KVIG Informative

For nearly a century, the rising waters of Lake Mead kept an entire Nevada town buried beneath the Colorado River. Now, as the reservoir sinks into territory it has never occupied before, that town’s foundations are surfacing above the waterline — a physical marker of how far the river system has fallen, and how much farther it may still have to go.

St. Thomas was founded in 1865 by Mormon settlers along the Muddy and Virgin rivers, in what is now the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, according to the National Park Service. The community grew into a farming town, with residents building homes, a school and stores across generations.

In 1928, President Calvin Coolidge signed the legislation authorizing construction of Boulder Dam, later renamed Hoover Dam, according to the National Park Service. The dam’s reservoir, Lake Mead, began filling in 1935, and the rising Colorado River water slowly advanced on St. Thomas.

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Residents sold their land and left their homes as the water advanced. On June 11, 1938, Hugh Lord became the last person to leave St. Thomas, paddling away from his house as the lake reached his doorway, according to the National Park Service. At its highest point, Lake Mead covered the town site by roughly 60 feet, the Park Service states.

A town that keeps coming back

The ruins did not stay hidden. Former residents and their descendants held reunions at the exposed town site in 1945, 1963 and 2012, according to the National Park Service — each occasion tied to periods when the reservoir’s level had fallen enough to expose the foundations again.

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The current exposure is different in scale. Lake Mead’s elevation stood at 1,038.83 feet at the end of August 2026, according to the Bureau of Reclamation’s daily reservoir elevation data — below the 1,040.92-foot level the reservoir reached in July 2022, which had stood as its lowest point since the lake was filled.

St. Thomas didn’t return because anyone wanted it to. It returned because the river that drowned it can no longer keep it hidden. As the states that draw from the Colorado River work out what a shrinking supply means for water rights carved out a century ago, the exposed foundations sit as a plain answer to an abstract negotiation: this is what less water actually looks like.