Silver Reef, Utah

Silver Reef is the ghost town that, by the science of its day, should never have existed. Everyone in nineteenth-century mining knew that silver belonged in quartz veins and igneous rock — not scattered through ordinary red sandstone. Yet here, on a bench of eroded sandstone in Utah’s Dixie, miners pulled fortunes in silver out of the rock, and even dug petrified logs that had been turned, cell by cell, into pure metal. For about fifteen years it was the loud, cosmopolitan, hard-drinking exception to the quiet Latter-day Saint farm country around it — and then it emptied out, was carried away for lumber and stone, and nearly vanished.

This is the documented history of Silver Reef, the geology that baffled the experts, and the legends worth separating from the record — a town whose story has been embellished almost as often as its ore was doubted.

Silver where silver shouldn’t be

The find traces to prospector John Kemple, who around 1866 noticed silver “float” in the eroded sandstone near the Latter-day Saint farm settlement of Harrisburg. Because the mining science of the era held that precious metals could not occur in sedimentary sandstone, Kemple couldn’t trace the silver to a conventional quartz lode, grew discouraged, and never realized the scale of the wealth around him. He organized a rudimentary district in 1871 and the Harrisburg Mining District in 1874, then sold his claims for modest sums. The deposit sat doubted for nearly a decade.

From Bonanza City to boomtown, 1875–1879

The man who turned a doubted outcrop into a rush was William Tecumseh Barbee, dispatched in 1875 by the Walker brothers, Salt Lake City merchant-bankers looking to diversify into mining. Barbee quickly staked 21 claims, centered on the rich Tecumseh ground, and promoted the district hard in The Salt Lake Tribune. In February 1876 he platted a speculative townsite called Bonanza City; when its lots grew too dear, miners clustered just north in a rough camp nicknamed the “Rockpile,” and the combined community became Silver Reef. Growth accelerated when the mines of Pioche, Nevada faltered and displaced miners streamed east in what’s remembered as the Pioche Stampede.

By 1879 Silver Reef was the commercial center of Washington County — a mile-long red-sand Main Street of cut-stone, brick, and lumber buildings. It had two banks (the Leeds Banking Company and a Wells Fargo & Co. express office), a telegraph, mercantile warehouses, boarding houses, a hospital, a brewery, an iron foundry, dance halls, and its own newspaper, The Silver Reef Miner. Depending on who counted, there were somewhere between twenty and thirty-seven saloons and gambling houses. Five principal stamp mills — the Christy, Stormont, Leeds, Buckeye, and Barbee & Walker — crushed the ore. It was, in the words of later researchers, a conspicuously secular, cosmopolitan island set down in the heart of Utah’s ecclesiastical Dixie.

That island was never as isolated as the “Mormons versus Gentiles” shorthand suggests. The surrounding farm towns of Leeds, Harrisburg, and Washington supplied the camp with food, cotton, lumber, and hauling; when the St. George Temple neared completion in 1877, regional Latter-day Saint artisans and freighters took wage work at the reef. The mining town and the farm communities grew increasingly interdependent.

Silver Reef in the boom years — a mile of stone and timber on the sandstone bench. Photo: George Ottinger, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A cosmopolitan camp: Catholics, Cornishmen, and Chinatown

Silver Reef’s miners were largely Irish and Cornish, its merchants Anglo-American and European, and the camp drew one of southern Utah’s most remarkable episodes of interfaith goodwill. The Catholic priest Father Lawrence Scanlan — later the first Bishop of Salt Lake City — ministered to hundreds of miners and founded St. John’s Catholic Church, a school, and a miners’ hospital. When his congregation outgrew the little chapel, his friend John Menzies Macfarlane, an LDS surveyor and director of the St. George Tabernacle Choir, arranged something extraordinary: with Apostle Erastus Snow’s blessing, Scanlan celebrated a Catholic High Mass inside the St. George LDS Tabernacle on May 25, 1879, with Macfarlane’s all-Mormon choir singing the Latin mass to an overflow crowd of roughly 3,000 Latter-day Saints and Catholic miners.

