Thompson Springs: Rails, Coal, and the Road That Left

Thompson Springs existed because water was scarce in the canyon country of eastern Utah, and steam locomotives needed to stop somewhere.

The Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad came through in eighteen eighty-three, and E.W. Thompson's homestead at a desert spring became a railroad stop and post office. Sheep outfits from two hundred miles away shipped their wool from here. When coal mines opened in Sego Canyon to the north in nineteen eleven, a branch line connected the mines to the Thompson railhead, and the town had two economic legs.

Neither lasted. Diesel locomotives killed the water-stop business. The Sego mines closed around nineteen fifty. Then Interstate Seventy was built two miles south of town, pulling traffic away from the old US Fifty corridor. Thompson Springs now has only a few dozen residents, but the Sego Canyon walls a few miles north are covered with ancient rock art, Barrier Canyon Style pictographs well over a thousand years old, entirely indifferent to every boom and bust below.