4 Ghost Towns

Building a new town from scratch is an act of optimism. Yet history shows us that, when it comes to a town’s survival, failure is always an option. While Utah currently has 253 cities, towns and metro townships, the state is also home to more than 140 ghost towns.

When towns die, they tend to disappear completely, but Utah has a number of ghost towns where at least some of the buildings remain intact for present-day Utahns to explore. These are the stories of four of Utah’s most scenic ghost towns.

_{Grafton’s adobe schoolhouse remains remarkably intact. Mount Kinesava in Zion National Park rises a short distance beyond the ghost town, which lies just across the Virgin River from the park’s boundary.
Photograph by Tom Till}

As far as anyone knows, Butch Cassidy never visited the town of Grafton, but the movie version of Butch Cassidy most certainly did. Situated just across the Virgin River from the boundary of Zion National Park, Grafton is one of the best-preserved ghost towns in Utah – and one of the most famous, thanks to its use as a film location. Though only five buildings remain out of the 30 or more that once existed, the town’s adobe schoolhouse and other buildings are remarkably intact.

Grafton was founded in 1859, when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints President Brigham Young sent five families to farm the area for cotton. The farmers had a rough go of it: The river flooded often, and when it didn’t flood, its silt clogged hand-dug irrigation ditches. Tension with the Southern Paiute tribe during the Black Hawk War only made life more stressful; seeking safety in numbers, the townsfolk fled to nearby Rockville in 1866, marking the first time Grafton became a ghost town. Residents returned in 1868, when conflict with the Paiutes died down.

Grafton prospered in the 19th century. Its downfall was the construction of the Hurricane Canal in 1904 and the founding of the city of Hurricane two years later, which prompted local farmers to move closer to that source of plentiful water. Due to the dwindling population, the Church decommissioned its Grafton branch in 1921. By 1944, the last residents moved away.

Western movie producer Harry Sherman bought the site from a descendant of a Grafton co-founder to establish a movie location. Scenes for two historic movies were filmed in Grafton: In Old Arizona (1928), the first Western with sound and filmed outdoors, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), whose classic bicycle scene was filmed here.

The nonprofit Grafton Heritage Partnership Project, formed in 1997, preserves Grafton as a historic site. The partnership put new roofing, windows and doors on the old church, the Russell Home, the Louisa Foster home and John Wood home. The Partnership also bought 150 acres for farming operations, to evoke the settler families’ experience.

Follow the signs to Grafton along Utah State Route 9 through Rockville, which becomes Bridge Lane, named for a one-lane iron bridge from 1924 that crosses the Virgin River. Beyond the river, the Grafton backroad continues roughly parallel with the river for another two miles.

Just before Grafton is Grafton Cemetery, which records the hardships of settler life: six babies under age 1, a 28-year-old who died of tuberculosis and a 9-year-old dragged to death by a horse. As with farm life of all ages, families carried on. Descendants of old Grafton families meet in town annually, briefly bringing the ghost town back to life.

_{The most iconic image of Old Iron Town is its beehive-shaped kiln, which was used to convert local juniper wood into charcoal to power furnaces for iron production.
Photograph by Tami Force}

While Brigham Young wanted cotton from Grafton to help make Utah self-sufficient, his desire for iron led him to establish an Iron Mission in southwest Utah in 1850. Cedar City and Parowan were founded to produce iron, but the project fizzled out by 1858. Ten years later, the Union Iron Co. took another crack at iron production in the region, founding the town of Iron City 24 miles southwest of Cedar City in 1868.

The company built a furnace, two kilns, an ironworks and an ore grinder. The furnace produced iron from raw iron ore mined from Iron Mountain and burned charcoal produced from juniper and pinyon wood in the nearby forest.

Within a year of its founding, Iron City had a post office, schoolhouse, boarding house, general store and butcher shop. By 1870, 19 households made Iron City home, but good times didn’t last long. East Coast iron producers lowered their prices, making Utah iron comparatively more expensive. The ironworks closed in 1876. A few residents remained into the 1880s.

A beehive-shaped kiln is the most intact structure that survives from Iron City, now known as Old Iron Town. The kiln requires constant repair. Loose mortar is reinforced every 10 years. The furnace is in shambles, as visitors had taken stones from it for their own fireplaces.

