South Boise Historic Mining District


The South Boise Historic Mining District, in Elmore County, Idaho and including Rocky Bar, Idaho, is a historic district which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. It included eight contributing buildings and a contributing site on, or about a ten square mile area.
It is located in the Boise National Forest and the Sawtooth National Forest..
It includes the ghost town of Rocky Bar and a good part of a large basin in which there was a great amount of gold mining. Rocky Bar has a historic cemetery, which among other graves has the grave of Idaho's territorial governor Clinton DeWitt Smith, whose death in Rocky Bar effectively halted governance of the territory.
It includes Spanishtown, a few miles from Rocky Bar on Elk Creek, with similar utilitarian structures.
It includes the remains of a number of gold mines, some with remains of structures. Mining rose in 1865, then eventually peaked and declined in the 1890s.