The Town That Wouldn’t Stay Buried: Rockport’s Ghost Surfaces in the Drought
In September of 2021, Utah’s drought became so severe that it did something the reservoir’s engineers never anticipated: it turned back the clock sixty years. Rockport Reservoir, which sits between Park City and Coalville in Summit County, dropped to just 26 percent of its total capacity, its lowest level since the valley was first flooded in the late 1950s. And when the water receded, the past came back up with it.
Drone footage captured by Devon Dewey on September 11, 2021 spread across the internet almost immediately. There, visible beneath the retreating waterline, were the faint but unmistakable outlines of what had once been a living community: foundations, the ghost of a road, structural remnants of homes where families had raised children and built lives before the federal government decided their valley would become a reservoir.
The town of Rockport (originally called Crandall when European-American settlers arrived in 1860, then renamed Enoch City, then Rockport) was never a large place. At its peak, perhaps 200 people called it home. The Black Hawk War drove many residents north to Wanship in 1866. Population dwindled across the following decades. By the time the Bureau of Reclamation announced the Wanship Dam project in 1952, only about 27 families remained. They were relocated. Between 1954 and 1957, the 156-foot dam was built across the Weber River, and the valley filled. Rockport became Rockport Reservoir. The town became sediment.
For 64 years, that was the end of the story. The reservoir served its purpose: water storage, flood control, recreation. Families boated over the foundations of other families’ homes, unknowingly. The past stayed buried.
Until the drought made it impossible to keep the secret any longer.
The re-emergence of Rockport’s foundations sparked genuine wonder and significant media coverage. People visited the reservoir to stand where homes once stood. History enthusiasts mapped what could be seen. The images were striking, melancholy, and beautiful in the way that all long-hidden things become beautiful when the light finally finds them.
But we are also an organization that looks at what drought reveals and asks a harder question: what else came up with those foundations?
Sixty-four years of submersion means sixty-four years of accumulated lakebed history. The town’s structures are the dramatic, photogenic part of what drought exposed. What doesn’t photograph as well (what doesn’t trend on social media) is the equipment, the debris, the vehicles, and the waste that accumulate on any heavily used reservoir lakebed over six decades of recreational use. The ghost town is a story about the past. The debris on the lakebed is a story about every summer since the reservoir was filled.
Rockport Reservoir is smaller and quieter than Pineview, but it has its own history of accidents, drownings, and vehicles that entered the water. The drought showed us the foundations of Rockport the town. As a disabled-veteran-led Utah nonprofit focused on lake cleanup, we want to know what else is down there.
Fathom Restoration is a disabled-veteran-led Utah 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to lake cleanup and the recovery of submerged vehicles, vessels, and debris from Utah’s lakes and waterways. Donate / Volunteer / Report a vehicle at fathomrestoration.org.
Source: https://www.sltrib.com/news/2021/09/23/drought-exposes-long/
