Theron Hardin

Nebo Reporter

The town of Eureka was a full blown city during the height of the silver and heavy ore days from 1910 to 1950. The Population,at the peak of it's heyday, grew to 3,908 (1920 census) and established Eureka as the sixth largest city in Utah. The money made by the mines gave rise to all of the cities in Utah county and even the Salt Lake City area.

The area, over time, has been known under at least three different names, Ruby Hollow, Tintic and Eureka. Even the famous Amelia Earhart spent some time in the Bullion Beck hotel in Eureka in 1928 while waiting for parts for her downed airplane.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt took over as president in March 1933 the country was in the midst of the worst depression ever experienced in the United States. Among the organizations established to help relieve the situation was the Civilian Conservation Corps, not only one of the first to begin operations across the country but also one of the most successful.

Compared to the rest of the nation Utah was hit particularly hard by the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1933 Utah's annual per capita income of $300 was a mere 80 percent of the national average, and 35.8 percent of Utah's work force was unemployed.

The United States Forest Service supervised forty-seven camps; the Division of Grazing--now Bureau of Land Management (BLM)--had twenty-four camps working on erosion control projects and building reservoirs. The six Bureau of Reclamation camps worked primarily on irrigation development. The Moon River Project in the Uinta Basin was one of the biggest projects in the state.

One of the BLM projects was to work on erosion control in and around Eureka aka the Tintic during the mid 1930's.

During that time railway passages, roads, whether paved, dirt or gravel had culverts or underground drainage created. Then channeled the water runoff down to Main Street and on out of town through the natural aqueduct of the Eureka Fault.

The real problem with water run off was that the mines contained heavy metals. Those metals began to build up all through the Tintic.

In July of 1970, the White House and Congress worked together to establish the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) response to the growing public demand for cleaner water, air and land. Eureka became a superfund location to work on disposal of the heavy metals.

In September 2002, EPA and the Utah Department of Environmental Quality (UDEQ) selected a cleanup strategy for the site. In May 2003, EPA, the UDEQ, and their contractors completed the site's cleanup plan. The cleanup plan called for the removal of contaminated soil from residents' yards, replacing it with clean soil, and replanting the yards with new plants and shrubs. The plan called for the areas of mine waste to be stabilized and covered with a clean material and rock to prevent direct human contact as well as erosion by wind and water.

Just as in the time of the CCC the EPA has taken over the job of controlling erosion and drainage. Now the added responsibility of the EPA is to maintain the historic nature of the work done by the CCC.

In conversations with the supervisors of the superfund project they show a genuine concern to maintain whatever work that was done by their predecessors.

CCC enrollees received wages of thirty dollars monthly, of which twenty-five dollars was sent home to their families, while the young men were allowed the remaining five dollars to spend on themselves through the month. More than $125,000 a month thus was pumped into the state's economy. During the 10-year CCC experience in Utah, more than 3.2 million trees were planted. The experimental terracing methods used above Bountiful became a standard for flood and erosion control in mountain terrain. Over the life of the program, the federal government spent $52 million in Utah. For all Utahans, including those who were never aware of the corps, the work done by those unsung heroes in the early days of the twentieth century, their labors and the monetary infusion from Tintic, the Salt Lake and Utah counties would be much different than they are today.