Each morning, Brandy Wilber wakes up to a sweeping view of the desert and the sound of gypsum being crushed at the plant. This is life in Empire.
Wilber, who stars in the movie briefly with her daughters as a friend of the main character, acted as a town liaison for the crew. Today, the town is home to a general store, a gas pump, a storage business and the gypsum mining operations, which – true to the movie’s plot – closed in 2011. The operations resumed in 2016, but not to the level of their heydays in the 20th century.The plant “rises like a giant white frosted cake from the desert,” a journalist from the Nevada State Journal wrote in 1953.
By 1950, the town was booming with workers mining around the clock, the Journal reported, and adding housing to support about 200 people, including workers and their families. At the time, neither community had telephone service still, but residents were said to love life in Empire.
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