From Schoolhouse to Town Hall

A Building on the Move

The building to your left was originally built as a schoolhouse in 1880 in nearby Silver Reef. It also served in the mining boomtown as a place for community dances and other gatherings.

Soon after the schoolhouse ...

A Tale of Three Towns

The history of three towns – Harrisburg, Silver Reef, and Leeds – is intricately connected. Harrisburg and Silver Reef are ghost towns today, while Leeds persists. Like many locations in the arid west, water and its availability and accessibility was ...

Wells Fargo and Company Express Building

Utah Historic Site

Built in 1877

Architect unknown

Used by Wells Fargo Company and by St. George merchants, Woolley, Lund and Judd.

Marker is on Wells Fargo Road, on the left when traveling north.

Courtesy hmdb.org

Mile-long Main Street

Between 1875 and the end of 1876, Silver Reef boomed with development, going from a boulder-strewn flat to a town of 1,500 people, one of the largest in Washington county.

Silver Reef soon became the center of permanent development, and many ...

Civilian Conservation Corps, Leeds, Utah

The Leeds CCC camp opened in October 1933 under the direction of the Dixie National Forest Service on the site of an existing ranger station. Leeds, a town of less than 200, more than doubled with the opening of the ...

Harrisburg/ Harrisburg Residents

Harrisburg

The town of Harrisburg was founded by Moses Harris in 1859. By 1868, twenty-five families had made their homes in this little valley along Quail Creek, located three miles south of Leeds and twelve miles northeast of St. George. The ...

St. John's Church / Bishop Lawrence J. Scanlan

Silver Reef, UT

St. John's Church

After his 1877 visit to Silver Reef, Father Scanlan appointed Father Dennis Kiely as the local pastor. The increasing Catholic population continued to ask for a church. Father Scanlan returned in November 1878 to accomplish this ...

The Tithing Lot and Relief Society Hall

Tithing Lot - Pioneer William Robb Jr. built a rock house, consisting of two rooms with a cellar, diagonally across the street from this location. It was later sold to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and became ...

Paragonah Town Square

This area, a part of the Great Basin, has evolved from the time of Lake Bonneville. It has known Anasazi Indian civilizations as evidenced by nearby ruins. It has seen the Dominguez-Escalante expedition of 1776 which passed west of this ...

Paragonah Fort

Paragonah was founded in 1852. Indian trouble caused abandonment a year later until 1855 when the pioneer fort was built. The site was selected and dedicated by President Brigham Young.

The fort was 105 feet square with walls 3 feet thick ...