Castle Town, nestled in the Castle Mountains of central Montana, is one of Montana’s many ghost towns. His story is similar. Ore was found, the city grew, the ore disappeared, the city faded. But Castle Town is different, because everything is private property.

Many of Montana’s historic places – Bannack, Elkhorn, Granite, Garnet – are all state parks, protected by the state and free for residents to visit. But try exploring Castle Town and you’ll see more “No Trespassing” signs than historic buildings and interpretive signs.

Private property is not completely unknown in Montana ghost towns. When Pray was listed for $1.4 million in 2012, the news was big enough that CBS News sent a correspondent to the small town of Paradise Valley to report on it.

But Castle Town is not the property of a single individual. Check the town in Cadastral, the state’s land ownership database, and you’ll see a view that looks like any other town in Montana. It’s still divided into a grid, with oddly shaped quirky lots and equidistant streets between them. It’s like someone expected Castle Town to come back to life.

If Castle Town was owned by just one person, you could call them and get permission to explore. Comet, a beautifully preserved ghost town south of Helena, is also privately owned, but it is open to the public. The problem with Castle Town is that you would need multiple permissions from multiple owners. Step back to take a photo of one person’s building and you might encroach on someone else’s.

This grid seems out of place today, but if we could go back about 140 years, it would make a lot of sense. Copper is fairly well documented in the annals of Montana history, and the best single-volume work on the state’s myriad mining camps may be that of “Montana Pay Dirt,” published by Muriel Sibell Wolle, Denver-based, Brooklyn-born professor and author. in 1963.

Wolle credits Hanson H. Barnes as the first to call a strike in the Castle Town area, where he went after leaving Diamond City, a ravine town in the Big Belts, east of the present-day Canyon Ferry Lake. This entire region is littered with mining history. Castle Town is only about 10 miles as the crow flies from Copperopolis, a boom town that survives today only as a historical note: its existence prevented copper king Marcus Daly from naming his town commercial Copperopolis. He instead settled on Anaconda, stealing that name from its most prosperous mine.

It was the money that fueled Castle Town. The importance of metal in the hills led to the establishment of the town in April 1887, and by Christmas there were 200 people in the camp. The Castle Land Company laid out 80 acres for development, hoping that the beauty of the place might be as attractive as its potential for wealth.

The town reached its peak in 1891, when it boasted, according to “Montana Pay Dirt,” “nine stores, a bank, two barbershops, two butcher chops, two livery barns and two hotels.” There was a picture gallery, a church, a school, a dance hall, a jail and 14 saloons. Three smelters refined ore from countless mines. Four newspapers – the Castle News, the Castle Reporter, the Castle Tribune and the evocatively named The Whole Truth – competed to tell the town’s story.

It was a short story. Most of these mining towns are. Helena lasted, as did Butte, but most of Montana’s mining camps dried up as soon as the ore disappeared. In 1927, all of Castle Town’s abandoned mines were sold at auction to a blackmail buyer. In 1936, only two people lived there. When one of them died during a big snowstorm, the White Sulfur Springs sheriff and coroner arrived on skis, strapped the body to a slide and took it away.

The castle exists mostly in the past, but you can still visit it. It’s about 140 miles from Billings and you can cover the distance in about an hour and a half. Just before Martinsdale, you turn off Highway 12 and head onto Montana Secondary Highway 294, a lightly traveled thoroughfare that connects the 12 to Highway 89 up from Shields Valley.

You exit this highway at Lennep, which, like many of Montana’s railroad towns, is named after a European town, this one from Germany. Today it is little more than a ghost town, although the beautiful Trinity Lutheran Church, built in 1914, is still the most prominent landmark along this route.

Castle Town is 7 miles away in the mountains, on one of those Montana dirt roads that are pretty good by Montana dirt road standards and pretty bad by all other standards. The first glimpse of decaying buildings through the trees is exhilarating and your knuckles might start to turn white as you see more and more structures poking out of the trees.

But all you can do is watch. There is an old sign tracing the history of Castle Town and it is quite interesting, even if it has been scratched by the years and by passers-by. The first line reminds us that “Castle Townsite is located on private land”.

Right next to it there is a small sign that says “Property Protected by the Montana Farmer-Stockman Protective Service.” Maybe the Montana Stock Growers don’t called in a private army to kill civilians like their Wyoming counterparts didbut it’s probably not a good idea to cross them.

There are many “No Trespassing” signs, so you can only view the buildings from the side of the road. Some are barely visible on the hills, and unless you’re armed with a good zoom, you can’t see much.

But hey, maybe that’s a good thing. Perhaps these few structures are still standing because few people look at them all the time. Visit a ghost town, especially one like Granite, which doesn’t have much infrastructure around it, and you’ll see that just because the public owns something doesn’t mean they always take care of it.

You can enjoy the peace and quiet for a little while and the easiest way back to Billings is the way you came. But if you continue west on Highway 294, you can follow the old Milwaukee Road railroad track. They tore up the tracks but left the grade, and every few miles you can see an old sign that they never took down. Now decrepit, he guided these trains as they transported metal mined near Castle Town. There’s still so much Montana here, you just need to know where to look.

Cross that ribbon of highway and maybe put on some Woody Guthrie to pass the time. Listen to the full version of “This Land Is Your Land,” with the verse that most covers forget.

“I saw a sign there, and on the sign it said ‘No Trespassing,’” the troubadour sings. “But on the other hand, it didn’t mean anything. This side was made for you and me.