Town #63: KANNARAVILLE est. 1861

I couldn't find very much information on Kannaraville. It is a small farming community just south of Cedar City. It was named after the Piute Chief Canarrah, and according to the town sign, it had an all women fire department in the 1960s.

Town #18: CEDAR CITY est. 1851

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.


Here is John talking to a statue of Henry Lunt on Main Street. There are several of these statues along Main Street of Cedar City's founding fathers. What an interesting way to help residents and tourists learn about local history.

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.

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.