Above, the Lockhart Ranch, in the remote Pryors, is kept in a state of not-quite decay.

By JOHN CLAYTON

The allure of a ghost town is its state of decay. Bereft of people, furnishings and other signs of residence, it gives us room to project ourselves into those empty spaces. If the buildings are not just rundown but formerly elegant — with decorative trim on the leaning timbers, or a grand staircase under the gaps in the roof — we’re apt to be even happier. Now we can project ourselves into another era’s dreams.

When I stumbled across the former homestead of bestselling author Caroline Lockhart in 2000, it was in part this ghost-townness that attracted me. In this old ranch complex on the east slopes of the Pryor Mountains, a friend and I pushed open creaky doors and walked gingerly over sloping floorboards.

We marveled at not only the valley scenery and romantic setting; not only the lonely abandonment of the dozen-plus log buildings on the empty site; not only the absence of telephone, television, or indoor plumbing. We marveled at this window into a past glory, the ease by which we could imagine Lockhart living out her cowboy fantasies in this incredibly remote spot from 1925 to 1951.

I spent the next seven years enriching that projection by writing Lockhart’s biography. I combed through old diaries, newspapers and novels, trying to bring Lockhart back to life in some small way. Meanwhile, the ranch buildings themselves went on a similar journey.

“The National Park Service used to have a ‘decompose naturally’ philosophy,” says Chris Finley, an archeologist and historic restoration specialist at the Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, which now owns the Lockhart ranch. “They’d let an old ranch fall apart, and then once it became a safety hazard they’d burn it.”

That policy, however, meant the loss of great cultural resources. For example, at Bighorn Canyon, the Lockhart ranch provides a fascinating window into Montana’s early homesteading and cattle-ranching eras. The same can also be said of the neighboring Ewing/Snell ranch and ghost town of Hillsboro.

The Park Service later adopted a policy of stabilization and repair, Finley says, and more recently has chosen to give such resources new life through restoration.

Restoring the Lockhart ranch, or any such historic property, involves a delicate balance. If they were still inhabited, each building would eventually come to a crossroads: does it get modernized or destroyed? Finley instead tries to keep the buildings in a permanent state of not-quite-decay, thus providing a permanent view of life in the past.

The most glamorous work happens in the summertime, when crews of students — from Minnesota State University, Northwest (Wyoming) College, and anywhere else Finley can round them up — mimic the brutal physical labor of the old-time carpenters.

“I had the Montana Conservation Corps in here last summer (2007) splitting poles like Abraham Lincoln,” Finley says. “Now we’ll have to figure out how to blacken them” to match the aged timbers they will complement. Much of their work comes in simply trying to stop nature from reclaiming what humans have abandoned. Standing in front of the post office in Hillsboro, Finley says, “I knew these buildings weren’t built into the hillside. The hill moved in on them.” So one summer the Conservation Corps shoveled 11 feet of dirt away from the building’s back side.

The results are not always obvious to the untutored eye. A bizarre diagonal tries to link two wayward ridge poles — was it a builder’s shortcut or a restoration crew making an exact replication of that shortcut? An old blacksmith shop appears full of junk — is it junk the smith once worked on or did Finley collect it from around the ranch? An outhouse features a seat consisting of two planks — is it a museum piece or a functioning privy?

That last paradox has fooled even Finley. “We’ve had to put Plexiglas over the seat since there’s no hole under it,” he says. “I was amazed at how people will always use an outhouse, even one that’s clearly under construction with tools lying all over the place.”

Yet re-creating these historic features also involves a good deal of research and analysis. For example, old photographs can show how a ridgepole stuck out from the side of a building, or what types of apple, pear and peach trees filled an old orchard. Finley discovers old paint colors by taking off moldings and nurtures seedlings for the time when they will have to replace a dying cottonwood.

Along the way, the research also provides delicious evidence of how characters of the past dealt with hardships. For example, Lockhart had an old-style plank floor in her kitchen. She liked the look of it, but mice could easily creep through its gaps. So she kept two bullsnakes in the house to kill the mice. Today, by contrast, the Park Service uses gravel fill beneath the planks to keep out the rodents.

Such applications of current-day technology to simulate old environments lead to some of the biggest debates that Finley has with himself, his team, and other preservationists.

Do you add drip flashing to a roof? It’s not historic, but it extends the life of a restoration by at least 10 years.

Do you add French drains to pull water away from delicate log construction? Again, the technique was not available when the buildings were constructed in the first half of the 20th century, but 99 percent of the public may never notice it.

Do you chink a log structure with a modern imitation-mud chink? Real mud would be more historic, but would require much more maintenance and hasten structural decay.

Finley even spends his weekends going to garage sales and coordinating with a network of folks on the lookout for vintage materials. “Lockhart had a wind generator powering a battery that she used to run a Zenith radio,” he says. “She paid $15 for it new; I found one in a dump.”

On another occasion he bought and dismantled a 1905 schoolhouse near Lovell, Wyo., because its battered siding matched the Hillsboro properties he was restoring.

“When you start talking to people about what you want to do with their stuff, they’re willing to help,” he says.

Indeed he’s developed quite a team. “One of my students is a stonemason,” he boasts. “I have a blacksmith who re-creates historic hardware. An exhibit specialist, a former bush pilot from Alaska, two local schoolteachers, and a fellow who gives me two months every year repairing and replicating historic doors and windows.”

It’s a form of creative salvage — re-creating historic environments from whatever is at hand. In that sense it resembles the way these remote environments were created in the first place. And it seems to be a particular point of pride for Finley, who himself grew up in a similar region, the Book Cliffs country of Colorado, in the 1940s and ’50s.

While most of us spend merely hours in a ghost town, projecting ourselves into utterly foreign environments, Finley is fulltime reanimator of a history not far removed from his own childhood.

“I like to think of it as ‘cowboy craftsmanship,’” he says. “Today we might say it’s lacking, but it’s pretty neat to see how they made do.”

John Clayton is the author of “The Cowboy Girl: The Life of Caroline Lockhart.” This article originally appeared in Montana Magazine.