Helper, Utah

The town of Helper takes its name from a piece of railroad engineering. When the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railway reached this stretch of Price River Canyon in the eighteen eighties, engineers discovered a grade steep enough to stall a fully loaded freight train. The railroad stationed extra locomotives here, called helper engines, to push trains up to Soldier Summit. The name stuck.

By nineteen hundred the town had sixteen nationalities packed into a population of roughly four hundred people, most of them coal miners drawn by the rich seams running through Carbon County. Greeks, Italians, Slavs, Japanese, and Mexican workers built neighborhoods that gave Helper a cultural texture unusual for rural Utah. The mines closed across the twentieth century. Today Helper has reinvented itself as an arts district, its Depression-era storefronts along Main Street home to galleries and studios where the coal camps once stood.