TRAVEL
Rural renaissance: Ely citizens donated furniture and accessories to bring the restored cottages to life; the Ely art trail celebrates the town's rich ethnic heritage.
hot-springs entrepreneurs who offered weekly cleansing soaks; and brothels that offered, well … While the town bustled several times over the course of a century, it also went bust just as often. By 1999, after a series of mine start-ups and shut-downs, “Ely looked like a bomb had gone off,” says Donna. It was then that Donna and Virginia organized the Renaissance Society and what continues to be an ongoing town makeover. Their first project? An art trail through Ely’s decimated downtown using blank brick walls and vacant lots to showcase Ely’s history. The idea, says Donna, was inspired by
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an oversize mural that nearly covers the side of the five-story Hotel Nevada — a simple cartoon, painted decades ago, of a donkey dressed as a cowboy holding a frying pan over a fire. That mural and the fact that small towns, like Twenty-Nine Palms in California, were mounting similar projects with great success got people in Ely talking. “Point of clarification,” says Donna. “It was the women in town that first saw potential in spiffing up this place.” Women like Lorraine Theil and Margaret Bath, an Ely-area pharmacist, alongside dozens of other women latched onto the makeover idea and haven’t let go. They started raising money through bake sales and by auctioning decorated Christmas trees. “You’d be surprised by how much we raised here and how well
we paid the artists,” says Donna. Over 13 years, they commissioned 22 art installations, paying artists an average of $25,000 for their work. She laughs. “Hey, we’re not some sleepy old podunk town.” Workers, riders and shepherds
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ly’s Art Trail is an eclectic mix — a finely shaped bronze sculpture of a strong Shoshone woman in front of the County Courthouse; paint-smeared images of mustachioed miners cavorting in Cherry Creek Springs on an Ely side street; a linear Western landscape of a cattle roundup on a downtown corner. Other paintings and sculptures depict railroad workers and Basque sheepherders, Pony Express riders, charcoal ovens used in mining and smelting, the benev-