Ophir Ghost Town, Utah: The Silver Camp in the Oquirrh Mountains That Never Quite Emptied
Ophir began in August 1870 when soldier-prospectors organized a mining district in a narrow Oquirrh canyon, and for about a century its mines kept coming back from the dead. Marcus Daly worked here before he became a Copper King, a ten-year-old boy survived five days in a mine nearby, and the town voted itself out of existence in 2016. Today a few dozen people still live among Utah’s oldest surviving mining-town city hall and a row of preserved buildings.