Ghost Town Tuesday - Silver Reef, Utah (Part II)

It wasn't long before other rich deposits were discovered in the Silver Reef area. In the autumn of 1877, the Leeds Company was created and started to mine the White Reef area which is the name given to this particular sandstone ledge....



It was here that the Leeds Company opened the surprisingly productive and cleverly named Leeds Mine...





and the equally cleverly named Leeds #2 Mine....



In addition, the Leeds Company opened a 5 stamp mill to handle the ore that was pouring out of the hillside....









In the spirit of competition, the Christy Milling and Mining Company was incorporated in 1877, and they opened a 5-stamp mill of their own...



This peaceful little building was built right at the corner of town, and probably spewed economic smog all over the place. Not much of the mill remains....



By this time the mines were booming, and lots of people who didn't mind crawling down into little holes for a living were required to work them. Luckily for us, the mines in Pioche Nevada had just started to putter out, so everyone from there came rushing over here. This event was big enough to earn the name the "Pioche Stampede" and it was soon noticed that all these people were going to need a place to stay and woo prostitutes. And so begins Silver City, although it was originally named "Rockpile" because it was nothing but tents all over a big pile of rocks. Silver Reef is far more marketable anyway. Here's what the townsite looks like to God and astronauts nowadays!



This map isn't particularly interesting to us. But with a spoonful of imagination and a dumptruck of internet help, maybe we can get a better picture of how the town would have been laid out...



Look at that! The town has sprung to life before our very eyes! Now imagine that you can read the words on that map. If you could, you would see that in 1879 Silver Reef had a booming Chinese population, several saloons, a hospital, schools, and everything else that a miner would need to enjoy themselves. What's that? You wish you could see what Main Street looked like? Well, save your wishes my electronic friend! Behold!



And say you were traveling to Silver Reef, but didn't know what the town looked like from a distance? Well, I can help you out there too...



And for no reason, here's a picture of some guy just leaning and hanging out....




And here's a picture of some sort of old building! Who knows what it was used for? Hat repair? Mule refurbishment? It's a mystery!




Here's an old-timey picture of the two remaining buildings at Silver Reef. The building on the right is the Wells Fargo/Museum building. The one one the left is a house that belongs to one Mr. J.N.Rice. He's probably dead now.



In addition to the two complete structures still standing at Silver Reef, there are several kinda-there structures. Here's the moldering remains of the Harrison House Hotel. That's what happens when you don't tip the room service...



And here's a wall to P. Clancy's store. Shoplifters find this arrangement pretty agreeable.




Aaaand here's the town Skull Fortress.



Just kidding. Silver Reef didn't ever feature a skull fortress. At least not one that anyone has record of. Finally, here are the remains of the Silver Reef Miner's Printing Office.



In all, approximately 1,500 people called this place home by 1879. In addition, several new mines had been discovered along Buckeye Reef....



Included in these new mines was the Hartman Shaft...



The Savage Shaft...



As well as the California Mine....



Just to name a few. These productive mines were joined by several new mine discoveries made along the White Reef, such as the Cobb Mine...






The Nichols Mine....





And finally, the famous Barbee and Walker Mine. The good people at the Barbee and Walker Mine built their own mill at the mine site. See?





I've labeled the stone wall in both pictures for your convenience! I am a merciful blog-guy, am I not? Anyway, that mill burned to the ground in 1879, but was rebuilt and back grinding up ore by 1880. The Barbee and Walker Mine was built using a 30 degree incline that lead down 270 feet to a 3 to 4 foot wide ore zone. Sadly, this mine collapsed a few years after being abandoned, even though it was one of the few mines not constantly battling groundwater. Would these new mines see Silver Reef through to the new century? Or would the fickle nature of nature destroy their hard work, and leave naught but corpses? Stay tuned for Part III!!

Ghost Town Tuesday - Silver Reef, Utah (Part I)

First and foremost, I'm aware that I've already covered Silver Reef in a blog post. I am also aware that it was an incredible post, and it probably rocked your world. But something got to bothering me. While it was an incredible post and world-rocking likely took place, much of it isn't true. Either that or much of the history simply wasn't there in the first place. So in the spirit of self-internet-improvement, I vote we revisit Silver Reef.

The modern town of Silver Reef has no residents except for jack rabbits, dust, and sagebrush. And also a couple dozen residents. But don't let the fact that Silver Reef has technically been re-peopled take away from the incredible amount of history that once stood on that same spot. A little over one hundred and twenty years ago you would have been standing in a bustling town filled with intrigue, cussing, sand, spitting, some more intrigue, women, guns, women with guns, and other such things.

Silver Reef is located down near the southwestern corner of Utah, about 16 miles north of St. George, a city that is filled with retired folks with HUGE blind spots. Here's a map.

