OLD MOLSON
Ghost Town — Old Molson, Okanogan County, Washington
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/old-molson-old-molson-washington/

Historic settlement and ghost-town heritage.

A ghost town in Old Molson, Washington, Old Molson is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Historic settlement and ghost-town heritage. It sits in the archive under ghost towns. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — a documented spine with no haunting reports attached. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip.

Old Molson had a brewery fortune behind it and a two-year boom. In 1900, promoter George B. Meacham founded the townsite in Okanogan County, 1.7 miles south of the Canadian border, on money from John W. Molson — of the Canadian Molson banking and brewing family — who put in a reported $170,000. The post office opened that July; by year's end some three hundred people supported three general stores, a drugstore, three saloons, a dance hall, livery, blacksmith, assay office, hotel, newspaper, attorney, and doctor.
Then the money left. The Molson company withdrew its backing, and by June 1901 — a year after founding — twelve residents remained. The grand Hotel Tonasket, three stories and thirty-four rooms named for the Okanogan chief, stood until it burned in 1924. Mining flickered intermittently around the district until 1938, while the newer Molson townsite nearby carried on with a real school.

THE TOWN AS EXHIBIT
In 1960 Harry Sherling established the Old Ghost Town Museum at the original townsite — an open-air assemblage of pioneer buildings, farm machinery, and mining equipment — and the surviving Central Molson schoolhouse became a second museum holding the school's library and household artifacts. Both run seasonal hours by donation.
The file keeps the site as heritage rather than haunting: Old Molson is a deliberately curated ghost town, which makes it an unusual archive object — a boom that failed in twelve months, preserved sixty years later by a man who decided the ruins were the point.

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· Former mining settlement with preserved pioneer artifacts. The town's documented rise and abandonment is the record the rest of the file stands on. The press recorded it; the detail stands as reported history. The record appears in 'Discover Washington Ghost Towns'. It is the kind of fact the rest of the dossier leans on.

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Discover Washington Ghost Towns — State of Washington Tourism
  https://stateofwatourism.com/ghost-towns-of-washington-state/

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