LOST VEGAS: The Hoover-Damned Town of St. Thomas

The human remains uncovered by the recession waters of Lake Margaret Mead lay claim the headlines, and rightly so. But they’re non the only when secrets that mood vary has forced the nation’s largest man-made lake to pay up.

Located on the northern reaches of what is now the Lake George Herbert Mead National Recreation Area, around 60 miles due east of Las Vegas, St. Thomas the doubting Apostle was at one time the to the highest degree populated townspeople inwards Southern Nevada. That was before it was advisedly drowned past the U.S. governance to take Lake Mead.

Dead inwards the Water

St. Dylan Thomas was founded inwards 1865 by Mormon missionaries sent by their leader, Brigham Young, to pop a settlement along the Muddy River inward the Mormon State Territory (present-day Arizona).

The settlers chose a recognize with fertile land soil — close the Muddy’s Overton arm, where it converged with the Virgin River to give the Colorado. They reinforced an irrigation scheme to develop their vegetable gardens, fruit trees, and cotton. (They eventually intended to unfastened a supply route to go that cotton support home to UT along the Colorado.)

The leader of the settlement, St. Thomas Sasson Smith, rather immodestly conferred upon it his own for the first time name. Smith, born in 1818, moved to Mormon State from his indigene New York State in 1848, tetrad years after he was baptized into the Church of the Nazarene Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Many historical accounts pick the missionaries for subsidence in the Nevada Territory, instead of the UT Territory, by mistake. However, what happened is that United States Congress redrew the Utah Territory’s western sandwich edge inwards 1866, which rendered all Muddy River settlements a component part of the comparatively unexampled State of Nevada.

The missionaries had no more thought until an 1870 edge study dictated St. Norman Thomas to live in Nevada. Almost immediately, the country smacked all the residents with Phoebe years’ worth of backrest res publica taxes and fines.

In Feb 1871, with Young’s permission, the settlers abandoned their town and — not unlike the Mormons who foremost settled Las Vegas — high-tailed it support to Utah.

Only 1 adult male and his phratry remained. Book of the Prophet Daniel Bonelli operated a prosperous CO River ferrying in Junction City (later Rioville), Nev., connecting mining towns inwards Nevada and Arizona. He also owned and operated the Virgin River Salt Company.

New Settlers on the Block

A sweet moving ridge of settlers arrived inwards the 1880s, planting their possess crops and rebuilding St. Norman Thomas into what historiographer James II H. McClintock, inwards his 1921 tape of the settlement, recalled as “a beautiful village.”

Townsfolk resided inward 85 houses, according to McClintock, to the highest degree on an acre of land featuring yards with roseate bushes. Their streets were lined with umbrageous cottonwood trees.

It was scarcely ever a bustling city, but St. Dylan Thomas was at 1 dot home to to a greater extent than 500 people. It had its have school, put up office, church, pocket billiards hall, auto garage, not ace but two grocery stores, and an ice-cream parlor, Hannig’s, that boasted its possess soda fountain.

By 1911, St. Norman Mattoon Thomas was deemed worthy of its own railroad spine — from Moapa send on the San Pedro, Los Angeles, and Salt Lake Railroad.

Once that began service, refrigerated railroad cars replete(p) of commercial goods — including intellectual nourishment and much-welcomed blocks of ice — arrived on the regular, straight off diminishing the demand for local subsistence farming.

On their issue trip, the railroad cars were packed with mined copper, silver, gold, and salt, which residents often traded for the goods.

St. Norman Mattoon Thomas even boasted a nice hotel, a 14-room hunting lodge called the Gentry. Jean Caulvin President Coolidge stayed in that location — while he was president!

And then, just the like that, St. Lowell Thomas was gone.

Here Comes the Flood

In 1928, the chairperson signed the Boulder Canyon Project into law, dooming St. Norman Mattoon Thomas to a weak grave. That chairwoman was Coolidge.

It wasn’t risky memories of the Gentry that motivated Coolidge’s action, but rather the need for a gigantic dam to tame the flood-prone Colorado. The added incentive of a reliable supply of chintzy irrigate and hydroelectric power for the growing Southwest made the Herbert Hoover Dam seem out of the question not to build.

And the engagement opportunities accompanying the dam’s expression continued the chore started past the railroad inwards 1905 — of slowly transforming sleepy Las Vegas, universe 5,000, into single of the Southwest’s biggest cities.

The U.S. governing seized all the land inward St. Norman Mattoon Thomas by lofty domain, paying its residents minimally for their displacement. The flooding cognitive operation began in 1935. Within pentad years, St. Lowell Jackson Thomas was under 50 feet of water.

At least the governance had the compassion to relocate St. Thomas’ burial site as division of its plan. It’s now inwards Overton, where today, the Lost City Museum employs a stave archaeologist to do search into the chronicle of St. Lowell Thomas and other Muddy River settlements.

Some St. Thomasites chose to dismantle and relocate their houses to Overton and other nearby towns. Others were less cooperative.

Such was the instance with Hugh Lord, an auto garage possessor credited with existence the really lastly St. Thomasite to leave. Lord reportedly refused to believe that the rising new lake would ever make his home. When it finally did, on June 11, 1938, he rowed off from his domiciliate inwards a boat packed with his to the highest degree treasured possessions.

According to author Hank Aaron McArthur’s 2013 book, “St. Thomas, Nevada: a History Uncovered,” nobleman lit his put up on discharge before row off, but that spectacular item is non corroborated past most archetype accounts.

How to Find It

St. Dylan Thomas re-emerged during several droughts over the decades, to the highest degree notably inwards 1945, 1965, and 2012. Reunions, attended by former townspeople residents, were held during those years.

Now that more than 60% of Lake Mead is gone, St. Norman Mattoon Thomas has returned permanently — though the 80 years its buildings spent underwater have got transformed them into scattered piles of foundations and nowhere-leading staircases.

Instead of water, what’s flooding the townspeople these years are tourists. They take the air a 2.5-mile intertwine train through and through what remains.

The ruins of St. Thomas, saved by the National Mungo Park Service as a historic site, are best reached inwards a high-clearance vehicle with four-wheeled drive.

A bumpy mount along a grease memory access road, cancelled Highway 169, ends at a parking lot. From there, follow the signs.

Lost Vegas” is an occasional Casino.org series featuring remembrances of Las Vegas’ forgotten history. Click here to register other entries in the series. Think you know a goodness Vegas story missed to history? Email corey@casino.org.

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