Silver Reef Graveyards
As my charter membership as a Graveyard Rabbit is official, I better get busy. Actually, for the past 24 hrs, I have been looking through everything that I have on the ghost town cemetery that I mentioned in my first post. It was May of 2006 that we stopped atthe town of Silver Reef in Washington Co., Utah on our way to the Family History Library in Salt Lake.
Come to find out when we visited this cemetery, I was just planning on posting the names of the interred, I took very few stills, but I was able to capture some pretty good stills from the video we shot. I tried the Studio 9 software that I paid for but wasn’t very impressed. At http://www.videolan.org I found a free program “VLC Media Player” that worked pretty good, but you be the judge, as I get some posted.
There are actually two cemeteries, The Protestant and the Catholic. I read somewhere in my research that there was only a Catholic Church building, but they shared with the Protestants There are no church buildings now, just a marker about St. Johns Catholic built in 1879. It appears the the town didn’t last long, the Silver mine was opened and camp set up in late 1875, by William Tecumseh Barbee. At the same time the mines in nearby Pioche, Nevada closed down and some of those miners and merchants moved to Silver Reef. By 1884 most of the mines were closed and the peak population of about 1500 started to dwindle.
In Jan of 1998 the Lions Club from the neighboring town of Leeds, started rehabilitating the old cemeteries. According to sign at the gates 192 folks donated their time and materials to create the quaint graveyards. Also on the signs, they state that in the Protestant Cemetery there are 11 graves with tombstones and 37 unknowns and the Catholic Cemetery has 3 graves with tombstones and 15 unknowns. They have marked the unknown graves with wooden crosses, the paint that they used to mark them unknown is already starting to fade on the crosses that are facing the sun,
Silver Reef Utah circa 1880
Tags: Utah
