Not far from Lyman is the county seat of Loa. Loa was named after Mauna Loa, a volcano in Hawaii, by Franklin Young. Franklin Young served a mission in Hawaii and was impressed by the volcano there.
The town sign is on top of a hill northwest of the town. Here is what looks like from the sign.
A short distance from Bicknell is the town of Lyman. It is one more small Utah farming community. It was named after LDS apostle Francis Marion Lyman. As you can see, I look really excited to be here on the edge of town.
Sometimes, these little towns fool you. Just as you think you have found the only town sign, you find another bigger one. We almost missed this one, but John made a quick turn and stop. It is hard to skip a bigger sign. We had to dodge sprinklers to get this picture.
The town of Bicknell lies just west of Torrey. It was originally called Thurber after an early settler. In 1916, Thomas Bicknell, a wealthy educator and historian from Providence, Rhode Island, offered a library of 1,000 books to any town that would name itself after him. The townspeople of Thurber took him up on his offer and changed their town's name to Bicknell. The people of Bicknell, however, only received 500 books because another Utah town also took up Thomas Bicknell's offer. The town of Grayson changed its name to Blanding, Bicknell's wife's maiden name, and they received the other half of the library. That must have seemed an easy way to start a library.
Torrey is the only town so far that I haven't been able to find an establishment date for. All the sources that I have been using just say that it happened sometime in the 1880s. That is all I got from the Torrey website too. It is named after a Colonel Torrey, who served with Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders during the Spanish American War. Torrey is one more small farming community that has expanded to include tourist accommodations. It sits about 10 miles west of Capital Reef National Park.
Capital Reef National Park is one of the lesser known national parks in Utah, but it has some really nice hikes. This is a picture of Hickman's Bridge.
The next few towns are from another quick Thursday night trip to see parts of Utah. This time we left our children behind and took John's parents. Here John is on the outskirt of the town of Redmond on the northern border of Sevier County. There were a bunch of water birds in the pond behind the fence when we pulled up. I think John scared them all off. He is SO SCARY!
Redmond was named after three red hills nearby. This is a picture of an old service station in town. John's grandmother owned and operated this station with her first husband in the late 1930s and early 1940s until his death from an infection after some dental work. Dentists were even scarier back then.
Salina was our last stop on our trip down to Cedar City and Zion National Park. It is one more small farming community. Salina was named for the salt deposits that the original settlers found near the town site.
We stopped at this cafe for dinner. Mom's Cafe is one of the oldest cafes in Utah. It has been in business since the 1920s. The food was very good. We gladly indulged in some of their slices of pie. The only thing we could really complain about is the ugly facade from the 1950s or 60s that no doubt covers some much nicer brickwork.
Marysvale is on the northern end of the Sevier Valley. This little town has connections with the mining industry. In the late 1800s there were gold mines up the canyon to the west of Marysvale. Marysvale sneaks up on you when you are driving because it is just on the other side of a ridge. One minute it isn't there and the next it is.
Isn't that just a cool old sign? Junction has several cool old things about it like the old county courthouse and an art deco gas station that is hiding in a grove of trees. We drove thru Junction on the last day of their Butch Cassidy Days. I was sad to hear that we missed out on the parade.
Just across the Piute County line, we came to the little town of Circleville. Its biggest claim to fame is that the outlaw Butch Cassidy grew up on a ranch just south of town. His family cabin still stands in a grove of trees, but it isn't marked as such. We stopped at one of the strangest antique shops here. It was housed in a shed, and our presence was announced by a howling pack of dogs behind a fence next door.
Panguitch is the largest town in Garfield County. It doesn't take much to get that distinction. Panguitch is a Piute word for 'big fish'. No one has ever explained to me why they named the town Big Fish. Are there huge fish in the local river? Maybe the settlers just liked the way that Panguitch rolled off the tongue. The town's big festival is the Quilt Walk Festival, which celebrates when 7 men crossed the snow covered mountains using quilts to get supplies to the starving settlers the first winter. I'll have to remember that the next time I am trapped by snow with only a couple of quilts to my name.
