Designated in 1966, the district includes over two hundred nineteenth-century buildings, representing the site of a major gold strike and the capital of Montana for ten years.

[2] Virginia City was founded in the early 1860s, in the wake of a major gold find in Alder Gulch, which ascends into the mountains to the south.

It grew rapidly with the influx of gold seekers, and was by 1865 so large and prosperous that it was made the capital of the Montana Territory.

Alder Gulch was lined with mining communities of all sizes, with an estimated total population of 10,000 in 1865.

In the 1940s Charles and Sue Bovey began to buy up abandoned buildings and restoring them, in effect creating an open-air museum.