Did Western 1800s towns in the US really look like the dirt-main-street-all-connected-wooden-buildings towns you see in Westerns?

by putthehurtton
thelurkess

Bodie is an excellent reference, but as it was a boom town it may have lacked some of the permanence of western towns with a more varied economy or slower development cycle.

Here is a fine photo of Silverton, CO, a series of storefronts that are virtually unchanged but was a larger and more established community http://www.silvertonmagazine.com/downtown/Greene_1912_TellerBlock.html

You might also find the town of Oatman, AZ interesting, another boom town but with a little more consistent population than bodie: http://www.legendsofamerica.com/az-oatman.html

I think the short answer is yes, if you mean hastily-erected wooden frame buildings with false fronts in small towns, with wide streets for horse-drawn vehicles. Larger towns such as Denver used more permanent materials and often incorporated architectural fads of their era such as beaux arts http://www.historycolorado.org/sites/default/files/files/OAHP/Guides/Style_BeauxArts.pdf.

Wilda86

Bodie State Park in California is an example of an actual western town that was abandoned and is now a heritage site in a state of arrested decay. There is an image gallery that gives you an idea of how it looked.

http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=509

I hope this is acceptable as a top-level answer.

jeffbell

Keep in mind that in the 1800s most towns had mostly dirt streets.

For example here is a photo in Ann Arbor of the campus of the University of Michigan. There are paved sidewalks to get across the street as of 1919.

State street was not paved at the time either.