Old Iron Town State Park is an extension of Frontier Homestead Park, surrounded by the Dixie National Forest. The ruins can be seen on Iron Town Road, which intersects with Utah State Route 56. The kiln is the first ruin visitors encounter within the park. A trail leads behind it, past a settler’s home.

_{The buildings of the town of Sego fell into various stages of decay and collapse after the town was abandoned in 1955. Coal was discovered here in 1908, and for much of the first half of the 20th century, Sego’s coal mining operation did booming business. However, a pair of disastrous fires in 1949 and 1950 meant the beginning of the end.
Photograph by Joshua Hardin}

Cotton ghosted Grafton. Iron ghosted Old Iron City. Coal ghosted Sego, a town in the Book Cliffs that died in 1955.

A founder of neighboring Thompson Springs, a community currently on its way to being counted among Utah’s ghost towns, discovered anthracite coal in 1908, bought up the site and founded a company town there to work the mine. The town was initially named Ballard, then Neslen, and finally Sego, after the sego lily, Utah’s state flower, which grows prolifically in the area.

Sego grew to become one of Grand County’s biggest towns, though its growth was hampered by the lack of a steady water supply. Still, coal production boomed there in the 1920s and ’30s. However, by 1947, the operation was no longer profitable, and the company that owned it shut down. The laid-off employees formed a company of their own, Utah Grand Coal Co., and kept up production, even managing to turn a profit in its first year, but fires in 1949 and 1950 destroyed their investment. Smoke still rises from coal fires burning in abandoned shafts. What remains in view in Sego – structures that haven’t been relocated to nearby Thompson Springs – include foundations and dugouts. The old boarding house and company store have collapsed.

To see the ruins, take the Thompson exit 187 off Interstate 70, then go north on UT-94 N/Thompson Canyon Road until you reach the Sego rock art panel – a display of ancient petroglyphs – on the left. Take a right after the panel and pass the Sego Cemetery on the way to Sego.

_{Silver mining operations began in Silver Reef in 1874, eight years after the discovery of silver in a nearby sandstone ledge. The town’s heyday was brief: Its last mine closed in 1891, and within a decade, Silver Reef was largely abandoned. Rusting equipment is all that remains of the town’s glory days.
Photograph by Utah State Historical Society}

As its name suggests, Silver Reef lived and died by silver. A prospector found silver in 1866 near the townsite, but silver mining from within a nearby sandstone ledge didn’t start until eight years later.

In May 1879, a Silver Reef restaurant caught fire. Residents lined up for a bucket brigade, lifting water from Leeds Creek to the blaze and dampening blankets to prevent the fire from spreading to other buildings. Even so, the Salt Lake Tribune spread panic by saying Silver Reef had been “Chicagoed,” referring to that city’s devastating fire earlier in the decade.

By 1880, Silver Reef had 37 mines and five stamp mills. Its payday supported nine stores, eight dry-goods stores, six saloons, five restaurants, two dance halls, two cemeteries, a newspaper, a brewery and a Wells Fargo office. In 1881, the mining company cut wages, and workers began whispering about a strike. Twenty-five miners were arrested, but Silver Reef’s jail was too small for them. When silver prices fell further, the miners didn’t talk strike, but they inadvertently flooded mine shafts with water. One blow after another, the last mine closed in 1891. Within a decade, most of the town’s buildings had been demolished or moved to Leeds.

Attempts to restart mining operations were made in 1898, 1909, 1916 and 1950, but none were successful. Many Silver Reef buildings were salvaged for their lumber and stone. One buyer found a cache of gold coins worth $10,000, naturally leading to the rapid demolition of other structures in desperate and destructive hopes that they would yield treasure.

Today, wooden sidewalks rot, walls crumble, and sage clogs the streets. The Silver Reef Museum occupies the 1877 Wells Fargo Building, with its original vault. Next door is the Equipment Yard, a collection of mining tools and devices.

Silver Reef appeared in several Robert Redford films: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Electric Horseman. If there can be such a thing as a successful failure, then these Utah ghost towns are prime examples, having endured as ghosts for far longer than they did in life.