Town #39: HANKSVILLE est. 1882

Hanksville seems to be out in the middle of nowhere. It is at least an hour away from any other town. The town is just north of the Henry Mountains in southeast Utah and sits along the Fremont and Muddy rivers. It was originally named Graves Valley after Walter Graves who originally mapped the area. In the 1880s, several small towns were established in the area along the river, but Hanksville is the only one left functioning as a town. It is so isolated that they didn't have telephones until 1913, and before 1960, the only electricity came from individual generators fueled by butane and diesel fuel.


West of Hanksville, we found this billboard about the town Giles. Giles was another settlement started in the 1880s. The people of Giles struggled to make a farming community for over 20 years, they finally gave up around 1909. I have great- grandparents that met and fell in love here.

There isn't much left of Giles except some adobe brick foundations. This is what is left of the bell tower of the church/school house.

Town #22: ROCKVILLE est. 1862

As the road follows the Virgin River east from the town of Virgin, you come to the town of Rockville. It was named after it's rocky soil. See here I am holding one of those rocks. It was easy to find. Rockville was almost called Adventure. I don't know why. Rockville managed to survive the problems with the Virgin River in its early settlement and is now, in my opinion, the cutest town on the way to Zion National Park.

Across an old steel bridge over the Virgin River from Rockville and a little further west is the ghost town of Grafton. Grafton was a settlement that did not survive the raging river. The settlers here kept having their farms and homes washed down river to Virgin until they just gave up. This is a picture of the adobe school/church in Grafton. Ten years ago it was in a lot worse shape, but since then, a preservation group has been slowly restoring the church and several homes in the town. They have even installed cameras to keep down the vandalism. They have done a great job. Grafton has been used as a background for several movies including Robert Redford's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. For more information on the restoration project go to www.graftonheritage.org. Grafton also has a great pioneer cemetery.

Town 17: LUND est. 1901

Lund is a strange place to purposefully take a side trip to, but we did. This is another former Utah town that we are not sure we should include on our list. We think someone must live out there since we heard a dog barking and saw some laundry hanging outside a trailer. I'm not sure about the establishment date, but it got its post office in 1901. The town was named after Robert Lund who was some 'bigwig' in the Union Pacific Railroad. The town wasn't ever much more than a glorified railroad stop. From 1917 to the late 1960s, this is where you would get off the train to see the national parks.

The Utah Parks Company would pick up vacationers here, put them on sightseeing buses and take them on a week long tour of Zion, Grand Canyon, and Bryce Canyon National Parks, along with a couple of smaller monuments. The buses would take them on this long lonely highway to Cedar City from Lund. Lund was also where the rail took a short turn to Cedar City.

We didn't find much left in Lund. The train station was torn down years ago. There are a few abandoned homes and stores left. It is hard to picture anyone wanting to live out here.

This was once a store. The town population was never very large, but it died completely when the railroad stopped using it as a stop.

In 1922, Lund experienced a freak flash flood which flooded the entire town. That is another hard thing to imagine while you are wandering this hot, dusty place.

While we were there, we heard a flap flap flap and saw a car pull up next to us with an extremely flat front passenger tire. The young man inside asked us if we had a cell phone he could use. Unfortunately, he had run into, probably, the last people in Utah to buy a cell phone. We were not any help to him. We couldn't even help him put a spare tire on because he was already using it on the back passenger side for the tire that went flat earlier that day. He was not having a good day.

Town #9: Woodside est. 1881

On our way home from Arches National Park, we stopped at Woodside in Emery County. It is on the highway between Green River and Price. John and I debated whether this small spot should be counted on our list of Utah towns. We decided that if there was a green town sign or other welcome sign and at least one person lives there we could count it. Woodside just barely qualifies.


We think someone lives behind this fenced off gas station. It is the only building in sight. There are no trespassing signs all over. Maybe an ogre lives there. If this counts as a town, it is the least friendly town in Utah.


Somewhere beyond the fence is the old ghost town of Woodside that was settled in 1881. It was a farming community and a livestock loading station along the railroad. Later on it catered to tourists with a cafe, a museum and a geyser that would go off every 20 minutes.The geyser appeared when the railroad was drilling a well in the middle of town. The cafe burned down in 1970, and the geyser was plugged up with rocks and debris which someone had thrown into it.