Lake Mead Is So Low a Town Drowned in 1938 Is Back — And It's Not the Only Thing Surfacing

In 1938, the last man in St. Thomas, Nevada, rowed away from his own front yard as Lake Mead swallowed his town. Eighty-eight years later, the town is back in the open air, and it is not the only thing the lake has been giving back. St. Thomas was founded by Mormon settlers in 1865, abandoned once over a tax dispute, revived as a stop on the Arrowhead Trail, and finally erased when Hoover Dam created the largest reservoir in America. Today, decades of drought have pulled Lake Mead so far back that you can walk its main street again: foundations, steps, cisterns and the floor of an old ice cream parlor, sitting under the desert sun. In this documentary we follow the full story of the town that was lost twice, and the other secrets Lake Mead has surrendered as the water dropped: a World War II landing craft, a B-29 bomber that crashed during a Cold War research flight, and the 2022 discovery of human remains inside a barrel near Hemenway Harbor. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 00:00 The last man in St. Thomas 03:12 A town lost before the water came 06:24 The dam that changed the West 07:56 Buying out a hometown 09:22 June 11, 1938 10:58 The town that kept resurfacing 11:36 The drought and the return of St. Thomas 13:18 2022: the barrel in the mud 15:01 The World War II landing craft 16:00 The B-29 bomber at the bottom of the lake 17:38 Minimum power pool and dead pool 19:21 Lost twice This is a history documentary built from real research. Sources are listed below. Visual reconstructions are illustrative and do not show exact historical locations. 📚 SOURCES National Park Service, Lake Mead National Recreation Area: history of St. Thomas U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: Hoover Dam and Boulder Canyon Project history Library of Congress, Chronicling America: historical newspaper archive Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department statements (May 2022), as reported by the Associated Press and the Las Vegas Review-Journal U.S. Bureau of Reclamation: Lake Mead water level data 💬 Have you walked the St. Thomas trail, or does your family have roots in the Moapa Valley? Tell us in the comments. We read every one. 🔔 Below the Waterline tells the true stories of the towns beneath America's lakes. New documentaries every Tuesday and Friday. #LakeMead #DrownedTown #History