Mile-long Main Street

Between 1875 and the end of 1876, Silver Reef boomed from a boulder-strewn flat into a town of 1,500 people, one of the largest in Washington County. It soon became the center of permanent development, with many stone and wooden buildings erected along a mile-long Main Street. Its businesses and public buildings included six saloons, nine grocery stores, two dance halls, a brewery, a billiard hall, the Wells Fargo Express Office, a post office, an undertaker, citizens hall, a jail, Masonic and Oddfellows halls, a telegraph office, a barber shop, a physicians office, Chinese laundries whose walls are still standing, and a Catholic church with a hospital included. Although many of the original buildings are gone, beginning in the 1980s area residents organized efforts to restore existing buildings and structures and reconstruct some of them. The Wells Fargo Express Office was restored and turned into a museum, the 1877 stone Powder House was restored, the Rice Bank building was reconstructed and restored, and a replica of The Cosmopolitan Restaurant was built. Through these efforts, local residents succeeded in having the Wells Fargo Express Office added to the National Register of Historic Places.

Leeds, Utah · United States