Thistle, Ghost town in Spanish Fork Canyon, Utah County, United States.

Thistle is a ghost town in Spanish Fork Canyon, Utah County, Utah, United States. The photograph shows a partly ruined structure of reddish-brown stone blocks with a large rounded archway framing a dark opening. Above the arch, the stonework ends in a rough edge with exposed timber planks and beams; a metal pole and thin wire run along the upper right. Inside the archway, vertical wooden boards and a leaning timber stand before a shadowed interior, with a red plastic mesh net at the base.

Mormon settlers, beginning with the Pace family from Nauvoo in 1848, homesteaded the canyon floor before the railroad arrived. The Utah and Pleasant Valley Railway laid a narrow-gauge spur in 1878; the Denver and Rio Grande Western acquired it in 1882 and converted it to standard gauge by 1890. On 13 April 1983 a landslide dammed the Spanish Fork River, and the town was never rebuilt.

Thistle lay where Thistle Creek meets Soldier Creek, a junction Ute chiefs Taby and Peteetneet used for spring and fall tribal migrations. The first settler family, the Pace family from Nauvoo, Illinois, arrived in 1848, and their fifth-generation descendants ran a cattle ranch until the 1983 evacuation. A small Ute band living in the canyon raided the newcomers and was forcibly relocated in the 1870s.

You can view the ruins from a large pullout next to the double road cut along Route 6/89. Keep in mind the site is on private property, so access may be limited.

A landslide in 1983 dammed the water and created a natural lake, flooding large parts of the settlement. Residents had only two hours to leave their homes before the water covered everything.