Silver Reef, the town that should not have existed.

A silver mining boomtown a mile west of Leeds that ran from 1875 to the mid 1880s, and the only major field in the United States where silver was mined out of sandstone rather than hard rock. At its peak in 1879 about two thousand people lived along a mile of main street, with a Wells Fargo express office, a cosmopolitan restaurant, saloons, a hospital, a school and two cemeteries. Today the 1877 Wells Fargo building houses the Silver Reef Museum.

A prospector named John Kemple, in 1866, who found flakes of silver embedded in the sandstone reefs west of Leeds. Because silver was not supposed to occur in sandstone, the Smithsonian Institution examined his sample and dismissed it as an interesting fake. Most of a decade passed before later survey work established that he had been right, and in 1875 the mining agent William T. Barbee staked claims and founded Bonanza City.

Because a tent camp decided the name would sell better. Barbee's settlement was called Bonanza City, and north of it a rough camp known as Rockpile grew up alongside it. Its residents renamed themselves Silver Reef, after the sandstone reefs the silver was coming out of, on straightforwardly commercial reasoning. The new name is the one that stuck, and Bonanza City is the one nobody remembers.

Yes, on 25 May 1879. Father Lawrence Scanlan had been sent to minister to the Catholic miners and had established St. John's Catholic Church, the Silver Reef Hospital and St. Mary's School that year, but his church was unfinished and he had no choir for a High Mass. John Macfarlane, who directed the Latter-day Saint choir in St. George, proposed holding it in the St. George Tabernacle. The thirty voice choir learned the Latin Mass in about two weeks and roughly three thousand people attended.

The price of silver fell worldwide through the 1880s, and by 1884 most of the mines had closed. Ore came out in reduced quantities for years afterwards, but the town was finished as a going concern, and by 1901 most business owners had left or dismantled their premises and taken the materials elsewhere. That slow dismantling is why so little survives: a boomtown that dies gradually gets carried away rather than abandoned.

The 1877 Wells Fargo building, which survived because somebody lived in it as a private house until the late 1940s and which is now the Silver Reef Museum at 1903 Wells Fargo Road. The jail is still standing, along with mill ruins, foundations and two cemeteries. The Cosmopolitan Restaurant was dismantled in 1894, reconstructed in 1987 and closed in 2010, so the building on that site is a rebuild rather than an original.

Yes, on the marked routes, and the etiquette matters here more than at most ghost towns because people live on the site. Modern custom homes stand among the actual ruins and they carry the top of the Leeds property market, so the walk alternates between nineteenth century foundations and private gardens. Park where the museum directs, stay on the marked walking routes, and treat unsigned open ground between foundations as somebody's land.

A mixed community that was unusual for the territory at the time: Mormon settlers from the surrounding farm towns, Protestant and Catholic miners including many from Nevada's played out camps, and a Chinese community that almost every published account of the town under records. Two cemeteries survive and are the clearest remaining evidence of how the town divided. Leeds and Silver Reef lived a mile apart on entirely different terms for thirteen years.

The cool months, October through April, and ideally a fourth weekend. This is low desert at around three thousand feet with essentially no shade on the old main street, so a summer walk round the foundations is unpleasant by mid morning. The museum runs living history reenactments and lecture events on the fourth weekend of the month, which turns a self guided walk into something closer to a programme.