Modena is for sale. The whole town can be had for less than a jumbo mortgage. You will have to upgrade the 99 year old town water supply though. On the bright side, it has a red level rating for UFO spotting.
Modena isn't quite a ghost town - about 10 people live there.
Modena is easy to get to, but well off the beaten track - about 3 hours northeast of Las Vegas, or 4 hours southwest of Salt Lake City on well-maintained and quite scenic two lane paved roads (it isn't marked on this map, but it is at the "peak" in the road running west from Cedar City in the middle of the map, just inside the Utah border).
The story of Modena (and a lot of other towns out that way like Lund, Thermo, Elgin, Carp and so on) centers on water, railroads, and the interstate. Water in Utah is usually found on the west side of the Wasatch and other mountain ranges, which run from the north-central to the southwestern part of the state. Most of the population is and always has been in a thin green strip under these mountains. But, there are some spurs coming out of those mountains to the west, and a few large canyons. This made it infeasible to put a railroad through the population centers of southern Utah. Instead, the railroads cut diagaonally across the flat desert towards Las Vegas, sinking a well every 25 miles or so for their steam locomotives. The railroad towns thrived as the depots for the population centers (if they can be called that) to the east. Modena served St. George (which couldn't be connected with a spur), while a 30-mile spur from Lund served Cedar City. The trains still run that route across the desert, but starting in the mid-1930s the steam locomotives started getting replaced by diesel ones, and the watering towns withered away after the heavy traffic of World War II. Cars and trucks don't have the same degree of problems with grades and turns, and when the interstate system was built, I-15 was placed through the population centers under the lea of the mountains, rather than through the railroad towns. This allowed St. George to thrive as a retirement community, and Mesquite to thrive as the gateway casino community for that area of Nevada. Cedar City - where I live - is doing pretty well too. Now the 75 mile stretch from Cedar to Mesquite is one of the fastest growing regions of the country ... and it has a string of ghost towns off to the west.
Of course, you'd have some interesting neighbors about 100 miles to the southeast.
Posted by: Patrick R. Sullivan | May 25, 2005 at 02:46 PM
Suck up!
Posted by: Dave Tufte | June 02, 2005 at 12:28 PM
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Posted by: Jessica Light | January 02, 2006 at 11:06 PM
Id buy it i love ghost towns and ufos
Posted by: LyEyE | March 28, 2008 at 03:30 AM
i have a million dollars so i am going to get this house
Posted by: alexis etherton | June 03, 2008 at 08:28 AM
Does anyone know how to buy a property in Portugal?...
Posted by: | June 03, 2009 at 05:37 AM
i am buying this town
Posted by: juggalo1 | March 14, 2010 at 01:10 PM
Any one buy this town, email doninmt@gmail.com Thanks!
Posted by: Don Baumgartner | September 21, 2010 at 07:25 PM
Small towns are all the rage now. Everyone wants to get away from the big city. Will not everyone but some people.
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Posted by: Rick | June 12, 2013 at 07:00 AM