Lucin, Utah
| Lucin, Utah | |
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| Ghost town | |
 Lucin
Lucin
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| Coordinates: 41°20′54″N 113°54′18″W / 41.34833°N 113.90500°WCoordinates: 41°20′54″N 113°54′18″W / 41.34833°N 113.90500°W | |
| Country | United States |
| State | Utah |
| County | Box Elder |
| Founded | Late 19th century |
| Abandoned | 1990s |
| Named for | Lucina subanta |
| Elevation | 4,478 ft (1,365 m) |
| GNIS feature ID | 1437627 |
Lucin (also known as Umbria Junction) is an abandoned railroad community in Box Elder County, Utah, United States, resettled by a single owner-resident, along the western side of the Great Salt Lake, 162 miles (261 km) northwest of Salt Lake City.
Lucin was founded in the late 19th century, about 10 miles (16 km) north of its current location, to provide a water stop for railroads to replenish their steam locomotives.
The town was moved in 1903 to serve as a stop for the Lucin Cutoff. Historically, the town’s population consisted mainly of employees of the Central and Southern Pacific Railroads. In 1936 the town was abandoned, and then resettled by a group of retired railroad workers and their children.
For a while, no one had lived in Lucin, until 1997 when Ivo Zdarsky, venturing aviation entrepreneur and manufacturer of the Ivoprop, a plane propeller, bought it and moved there.
The area is managed for migrating songbirds and other wildlife by the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources.
The town was named for a local fossil bivalve, the Lucina subanta.
Except for the intermittent (more permanent since 2008) presence of Ivo, town owner and avid solitary explorer, and his IVOPROP Corp research and development activities, Lucin is a ghost town. As of 2016, the most prominent town features are a recent airplane hangar doubling as a residence and a workshop, an adjacent unpaved landing strip, along with several smaller, separate utility buildings (water, fuel, telecommunications, power).
Ivo (as Lucin's only resident prefers to be called), a former engineering student in Prague, made headlines in 1984 as an Eastern Bloc defector, when aged 24 he managed to escape the Iron Curtain by flying then silently gliding over the back-then heavily guarded Czechoslovak-Austrian border. He flew under night cover, avoiding radars, with a custom-built glider powered with a 600cc Trabant engine and propellers of his own design, and landed still undetected at Vienna international airport. Originally re-settling in California, Ivo eventually sold his DYI plane to the Berlin Checkpoint Charlie Museum's unique collection of escape vehicles. Lucin, on the other hand, offers a practical test-ground, and hosts Ivo's newest flying inventions and other ingenious designs.
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Wikipedia