One of the nation’s largest cannabis companies, American Green Inc, announced Thursday that it is buying all 80 acres of Nipton, CA. The desert town includes an Old West-style hotel, a handful of houses, an RV park, and a coffee shop.
According to the Associated Press, the company plans to turn the town into “an energy-independent, cannabis-friendly hospitality destination.”
The town, founded in the early 1900s, currently has fewer than two dozen residents. One of the major sources of revenue is selling California lottery tickets to people who cross the Nevada state line (they can’t buy them there).
Roxanne Lang, the town’s current owner, said that she and her late husband, Gerald Freeman, listed the property at $5 million when they put it up for sale last year. She declined to reveal the final price before the sale closes. The sale is still in escrow, but Lang confirmed American Green is the buyer.
Freeman had installed a solar farm that provides much of the old Gold Rush town’s electricity. American Green says it plans to expand that farm and bottle and sell cannabis-infused water from Nipton’s aquifer.
The company is also reaching out to edibles manufacturers and other pot-industry businesses with the hope they will relocate to Nipton and bring jobs with them.
“We are excited to lead the charge for a true Green Rush,” David Gwyther, American Green’s president and CEO, said in a statement reported by Associate Press. “The cannabis revolution that’s going on here in the U.S. has the power to completely revitalize communities in the same way gold did during the 19th century.”
Freeman, a geologist who likes to look for gold in his space time, found that the area was already a ghost town by the 1950s. He bought the town in 1985 anyway and spent 30 years restoring the hotel and general store and building “eco cabins.”
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