Continuing the thread on the lake that supplies several states, CNN covers the town that used to be drowned: St. Thomas. The Las Vegas Sun contributes this from a couple of years ago:
Residents fought the federal government to no avail and complained about what they said was the government’s low payments for their properties. Nearly all of the residents left well before the lake flooded the town, but there were a few people who denied that the lake would rise that high.
The last of those was Hugh Lord, who woke to water at the foot of his bed one morning. He gathered his things and before climbing into his rowboat, set fire to his house. Why? The histories don’t say, but it seems like a fitting Nevada way out — one last shake of the fist at the federal government, which might force him out but couldn’t take everything he had.
Back in 2008, the Las Vegas Sun had a bit more:
“What I find interesting about it,” says Aaron McArthur, a UNLV doctoral student who is writing the history of St. Thomas for the National Park Service, “is that in 1945, in 1963, the times it emerged from the water before, there were always reunions here. Reunions in the real sense that, ‘We might have been pushed out, but this is our home.’ ”
“Now most of the people are dead … Now the lessons that people seem to be drawing from it have less to do with matters of faith and ‘grow where you’re planted,’ and more with a cautionary kind of thing about what happens when we’re not responsible stewards of water.”
A little further back in time:
Thousands of years before, the Anasazi, an ancient Pueblo people, knew all too well that life in this area was impossible without plenty of water.
Eva Jensen, an archaeologist with the Lost City Museum in Overton, thinks about them every time she turns on her faucet.
“Everybody should think about that,” she says. “Just what is the capacity of the land and the resources that we have?”
Unable to grow crops to feed a population that had grown too fast to support their nearly 1,000 people, the Anasazi abandoned the dry valley about 1150, after living here for 1,000 years.
“The question we should be asking is: How were they able to survive here for as long as they did?” Jensen says. “Our current community hasn’t been here that long, so we haven’t really been tested. We’ll see how we handle this latest drought.”
And Americans, in the form of the National Park Service, are trying to make lemonade out of this lemon:
Once the town was flooded higher than 60 feet above the tallest structure, now visitors can roam the ghost remains of a true western town. St. Thomas lies in the northern part of the park near the Overton Arm along the Muddy River, which feeds into Lake Mead. The access road is dirt and sometimes bumpy so visitors with low riding vehicles may want to be careful. However most vehicles should be able to handle the approximately three mile dirt road. There is a dirt trail leading to the town site from the parking area.
It’s a tough squeeze, I fear.
