that operation ran until 1983. Today the population is in the low double digits, and the road in is unpaved most of the year.
The standing buildings are the record. The Carissa Saloon dates to the strike years and still serves a short menu on summer evenings. The Atlantic City Mercantile, built of squared logs in 1893, kept the post office and the only grocery for most of a century. St. Andrew's Episcopal-turned-Catholic mission sits on the rise above the creek. The taconite era left a different kind of mark a few miles east: a reclaimed open pit and a tailings pond that the BLM monitors as part of the South Pass Historic Mining District.
The town is reached by Wyoming 28 to the marked turnoff for the Atlantic City Road, an unpaved county route that the state closes informally between heavy snow and late May. The Carissa Saloon and the Mercantile keep summer hours roughly Memorial Day through September. South Pass City State Historic Site, three miles west, holds the better-preserved buildings of the rush and is the place to pair a half-day visit with. No services beyond the saloon; the nearest fuel is in Lander, about thirty miles east.
