Virginia City Historic District, National Historic Landmark district in Virginia City, Montana.

Virginia City Historic District covers about 20,000 acres, including all of Virginia City and part of Alder Gulch. It holds over 200 nineteenth-century buildings, many of wood-frame construction with false front facades; the 1875 Madison County Courthouse is the most prominent, and a few log buildings survive from the earliest days.

Virginia City grew from a gold strike in Alder Gulch in the early 1860s, not 1859. By 1865 the gulch's mining camps held about 10,000 people, and Virginia City, the largest, became capital of Montana Territory that year. It held the seat for ten years. Large mining operations in the 1930s later demolished or buried most rival camps.

The courthouse at the center reflects how law and order mattered in a remote mining settlement. The layout of buildings and streets shows how people organized their daily lives around mining and commerce.

You can walk through the streets and access many original buildings to experience how people lived during the territorial period. The site is walkable and spread out, so plan to spend several hours exploring at a comfortable pace.

Charles and Sue Bovey started restoring abandoned buildings in the 1940s and gradually turned the town into an open-air mining museum. Their work saved numerous structures from decay and created one of the few remaining complete views of a nineteenth-century mining settlement.