In the 1720′s Lisbon managed to smuggle his family and others to safety in England. Lisbon took the name of Samuel and his wife became Rebecca. In 1732-33 forty Sephardic Jews emigrated to the colony of Georgia. When they arrived they found the colony ill from intestinal ailment and fever. Nunes and the other Spehards nursed the colony back to health. Despite the care they received some sought to ban the Jewish pilgrims from settling in the Georgia Colony. The objections were overruled, and the Jews were allowed to stay and own land.

The Carvalho family also from Portugal were among the first Jewish settlers in Charleston South Carolina, a recognized Crypto and openly Jewish community.

In the naming practices of the Sephardic peoples, if the mother and the father are both from prominent families, the children are given both the name of the mother and the family.

The first settlement was the Las Vegas Mission, which arrived one year and two weeks after Parley P. Pratt’s bath. In 1857, the mission was abandoned, and from 1865 until 1905 was used as a ranch, first by Octavius Gass, and then Archibald and Helen Stewart.

Our ward (well, my family’s old ward, on Charleston) butted up against the Water District property. Our neighborhood was the last to still draw its culinary water from the old spring, but I understand that the neighborhood gets it from Lake Mead now, same as everyone else. The original water was sweet; the processed stuff is so nasty that I can’t drink it.

Amazing to think there is a decent spring under that desert.

Groundwater supplies 10% of the Las Vegas Valley’s requirements overall, and in summer up to 39%, pumped at this site and others. Las Vegas had plenty of water for a large town/small city, but not for what it became. Water from the Colorado was not pumped in large quantities until 1971. People look at Las Vegas and wonder at how improbable it is that a community would be placed there in the desert, but a century ago, it made good sense.

LVVWD timeline.