Jeffrey City, The Biggest Bust of Them All
Wyoming
A sign on the edge of town reads: Jeffrey City, Biggest Bust of Them All. It earned the title. The settlement began quietly in the nineteen thirties as a homestead stop called Home on the Range.
Then, in nineteen fifty-four, uranium was discovered in the surrounding hills. Bob Adams formed Western Nuclear and named the booming company town after Dr. C.
W. Jeffrey, a key investor. By the late nineteen seventies, four thousand five hundred people lived here, with a high school, a library, a medical clinic, an Olympic swimming pool, and its own newspaper.
The partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in nineteen seventy-nine collapsed uranium prices overnight. The Split Rock Mill shut down in nineteen eighty-two. Within weeks, residents who rented company housing had to leave.
By nineteen eighty-six, ninety-five percent of the population was gone. About fifty people remain today.