The camp also had a substantial Chinatown on its southeastern edge — laundries, herbal dispensaries, butcher shops, rooming houses, and vegetable gardens that fed the town’s restaurants, plus timber-hauling contracts. Its community was led by the merchant-apothecary Yee Sam Wing, known locally as the “Mayor of Chinatown.” When the mines failed, Wing performed a last service with his own savings: he built wooden exhumation caskets, disinterred the Chinese dead from the camp’s cemetery, and paid the freight to return their remains to their ancestral villages in China.

Strikes, a lynching, and the long decline

As the easily milled surface ores gave out, conflict sharpened. In early 1880 management cut underground wages from about $4.00 to $3.50 a day; miners organized the Silver Reef Miners’ Union and struck in 1881, a dispute serious enough to produce arrests and the territorial criminal case People v. O’Loughlin. It’s sometimes billed as “Utah’s first organized labor strike” — safer to call it one of territorial Utah’s earliest important mining-labor confrontations — and by the time it broke, much of the experienced workforce had left.

That tension framed the camp’s most notorious violence. In October 1880 the Cornish shift boss Michael Carbis, having fired the contentious miner Thomas Forrest on orders, was ambushed and stabbed to death. Forrest was jailed and moved to St. George for safekeeping — but on the night of October 5, 1880, a masked mob of more than a hundred armed miners rode from Silver Reef, overpowered the sheriff, seized Forrest, and hanged him from a cottonwood. Though many in the mob were recognized, no one was ever indicted. Carbis’s carved sandstone headstone still stands in the Protestant cemetery.

The decline that followed was gradual, not a single dramatic abandonment. Below the water table, the oxidized horn silver gave way to refractory sulfides and copper carbonates that milled poorly; groundwater forced expensive steam pumping in an arid, treeless landscape; and every ton of machinery and bullion had to be teamed a hundred miles to the railhead at Milford. When silver prices fell after the Coinage Act of 1873, margins evaporated. The primary mines closed by 1891, with brief revival attempts in 1898, 1909, and 1916. Much of the town was then dismantled for building materials — St. John’s Catholic Church was bought in 1895 and its stone hauled to Leeds to build a social hall; the schoolhouse was moved; homes were reassembled on valley farms. One last chapter came mid-century, when Western Gold & Uranium worked the old stopes and tailings from 1948 into the late 1950s, recovering more than 5,000 pounds of uranium oxide — making Silver Reef one of the very few districts anywhere to commercially yield both silver and uranium from the same sandstone.

What survives

What remains is a mix of authentic nineteenth-century fabric, careful reconstructions, archaeological landscape, and — today — a modern neighborhood. The centerpiece is the restored Wells Fargo & Co. Express Building (1877), which survived the salvage years and now houses the Silver Reef Museum. Around it are stone walls and foundations, mill ruins and tailings, mine dumps, roads, town-site alignments, a beehive charcoal kiln, and the Catholic, Protestant, and Chinese pioneer cemeteries.

Mill walls, foundations, and stone footings trace the old works across the bench. Photo: Nikater, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Timeline

Visiting Silver Reef now

Unlike many ghost towns, Silver Reef is easy to reach on paved roads just off I-15, and it’s anchored by a real museum. It’s also a living historic district — a residential subdivision now overlies part of the old town, and ownership is a patchwork of federal, state, museum, and private land — so treat it as a historic neighborhood, not an open-air free-for-all.

Nearby ghost towns & historic sites

Also within the broad 50-mile radius: Duncan’s Retreat, Shunesburg, Fort Harmony, and Tonaquint — flood- and hardship-abandoned pioneer settlements, several on private land. For more mining ghost towns on the archive, see Tonopah, Belmont, and St. Elmo.

Further reading