This Town Drowned in 1938. Now It's 100 Feet Above the Lake

This is Main Street in St. Thomas, Nevada. For most of the last ninety years it lay under Lake Mead. In June 1938 the water rose more than a foot a day, and the last man in town waited until it reached his door. But St. Thomas did not stay drowned. On 27 September 2026 Lake Mead fell to its lowest level since 1937, and the town now sits more than 100 feet above the water. So why do people keep coming back to a town that a lake was built to drown? A tax bill in gold, a Mormon colony that walked away, the railroad, the dam, the last man who rowed away, reunions in the mud, and the millions who drink the lake today. Chapters 0:00 St. Thomas, Nevada 0:52 A Tax in Gold 2:27 The Ones Who Came Back 3:19 Take It or Leave It 5:13 June 1938 6:34 Reunions in the Mud 8:11 The Lowest Water 10:03 Who Drinks the Lake About this film Public-domain photos and film from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the National Park Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA and the National Archives, plus CC BY photos and videos credited below. Lake levels are USBR figures. Maps and diagrams are original and approximate where marked. Every historical picture carries its own date on screen. The narration voice is synthetic (Chatterbox TTS). No AI-generated imagery is used. Sources U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (Lower Colorado River operations, Lake Mead daily levels); National Park Service, Lake Mead National Recreation Area; Nevada State Historic Preservation Office (National Register nomination); UNLV Special Collections; Southern Nevada Water Authority; Clark County; USGS Bulletin 798 (Longwell, 1928); Brigham Young Center; Moapa Valley Progress; Deseret News; Pahrump Valley Times; KSL; local TV (News 3, FOX5, 8 News Now, KOLO); CBS News; NBC News; The Christian Science Monitor. Credits Photos (CC BY 2.0): James Brooks, "221113 Hoover Dam intakes"; FDR Presidential Library & Museum, "47-96 1796"; Dale Cruse, "A Chalky 'Bathtub Ring' Marks Decades of Drought Along Lake Mead's Shoreline"; Tydence Davis, "Fenton Whitney Home", "Ice Cream Parlor", "St Thomas School House Steps"; Renee Grayson, "Moapa Valley"; teofilo, "Monument to Moapa Valley Pioneers" (all Flickr). Photo (CC BY 3.0): Prosfilaes, Wikimedia Commons, "St. Thomas standing building". Video (CC BY 3.0): YouTube: Ramblin Pam, "Mysterious Lake Mead Railroad Ghost Town of St Thomas"; Trek Wanders, "POV Drive: Las Vegas from Eastern Ave to Lake Mead Blvd"; Qwen Wan, "Lake Mead and Hoover Dam - 1982"; Google Earth, "Lake Mead, Arizona – Nevada" and "Las Vegas, Nevada" (Google Earth Timelapse: Google, Landsat, Copernicus). Changes: cropped, colour-graded, animated. Licences: creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, /by/3.0. Public domain: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (incl. E. E. Hertzog, J. R. Cotterill, William S. Russell, Andy Pernick; via UNLV Special Collections PH-00071 and Herbert Hoover Presidential Library); National Park Service (incl. Andrew Cattoir; NPGallery, Lake Mead NRA); U.S. Geological Survey (C. R. Longwell, Bulletin 798, 1928); John K. Hillers (Powell Survey); NASA Earth Observatory (Lauren Dauphin, Landsat data from USGS); U.S. National Archives, DOCUMERICA (Charles O'Rear); Wikimedia Commons: Jkotto. Maps Imagery: NASA GIBS Blue Marble · Sentinel-2 cloudless - s2maps.eu by EOX IT Services GmbH (Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2016), CC BY 4.0 · Terrain: Mapterhorn; Copernicus DEM GLO-30 © DLR e.V. 2010-2014 and © Airbus Defence and Space GmbH 2014-2018, provided under COPERNICUS by the European Union and ESA · © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), © OpenMapTiles, OpenFreeMap. Borders, railroad, routes and town positions are our approximate drawings after the Acts of Congress of 1864 and 1866, the 1870 survey and the National Register nomination. Lake Mead cross-section: our diagram after USBR, SNWA and CBS/AP figures. Music (CC BY 4.0, creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Chris Zabriskie (chriszabriskie.com): "Is That You or Are You You?", "That Hopeful Future Is All I've Ever Known", "The Dark Glow of the Mountains", "The Temperature of the Air on the Bow of the Kaleetan", "To Hide Their Secrets", "What Does Anybody Know About Anything". Jason Shaw, Audionautix.com: "Deep Space", "On Walden Pond". Narration: synthetic voice, Chatterbox TTS (Resemble AI, MIT licence). Original narration, script, maps, graphics and animations © 2026 Stubborn Places. All rights reserved. Archival footage, photos and map data remain under their own licences (credited above). #StThomas #LakeMead #Documentary #GhostTown #Nevada