Fourteen miles west of Ennis, Virginia City is a small but well-preserved 1860s gold-rush boom town — a cluster of frontier-era buildings (saloons, a blacksmith's shop, a print shop) protected as a historic district and still partly inhabited. In summer it operates more or less as a living-history town: stagecoaches run up and down the dirt main street, an opera house puts on melodrama, and a narrow-gauge train rattles over to neighbouring Nevada City. It is unashamedly touristy but the buildings themselves are real.
Plan a half day. Stop at the cemetery on the hill above town — five of the road agents hanged by the local vigilantes in 1864 are buried there in a row, which says something about how the place got its start.