St. Thomas Ghost Town

The story

In 1865, Thomas S. Smith led a group of Mormon pioneers into the muddy confluence of the Muddy and Virgin Rivers, believing they were safely inside Utah Territory. They planted cotton, built adobe homes, and laid out wide streets. Six years later, a federal survey delivered a unpleasant surprise: they weren't in Utah at all, but in Nevada, which promptly demanded six years of back taxes payable exclusively in gold coin. Rather than pay up, the entire town voted to abandon the settlement. On February 1, 1871, residents burned their homes, abandoned their crops, and marched back toward Utah, leaving behind a instant ghost town.

New settlers moved in anyway, turning St. Thomas into a bustling agricultural hub with a schoolhouse, hotels, a Ford dealership, and a popular ice cream parlor. Then came the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s. As Lake Mead filled, the rising water systematically swallowed the valley foot by foot. The final resident, a postmaster named Hugh Lord, held out until June 11, 1938, laying his bed on a truck bed and finally paddling away in a rowboat as the floodwaters crept up his front steps. For over six decades, St. Thomas sat quietly under 60 feet of murky reservoir water.

Then the western megadrought hit. In 2002, as Lake Mead shrank to historic lows, the drown town clawed its way back into the daylight. What re-emerged isn't just rubble—it's a sun-bleached, salt-encrusted skeleton of a vanished frontier community. You can walk the grid of old streets, past dead tree stumps that were once shade trees, concrete foundations, and the brick chimney of an ice cream shop that spent 64 years at the bottom of a lake.