To be more specific, take exit 23 off I-15 and there you are, standing right in the middle of a rather unique mining ghost town. Not much to look at nowadays, although the town does still have a surprisingly modern-looking town sign...

I'm not sure who has maintained the town sign down through the years, but they are doing a great job even though they must be a zombie by now. I never saw the sign zombie, but kudos to them and their amazing work ethic.

The story of Silver Reef begins in the year 1866. The state of Utah was but a dream. A dry, hot, parched dream filled with scorpions and odd liquor laws. Several areas of the state had been populated by Mormon pioneers who went about their business which included farming, praying, and generally trying to not catch any number of horrible diseases. One thing that did not get included in the pioneer's business was mining. Miners tend to be a bit loose morally, (or so the stereotype says. I've technically never met one), and as a result mining towns tended to have more whores than a religious people are comfortable with. So the LDS church generally advised against taking up the rockpick and just stick to growing crops, building highly organized street systems and, like I've mentioned, generally trying not to die. In Southern Utah, near the cities of Leeds and St. George, this wasn't a problem at all, as no one had any idea that there were good things underfoot anyway.

And so things went, until a wandering prospector named John Kemple spotted black spots in a block of sandstone that he had picked up. He did what prospectors do, and had the sample assayed. Much to his surprise, the results came back showing upwards of $17,000 worth of silver to the ton. This is unusual, as the sample was a block of sandstone which to that point had never been an ore-bearing material. So he figured that something was screwy with the assaying results and moved far away away. As a side note, the name of the assayer who investigated the sample was named "Metaliferous Murphy", so named because he seemed to have a knack for finding unusually high concentrations of minerals in whatever he assayed. Anyway, the miners were so sure that he was lying to them about the sandstone sample that they chased him out of town and hung him. Neat little story.

I’m not sure what happened to Mr. Kemple during the five years he was away from his black-speckled sandstone, but apparently he never truly believed that the assay results were bogus. Maybe he spent the time ignoring his guilt over getting Metaliferous Murphy hung. In 1871 he came storming back to Silver Reef and decided to bite the bullet by setting up the Union Mining District (the Silver Reef area). This was all well and good, but remember that the LDS Church and mining went together like two storks fighting over a wheel of cheddar. A man who was mining was a man who wasn't growing food, and everyone needed food back then. So the Church put the kibosh on the site, and things were abandoned and poor Mr. Kemple took off again for a couple of years and thought about things. Not to be defeated, Kemple came back yet again three years later determined to mine his little guts out, but the joke was on him. You see, it was too late! Some other dude named William Tecumseh Barbee found some sweet, sweet silver at the site when he discovered an outcrop of high grade silver that had been gouged out by Joe and Alex McCleave's wagon wheel on Tecumseh Hill. This hill, to be exact....





So Mr. Barbee gets all the credit for developing the site and Mr. Kemple gets a brief mention in an obscure blog entry. Regardless of who set it up, the wheels were already in motion, and by December of 1875, nearly 10.5 tons of ore running at approximately $502 of silver per ton had been shipped to the smelters in Salt Lake City. This is the Tecumseh Mine nowadays.....







Soon other mines sprung up in the Techumseh area, such as the Silver Flat Mine....



The Stormy King Mine...



And finally, the Manhatton Mine....

All of these mines were interconnected, and none of them exceeded 300 feet in depth. The average ore zones in this area were only 10 to 18 inches thick, but were chuck-full of silver, so it still managed to pay the bills. Most of the ore consisted of this little guy...

That dull little bugger is named cerargyrite, and while it may not look like it, it is jammed-packed with silver. The truly odd part of this whole mining area is that this little guy is present at all. Like I said at the start, it is unusual for sandstone to have any sort of mineralization going on it it, as sand doesn't like to play with other minerals. The secret here is that the sand happens to be stuffed with things that DO like to play with other minerals, namely petrified logs, reeds, shrubs and other planty goodness. As time went by, the carbon inside the plants took off, and silver, copper and other minerals were there to take its place. See!



Those greenish-grayish lines in that rock are 250 million year old tree branches and bits of reeds! It just so happened that the Silver Reef Sandstone was deposited as part of a wandering stream system filled with trees! The miners weren't very interested in the copper, but it's neat to look at anyway. Let's all go look at it again!

The premise with the silver is largely the same, although it ended up not being fully limited to plant remains. The silver ore bodies would form in 200 to 300 foot long squished cylinders, and were known for being incredibly rich in one place, then being barren a foot later. Miners hate that. It was noticed that the silver content would increase as the miners got closer to petrified trees. One tree in the Tecumseh Hill area produced $14,000 worth of ore, and was apparently nearly completely preserved in silver. Other legends say that a chamber filled with silver trees was found, but sent to be ground up to make whatever we make out of silver. I don't know if this is true, but it would have been a neat thing to see.

THIS ENDS PART I!