Nevada Flooded a Town in 1938 and Its Last Resident Rowed Away From His Own Roof

At the bottom of Lake Mead in southern Nevada, there is a town with streets, foundations, and a hotel floor you can walk across — when the water is low enough to let you. For most of the last century you couldn't. The lake was over it. In 1865, Mormon settlers founded St. Thomas at the confluence of three desert rivers, roughly 500 people at its height, with a school, a post office, a hotel, and cottonwoods planted down every street. The rivers made it possible twice — the town was abandoned once over a tax dispute, then resettled — and then the same water was turned against it. When Boulder (Hoover) Dam closed its gates, the reservoir rose on a schedule everyone could read. The residents moved their own cemetery uphill before the flood arrived. The last man rowed away from his rooftop in June 1938. Now Lake Mead is falling, and St. Thomas keeps surfacing — chimney, roads, and the pale stumps of those planted trees still standing in the silt. We looked at how a town got drowned on purpose and on time, and why it refuses to stay under. SOURCES National Park Service, Lake Mead National Recreation Area Lost City Museum, Overton (formerly Boulder Dam Park Museum) U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Boulder Canyon Project records Clark County / Utah Territory post office records National Register of Historic Places nomination, St. Thomas Cemetery Weathered Ground covers the roads, towns, and places America walked away from, and what is left of them. #stthomas #lakemead #nevada #abandoned #hooverdam