Panguitch caters to the tourists who come to see Bryce Canyon National Park which is not too far away in the mountains east of town. This is Byrce as the sun is rising. It is quite spectacular.
Driving north along highway 89, we next came to the little town of Hatch. It was named after Meltiar Hatch who settled here with his two wives. Because of flooding problems with the Sevier River, in 1901 to 1904, the town site was moved one and a half miles and combined with other small communities. I like that in this picture you can start to see the red rocks of Red Canyon behind me. We were coming on Bryce Canyon country.
Alton is a little town tucked away in a mountain valley a few miles from Highway 89. It was a beautiful little place, but I bet it gets really cold in the winter. I didn't even know that it existed before we drove up there. As you can see, all the kids wanted to get out of the car to have their pictures taken this time. I guess they were inspired.
I thought it was nice that the town posted its own history right below the welcome sign. Now I don't have to try to dig up any information about the town for this post. If you want to know, just read the sign like I did. Now you know as much as I.
The small town of Orderville lies just north of Mt. Carmel along highway 89. It was named after the United Order which was a church sponsered communal living society that was experimented with there when it was first settled. All the settlers donated their property and money to the Order, and each family was given a responsibility in the community for the betterment of all involved. I'm not sure that I explained that very well or that I understand it correctly, so don't quote me on that. Several communities in Utah experimented with the United Order at that time, but Orderville had the most success. I have a great-great grandfather who loved the idea and moved his family to Orderville. He was in charge of the orchards. Unfortunately, he didn't consult with my great-great grandmother before he sold their home snd store up north out from under her. She did not like living in Orderville. When the United Order started falling apart, they left Orderville to start new out in Giles, a ghost town near Hanksville.
Just outside the east entrance to Zion National Park along highway 89 lies the small town of Mt. Carmel. Mt. Carmel was first settled in 1864, but it was abandoned during the Black Hawk War for safety reasons. The settlers came back in 1871 and moved in for good. It is named after the mountain near Jerusalem. The artist Maynard Dixon had his summer home in this sleepy little farming community.
Just before you reach the west entrance of Zion National Park, you drive through the little town of Springdale. It has pretty much given up everything but tourism to survive. The town is full of hotels, restaurants and anything else that caters to the millions of tourists who travel to Zion every year. It isn't like it was in 1920 when Anne Widtsoe described it this way:"I went for a ride down to Springdale, just at the mouth of the canyon. A quiet secluded spot where the inhabitants are years behind the times. Quaint store and little church with a bell, little gardens, they live and die and know no other life - many never having seen a railroad, etc. That is the life."
This little town does enjoy some the most gorgeous surroundings in the state. It just takes your breathe away.
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.
East of La Verkin is the little town of Virgin. It is named after the nearby Virgin River, but it was almost called Pocketville. We didn't know if this was an official town sign, but it was much more interesting than the little green sign on the outskirts. It was the first of several towns situated right nest to the Virgin River on the way to Zion National Park. All the towns along the river depended on the river in their early development, but the river, like an angry child, would occasionally throw a fit and have flash floods that would destroy half the farms. I think that the people of Virgin should have skipped the farms and just provided sacrificial victims for volcanoes, dragons and big hairy apes. Someone always needs a virgin.
One gets the feeling that La Verkin residents like their bridge. Their welcome sign is located just a few hundred feet and on the other side of the Hurricane sign. The sign is shaped just like the steel bridge that spans across the Virgin River just before entering the town. I took a picture of the bridge just to prove it. (See below.)
La Verkin is nestled between Hurricane to the south and Toquerville to the north. It's history is similar to Hurricane in that it wasn't settled until the settlers figured out how to bring water up from the Virgin River. There seems to be some question an how the town got it's name. If you are visiting Zion National Park from the west you have to go thru La Verkin, and that was our goal on this trip.
