Mesquite, Nevada

Mesquite sits in the Virgin River valley at the northeast corner of Nevada, eighty miles from Las Vegas and just over the Arizona line. Mormon settlers arrived in eighteen eighty, naming the spot Mesquite Flat after the timber they found here. The Virgin River flooded them out twice before the community finally took hold on the third attempt.

For nearly a century it was a quiet farming town. Then the Peppermill casino opened in the nineteen seventies, and Mesquite discovered a new identity: a budget gaming destination for Utahns crossing the state line. More casinos followed in the mid-nineteen nineties. By two thousand six Mesquite was one of the fastest-growing small towns in the country. Today it holds over twenty thousand people, nearly half of them retirees drawn by the golf courses and warm desert winters, with a median age of sixty-two and a half.