Leeds, Utah

Leeds was a quiet Mormon farming settlement, barely a mile from one of the West's most raucous mining towns. Established in eighteen sixty-seven by pioneers drawn to the fertile bottomlands near the Virgin River, Leeds embodied everything its founders valued: order, agriculture, community prayer. Then silver was found.

Silver was found in the sandstone reefs just outside of town in eighteen sixty-six, and by eighteen seventy-five a boom camp called Silver Reef had erupted. By the late eighteen seventies it held saloons, Chinese laundries, a Wells Fargo office, and about two thousand people from across the world. The two settlements existed side by side for about a decade, trading goods and maintaining an uneasy truce between their very different cultures.

Then the silver ran out in the mid-eighteen eighties and Silver Reef collapsed. Leeds remained. The ruins of the boom town now sit quietly east of the freeway, and Leeds has outlasted its famous neighbor by more than a century.