He Bought A Ghost Town And Became A YouTube Star - EP 91 Brent Underwood

Ashlee Vance (0:00)

What is it like to buy a ghost town? That is where we get into on this week's episode with our guest Brent Underwood. A few years ago, he bought the Cerro Gordo Mine in California. It's near Death Valley or in Death Valley. It was a silver, and I want to say copper mine that ran for many, many decades. It had a ghost town, an old town, that is remarkably well preserved. Somehow or another, Brent ended up buying this and has turned it into quite the pet project. He's been exploring the mines. There's many, many, many miles of mines to go through there. He's been restoring the old hotel that used to be the center of the city, and he's built a massive YouTube channel around all this. He's an author. He's just a cool dude, a really good hang. We went to the mine and spent a couple days. I slept in a house from the 1800s. We used a Ouija board and tried to summon some ghosts, but our intern ruined the whole process by not really getting into the spirit of things. That's neither here nor there. We talked to Brent about the history of Cerro Gordo, what it's like to buy a ghost town, what it's like to lower himself down into the mines and explore them, and why he's doing this. It was great. We had such a fun time when we were hanging out there.

We'll have an episode on our main YouTube video channel, the Core Memory channel about our time in Cerro Gordo, but here's our chat with Brent, and I'm sure you will love it. I am Ashlee Vance. This is Core Memory. Off to the ghost town we go.

Brent Underwood, how are you?

Brent Underwood (2:15)

I'm doing well.

Ashlee Vance (2:16)

We are in a ghost town. We are in a old mining town.

You live here.

Brent Underwood (2:25)

Full time.

Ashlee Vance (2:26)

Full time. I think there's some people tuning into this who will know that you've got this mega YouTube channel about moving here. There's some people who will not have heard your story before. So we have this amazing setting. I thought maybe we should explain how we ended up here. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, tell us, tell us where we are and a little bit of how we got here.

Brent Underwood (2:52)

Yeah. So right now we are at Cerro Gordo, California, which back in 1800s was the largest silver mine in California. And it's a town that started around 1865 and ran all the way into the 1940s. So for a mine, it had a really long and active life. And the main mine here is 10 feet that way. That's the Union Mine. And out of that hole right there, they pulled something like 800 million dollars of the minerals. And so this was kind of your classic Western boom town. There was 4,000 people living up here at its peak. There was brothels, bars, saloons, everything that you can imagine happening up here.

The town eventually kind of went bust in the 1940s for a variety of reasons. We lost the vein.

World War II shut down all non-essential mining. And so the town kind of became a ghost town, abandoned for the first time. It's been in private ownership since then, kind of like passing down from person to person. And I purchased the town in 2018 with the idea of turning into kind of a hospitality destination, Airbnb some cabins, have people come up and stay here.

I was originally doing it from a far. I was living in Austin, Texas, kind of commuting back and forth. Then March of 2020 hits, the world starts shutting down. I decide what better place to spend the pandemic than in the middle of nowhere up here and moved up here in March of 2020 and never left. So six years later, still here, still working to bring the town back to life, still kind of loving life up here.

Ashlee Vance (4:38)

That was great and there's so much to get into. We spent a couple of days here, you're kind enough to let us hang out. We're like living, I mean, we've been staying in, what's the name of our house?

Brent Underwood (4:49)

Gordon House.

Ashlee Vance (4:49)

The Gordon House, which I think was built in 1910

Brent Underwood (4:52)

1910, yeah.

Ashlee Vance (4:53)

It's just very nice house. It's still standing.

Brent Underwood (4:56)

Yeah.

Ashlee Vance (4:59)

Let's go back a little bit. What were you doing before 2018? Yeah.

Brent Underwood (5:04)

I was living in Austin, Texas. I had a bed and breakfast in an old Victorian house from 1800s. So I've always loved this idea of history and hospitality and combining the two. My undergraduate degree was in real estate, and so I thought I would get into that, but I've always loved hospitality. Then my grandfather used to watch Gunsmoke, the Western show just over and over and over and over again. He had dementia, so he would just watch the episodes, the same one over and over and over. I think something about that implanted this romanticism of the American West.