OPHIR HISTORIC DISTRICT
Ghost Town — Ophir, Utah
Status: Historic site · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/ophir-historic-district-ophir-utah/

Partially inhabited former mining community.

Ophir Historic District is a ghost town in Ophir, Utah. Partially inhabited former mining community. HauntHunt files it with ghost towns. The dossier holds 1 documented fact — the record is history-forward, no paranormal claims on file. Access details are unverified — research before visiting. The dossier keeps the place and the story in the same record — which is what the archive is for.

Ophir, in Tooele County's Oquirrh Mountains about fifty miles southwest of Salt Lake City, took its name from the biblical land of King Solomon's gold — a name miners gave the canyon and district when rich chloride-silver ores were found on Lion and Tiger hills. The first claim, the Silveropolis, was located August 23, 1870, and the strikes that followed — the Tampico, Mountain Lion, Defiance, Silver Chief — made Ophir one of Utah Territory's first mining districts.
It made industrial history early: in June 1871 the Walker Brothers erected their fifteen-stamp Pioneer Mill at Ophir, the first stamp mill in the territory, processing roughly thirty tons of ore a day. The town boomed into the thousands through the 1870s; some mines on Lion Hill played out quickly, but the district — led by the Hidden Treasure and Ophir Hill workings — produced silver, lead, copper, zinc, and gold, on and off, for a century, with operations recorded as late as 1959.

AN INHABITED GHOST TOWN
Ophir never emptied. Its peak thousands shrank to a small resident population, but the town kept its buildings: the frame, false-fronted Ophir Town Hall of the early 1870s is the oldest surviving nineteenth-century mining-town city hall in Utah — one of only three left from the era — and was documented by the Historic American Buildings Survey and listed on the National Register.
The file's own source draws the operative line: the district is included for mining and ghost-town heritage, and the settlement is not wholly abandoned — residents live among the old buildings. No haunting claim attaches; Ophir is filed as a boomtown that survived its boom.

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· Ophir retains historic mining-town buildings; residents still live there. A ghost town's file is unusual: the emptiness itself is documented, and this entry is part of that record. Media accounts document it — reported history rather than legend. The record appears in 'Get Your Spook On: Northern Utah’s Most Haunted Places'. The record keeps it — history, not lore.

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Get Your Spook On: Northern Utah’s Most Haunted Places — Visit Utah
  https://www.visitutah.com/articles/get-your-spooky-on

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