In 1864, Mormon pioneers founded a small port called Callville on the Colorado River. It was supposed to be the inland gateway connecting the Utah Territory to the Pacific. Five years later, the settlement was abandoned. Sixty years after that, it was buried under the new waters of Lake Mead. And yet the name survives, attached today to one of the busiest recreational marinas in the Southwest. The America250 celebration is a fitting time to dig up the story under the surface. At Callville Bay Marina, a proud part of the Adventures Unbound family, the past is literally underwater.

The History

Callville Bay is located on the northwestern side of Lake Mead in Nevada, within the Lake Mead National Recreation Area and about 18 miles northeast of Henderson. The name comes from the historic settlement of Callville, established in 1864 to 1865 by Mormon pioneers led by Anson Call under the direction of Brigham Young. Callville served as a steamboat landing and freight port on the Colorado River, designed to ship supplies up to Mormon communities including Salt Lake City. The settlement included homes, warehouses, irrigation systems, and a landing area before being abandoned in 1869 due to its isolation and the difficulty of navigating that stretch of the river.

When the Hoover Dam was constructed and Lake Mead was created in the 1930s, the original Callville settlement was submerged beneath the reservoir, leaving only the name preserved in the modern bay. The story of steamboats on the Colorado River is a remarkable footnote in American transportation history. Steamboats operated from 1852 to 1909 on the lower Colorado, running from the Gulf of California up to the Virgin River and serving a network of landing ports across Sonora, California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. Callville was one of the northern anchors of that system.

Today, the area sits inside the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, established in 1936 as America’s first national recreation area. Visitors can occasionally spot mining relics and submerged town remains when water levels drop, and Callville Bay has grown into a popular hub for boating, houseboating, and lake exploration.

The Connection

The land and water around Callville Bay belong to a much longer Indigenous history. The Southern Paiute, Chemehuevi, Mojave, and Hualapai peoples have all called this stretch of the Colorado home, and the Ancestral Puebloans built a sophisticated civilization across the Four Corners region for some 1,500 years.

When you tie up at Callville Bay, you are floating above a Mormon shipping outpost, downstream of one of the most significant feats of New Deal engineering, and surrounded by landscapes shaped by tens of thousands of years of Indigenous presence. The marina is a starting point for some of the most spectacular boating in the Southwest, but it is also a portal into a story that goes a lot deeper than the waterline.

For more America250 stories from across our properties, visit Adventures Unbound’s America250 page.