By Mike Donahue
Moapa Valley Progress
Work crews contracted by the National Park Service are rapidly removing a large forest of spindly young Tamarisk trees. The trees have helped to hide from curious eyes the historic ruins of St. Thomas that were gradually exposed as Lake Mead receded over the last decade.
The crews, made up of diligent young men and women employed by Americorps and Great Basin Institute that has contracted with the Park Service, have been cutting, raking and spraying the noxious Tamarisk for weeks.
Working arduously from sunup to sundown, the 30 workers, who actually camp at the lake working, eating, sleeping all things Tamarisk, will have cleaned an estimated 50 acres by Feb. 7 when the project is scheduled to conclude. A proscribed burn will be conducted later in the year to dispose of the willow-like remnants of the opportunistic tree.
While the workers are intent on removing the Tamarisk from around the foundations to prevent their damage during the upcoming burn, large blocks of the trees have also been cut and their stumps sprayed with an herbicide.
The small community of St. Thomas, less than 10 miles south of Moapa Valley along the Muddy River off North Shore Road, was a bustling city established by Mormon pioneers in 1865. It was flooded by Lake Mead in the 1930s after the completion of Hoover Dam. It was the only town so affected by the rising waters of the lake which are fed by the Colorado, Virgin and Muddy rivers.
Although it has been exposed and re-inundated by the huge reservoir numerous times in the 75 years since the dam was completed, it is doubtful Lake Mead will ever recover to the level necessary to once again flood the city, according to Steve Daron, park archeologist for Lake Mead National Recreation Area, the agency responsible for the Tamarisk-removal project. For that reason, the park service decided it was a good time to make St. Thomas more accessible to the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit the Lake Mead Recreation Area annually.
Today St. Thomas is a ghost town of concrete foundations of the various buildings that once stood in the city. Unfortunately, millions of Tamarisk trees have sprouted in the areathat was once the bottom of the Lake Mead and are quickly inundating St. Thomas the same way the waters did in the 1930s. The trees are hiding the remains of the school, the hotel, the service station/garage and the ice cream parlor, a portion of which extends over the trees as a tall concrete steeple.
“There is a lot of tourism interest in the town,” Daron said. “There has been a lot of national publicity as Lake Mead levels have dropped and St. Thomas has become kind of a poster child for the whole drought situation across the west. Additionally, a lot of the people throughout the west and local area who actually had relatives that lived in St. Thomas come out and visit the site every year. We want to get the trees out of the way so these tourists can experience this piece of history.”
St. Thomas was plotted and constructed by 75 families from Northern Utah at the direction of Brigham Young, the president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons. Led by Thomas Smith, its purpose, like Las Vegas to the southwest, was to serve as a way station and haven for travelers to and from the west coast.
The Colorado River is a scant 20 miles south of St. Thomas and futurists of the day expected the river to become a water highway to points south and west since steamboat travel on the river was already a reality when the city was constructed.
Originally thought to be part of Utah Territory, Arizona Territory claimed the town in about 1868 and even named it the county seat for Pah-ute County. St. Thomas residents scoffed at Arizona and insisted they were Utahans.
Then, in 1870, a survey revealed the tiny community was really part of Nevada, which had become a state in 1864 during the Civil War, the year before St. Thomas was built.
A firestorm was ignited when Nevada demanded that residents pay several years back taxes with the legal tender of the day — gold. Unfortunately, St. Thomas, like many hard-working Mormon communities throughout the West, operated largely on the barter system and most residents were cash poor.
Nevada was unrelenting in its demands, however. Finally, after receiving permission from church president Young, most residents deserted their homes and headed back to Utah.
It wasn’t long before opportunistic “others” moved in to re-populate the community. Given time, many of the early Mormon residents also returned.
Eventually, the town recovered, thrived and became one of the many small communities on the Arrowhead Highway, the first all-weather auto byway connecting Salt Lake City with Los Angeles. The roadway was a wide, busy avenue through the center of St. Thomas. Current visitors to the ghost town can identify the important thoroughfare by the 4- and 5-foot stumps of the trees that at one time lined the road.
By the time Hoover Dam was dedicated in 1935, St. Thomas residents had been bought out by the government. Many moved north to higher ground in Overton and Logandale.
The cemetery was relocated to a small hill in Overton long before the last living resident left St. Thomas on June 11, 1938, as the rising waters of Lake Mead lapped his front porch.
A place of national historic interest, much is planned in St. Thomas once all the Tamarisk has been removed.
“Once we get it completely cleaned up, we’ll go in and do some interpretation including putting up signage to identify the different building foundations,” Daron said. “I think the preservation message is fairly important. We encourage people to come down and get the feeling of what life was like before the town was flooded, take a look around, enjoy but leave only footprints.”