Isn't it a little strange to have a town named after a tropical storm out here in the desert? The story goes that, in the 1860s, Erastus Snow was leading a team of surveyors in the area when he had the top of his buggy blown off in a gust wind. His comment, "Well, that was a Hurricane. We'll name this Hurricane Hill.", stuck to the place. For some reason the residents of Hurricane like to pronounce the town name "Her-ah-Kun". That always throws me off. The town wasn't established until 1906 because that is when it was finally figured out how to bring water up from the Virgin River to the plateau that Hurricane sits on. Like so many other towns around Utah, water was a major issue. Once it had water, though, Hurricane's farms were able to produce quite the crops, I guess, because it earned the nickname "The Fruit Basket of Southern Utah".
Out of the desert around Lund, we arrived at Cedar City. Cedar City is the largest city in Iron County. It was first established in 1851, when Henry Lunt led a group to the area to start an iron works. The residents worked on the iron works for a short time then turned their hands to agriculture instead. In the twentieth century, Cedar City became the hub of national park tourism.
I almost always have fun when I come to Cedar City. The Shakespeare Festival that takes place every summer at Southern Utah University is great entertainment. We couldn't go this year to any of the plays, but we did spend an evening watching the Green Show that is held on the lawn every evening for free. Even the kids enjoyed it. Huzzah!
Cedar Breaks National Monument is just up the road from Cedar City. That was a fun place for a quick hike and a picnic even though it turned cold and threatened to rain on us.
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.
After eating lunch in Milford, we traveled southeast to Minersville. This little towns name comes from all the mining activity in the area when it was first settled. A storm was blowing in as we drove into town, and B was complaining about it being cold, which it wasn't really. It did rain on us while we filled up at the gas station. Thank you to those Minersville residents that helped us find a good road to Lund. You directions were much appreciated.
Keep traveling south from Deseret, and eventually you will run into Milford. Milford is surprisingly bigger than you would expect out here in the middle of nowhere. It is home to more than 1000 people. For awhile, it was the southernmost end of the railroad. The town serviced the mining and livestock in the area. The Union Pacific is still a big employer in town. It is nice to see a old railroad town that is still viable.
In town, the visitor information is housed in this old caboose sitting in the middle of a park. The kids liked going inside.
We hit the jackpot of town signs just northwest of Delta. There is a cluster of small farming communities here making the desert blossom if not as a rose but as alfalfa. They are obviously proud of their ability to grow the stuff. Abraham started as a "church farm" that was land bought by a company of Salt Lake men such as Wilford Woodruff and George Q. Cannon in the late 1870s, but it soon broke up into a group of smaller farms. During World War II, the government bought up most of the farm land for the Japanese internment camp of Topaz. Sutherland was established in 1910. It was named after the U. S. Senator George Sutherland. Sugarville was established in 1911. It was named after the sugar beet factory that was there in its early years. It was also briefly called Alalfa and Omaha. There was also another community between Sutherland and Sugarville once called Woodrow that was named after President Woodrow Wilson.
Oak City is a small farming town south of Leamington. It is situated at the mouth of Oak Creek Canyon. If I had to pick a little isolated town to live in this could be it. Oak City has a charm to it that appeals to me with its tree lined streets. The settlers of Deseret would come here in the summers to graze their flocks of sheep before the town was established. When it was settled, you could buy a lot for $2.50. The settlers wanted to call the town Oak Creek, but when they petitioned for a post office, the government called the post office the Oak City office. Eventually, the residents accepted the name change.
The town sign is placed in front of the cemetery. After taking a picture, our girls wanted to go into the cemetery to see one of the headstones. Several of John's ancestors were settlers of Oak City and are buried here. This is the grave of Eliza Partridge Lyman. It is nice to know that some of my cemetery wandering has worn off on them.
