Silver Reef, the town that should not have existed

A silver mining boomtown just northwest of Leeds that ran from 1876 until the big mills closed in 1887 and 1888, 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 silver in a sandstone reef near Harrisburg. Silver in sandstone was thought impossible, so assayers doubted him, and the district was not organized until 1874. The mining agent William T. Barbee came to the district in 1875 and laid out Bonanza City in 1876.

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, in 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 choir learned the Latin Mass and roughly three thousand people attended.

The price of silver fell worldwide through the 1880s, and the largest mills closed in 1887 and 1888. Ore came out in reduced quantities for years afterwards, but the town was finished as a going concern, and by the early 1900s 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 was restored in the early 1980s, opened as the Silver Reef Museum in 1986 and is still the 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 1895 and rebuilt in 1992, and it ran as a restaurant until 2010, so the building on that site is a rebuild rather than an original. The museum now uses it for events.

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 most published accounts of the town barely mention. 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. This is low desert at about 3,800 feet with essentially no shade on the old main street, so a summer walk round the foundations is unpleasant by mid morning. The museum keeps limited hours and closes on Sundays, and it hosts occasional living history and lecture events through the year, so it is worth checking what is open before you make the drive.