At first, Chris Merritt couldn’t believe his eyes.
It was the opening day of an archeological survey he organized near the ghost town of Silver Reef northeast of St. George. His goal was to find physical evidence of the Chinatown he believed was once there, and he didn’t have to look far.
“The ground was shimmering with material culture, what we call artifacts, from China,” the Utah Historic Preservation Office archaeologist said. “So I'm like, ‘OK, we're in the right spot. We’re in the right location.’”
Over the next two days, Merritt’s survey team — which included local volunteers and representatives from the Bureau of Land Management and Chinese Railroad Workers Descendents Association — found more than 500 examples of Chinese artifacts. Piece by piece, these discoveries are helping to paint a picture of life in southern Utah’s only Chinatown.
Researchers already had some idea that Silver Reef — a silver mining boom town in the 1870s and 1880s — was home to a group of Chinese residents, he said, but this was the first study into what their lives may have looked like.
“They don't show up in history books. They don't show up in diaries. These artifacts are truly their testimony to their lives.”
He hypothesized that the town’s Chinese residents lived together in their own neighborhood. He honed in on the potential site by overlaying modern-day aerial images with historical town maps. The density of artifacts at the survey site not only proved his theory and pinpointed Chinatown’s location, but also blew past his expectations.
The Silver Reef Chinatown site is hardly remote, straddling BLM land just northeast of St. George near I-15 and popular hiking trails. So he expected that most of the pottery and other items would have been carried off at some point in the 140 years since the town’s heyday.
Instead, the team found the desert floor littered with fragments of fine porcelain cups and bowls, many hand-painted with delicate blue flowers and bamboo shoots. They also spotted pieces of giant rice vessels large enough to fit a person — something he hadn’t seen at other Chinatown sites near Utah’s Transcontinental Railroad — along with containers of imported soy sauce, pickled eggs and dried ginger.
That shows the town had shops catering to Chinese customers who wanted the comforts of home.
“You can almost start smelling the food in the back of these businesses and homes, smelling much like Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province.”
Those imported eggs and sauces would have had quite a journey, crossing the Pacific Ocean by boat before arriving in Silver Reef on a wagon because the town had no railroad line. It adds up to a community with an incredible global trade system that appears much more complex than many of the other boom-and-bust Chinatowns that popped up across the West at that time.
“When there's people who want things, things will get there,” Merritt said. “The freight wagons were the Amazon delivery driver of the day.”
The U.S. Census and other archives indicate that at least 250 Chinese immigrants lived there during the town’s peak, but Merritt said that’s likely an undercount. That’s partly because the residents formed a town within a town, pushed there by the racism they faced and by a desire for their own community.
The typical Chinatown resident, he said, would have been a young adult man with little money or education. Most would have worked service jobs, such as laundry or cooking, because the local mining union barred them based on their race. But some belonged to a higher socioeconomic class, too — Silver Reef’s Chinatown even had an herbal doctor.
LoAnne Barnes, a board member at the local Silver Reef Museum, said these discoveries bring the region’s diverse history to life — something all Utahns can benefit from.
“The more we can appreciate the history of the ethnic groups that make up this country, the stronger country we would be.”
The museum already features a display highlighting the town’s Chinese history, and she hopes some of the items will add to that.
Even with all of these recent findings, Merritt said, the survey is only scratching the surface of Silver Reef’s full history. He plans to continue exploring and cataloging the items found on the surface before potentially excavating and preparing items for public display.
Someday, he hopes to help put up interpretive signs near the site so visitors can learn more about the town’s Chinese residents while walking in their footsteps.
“That's why these types of places are so significant. … They can transmit you back into that period, and you can almost hear that town booming and the mining sounds and the stamp mills and 15 different languages being spoken. And you start feeling a lot more connected to that place.”
