Only The Dead Remain

As a discarded place from the past the ghost town of Kelton, located on the north shore of the Great Salt Lake, is one of the many small towns upon Utah's landscape that have faded into inexistence; barely more than a memorial dot on a map. However Kelton was once far greater than the slightly altered desert landscape it has become.

The town of Kelton was founded over 150 years ago in April 1869, when the Central Pacific Railroad arrived at Kelton's location laying tracks in an effort to complete America's first transcontinental railroad. Kelton was originally establish, less than a month before the railroad's completion, as a tent city for the railroad's predominately Chinese work crew. 

Due to its ideal position along the Transcontinental Railroad Kelton quickly grew from its makeshift work camp beginnings into a prosperous rail-town. A post office was established less than six months after the arrival of the town's first residence and soon the town had all the trappings of any decent western rail-town including fine hotels, gambling halls, saloons, stores and homes.

For Kelton's first 15 years it thrived as a vital link between the Transcontinental Railroad and the resource rich American north-west. In the 1870s and early 1880s Wells Fargo ran a stage coach route between Kelton and several gold mines in Idaho and Montana. For a time this stage line even held the dubious honor of being the most robbed stage coach route in the American west.  However the very thing that gave Kelton life was also the destructive force that eventually stripped it of its ability to survive.    

 

As spur lines from the Transcontinental Railroad quickly began to be laid across the American west from locations that did not include Kelton the town's importance began to decline as evidenced by its stage coach service being discontinued in the mid-1880s.

At the turn of the Twentieth Century, almost 20 years after Kelton had lost its stage coach route a far more damaging hit to Kelton's survival came when the Transcontinental Railroad was rerouted across the Great Salt Lake. This new route cut several small rail-towns  north of the lake, including Kelton, from the transcontinental route. The new lake route also cut from the rail line its most famous and historic landmark, promontory summit, where 35 years previous to the rerouting, the golden spike had been driven to celebrate the completion of America's first transcontinental rail line.

Because Kelton no longer lay upon one of the western United States' most traveled rail routes it slipped into obscurity and irrelevance and although the tracks that had made history still ran through Kelton they were only used by local farmers and ranchers from that point on.

Although in decline, Kelton still managed to survive almost 40 years after being cut from the Transcontinental route and the town even made history during its decent. On March 12, 1934, Kelton experienced a 6.6 magnitude earth quake, the largest earth quake ever recorded in Utah.

Kelton's final demise came 73 years from it founding when in July of 1942, while the nation was in midst of World War II, the Southern Pacific Railroad dismantled the rail line that ran through Kelton to collect the badly needed steel for use in the war effort. With the rail line stripped from the town, little reason was left for the few remaining residences to stay and the town was quickly abandoned; several of the town's final residences took their houses with them.