Silver Reef, Silver in Sandstone

About ten miles northeast of here lies one of the strangest mining camps in American history. Silver Reef was a boomtown that defied geology: silver deposits embedded in sandstone, something the science of the era said was impossible. Silver was supposed to occur in volcanic or metamorphic rock, not in the soft red sandstone that carpets southern Utah. The miners who discovered it in eighteen sixty-six knew they had something extraordinary.

The serious rush began in eighteen seventy-five when a prospector named William Barbee organized the first real mining operations. By eighteen seventy-six Silver Reef was a recognized town, and within a few years it had grown to roughly two thousand people. For a place in the middle of the Utah desert in the era before roads, that was a substantial city.

The camp was notably cosmopolitan. Irish and Cornish miners worked the shafts. German saloon keepers served the crowds. Roughly two hundred fifty Chinese residents built their own neighborhood, one of the largest Chinese communities in Utah at the time, providing laundry services, cooking, and their own commercial enterprises. The Wells Fargo office did brisk business hauling ore assays and payroll. At peak production, the mines were pulling more than a million dollars in silver per year.

The collapse came quickly, as boomtown collapses always do. In eighteen eighty-one, silver prices fell worldwide and the mines began flooding faster than the pumps could handle. By eighteen eighty-four most of the mines had closed. The town emptied within a generation.

What remains today is a small collection of preserved stone buildings managed by Washington County, including the original Wells Fargo office. The ghost town sits in the red hills as quiet evidence that the earth sometimes breaks its own rules.