Sheep have the right of way in Cedar City. Most of the major thoroughfares in this southwest Utah community are designated livestock trails.

Though it’s not an everyday occurrence, people are guaranteed to see sheep take the place of cars on Main Street one day each year during the Cedar Livestock & Heritage Festival. The highlight of this citywide celebration in late October is the Sheep Parade, during which 1,000 or more of the woolly animals march through Cedar City as they come down from their summer pasture on Cedar Mountain, east of town, to their winter pasture in the desert to the west.

While agriculture is a big part of life in Cedar City, it vies with the arts and the outdoors as the major focuses of this community of 33,000 residents. The city is known as a major gateway to Zion National Park and Cedar Breaks National Monument, as well as skiing at Brian Head Resort.

As the largest city in Iron County, Cedar City was a major hub for iron mining as far back as 1851, when Latter-day Saint settlers were sent here to build an iron works. Iron has been produced only sporadically in the past four decades. During that time, Cedar City gained a new claim to fame as the self-proclaimed “Festival City.” There are many festivals here, but when people in town refer to “the festival,” they’re almost always talking about the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

On evenings in the summer and early fall, crowds swirl around the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Center for the Arts on the campus of Southern Utah University before performances of the Utah Shakespeare Festival, which celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2021. This year, eight plays are being staged at the center’s three theaters.

Despite the festival’s name, most of the plays produced each season are not by Shakespeare. Actor Aaron Galligan-Stierle was taken aback when, after auditioning with two Shakespeare monologues along with a brief song, he was cast in two musicals his first season.

Galligan-Stierle is now acting at the festival in his ninth season in the past 18 years, playing the butler Wadsworth in Clue, based on the board game, and Adolfo Pirelli in the musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Returning season after season is the norm for actors at the festival. In Clue, eight of his 10 castmates are people he has worked with before.

“That is unheard of in the rest of the theater community,” Galligan-Stierle said. He has acted on Broadway and major theaters across the country. Usually, the actors meet each other for the first time at the start of the play, then never work together again.

“It’s really hard to create depth of relationship on stage when you don’t have depth of relationship in real life,” he said. That’s not an issue at the festival. “We can read each other’s body language and thought processes much quicker and easier.”

Though Cedar City isn’t his full-time hometown, Galligan-Stierle said it has become his “artistic and spiritual home.” Residents are deeply invested in the theater and its actors; wherever he goes in town, he gets stopped by people who recognize him from past performances, all the way back to his first role.

At most regional theaters, traveling actors might be given one bedroom in a house shared with other actors. But when Galligan-Stierle, who lives in Pennsylvania most of the year, comes to Cedar City, the festival provides a house not just for him but for his wife, Shannon, and their children, Devin, 10, and Zoe, 8.

The city has become a place of cherished family memories, starting back before the kids came along, when he and Shannon purchased their wedding rings from Clark & Linford Jewelers on Main Street. And last year, the entire family, including the kids, took the stage together as cast members in the musical Ragtime.

The two blocks of the Beverley Taylor Sorenson Center are an artistic focal point of Cedar City. The performing arts are represented by the three theaters, and the visual arts got in on the act with the 2016 debut of the Southern Utah Museum of Art, or SUMA.

Suma began with a gift of paintings from Jimmie Jones, a Cedar City native who had gained renown as a painter of landscapes from Zion National Park and other regional locales. Though some of Jones’ work will be on display going forward, the museum has established itself as a place for modern and contemporary art. Earlier this year, SUMA put on an exhibit of 14 Andy Warhol screen prints from the groundbreaking pop artist’s “Cowboys and Indians” series.

Cedar City’s dedication to the arts has been a constant from the community’s earliest days, said Sara Nelson Penny, a longtime Cedar City violin teacher. Penny plays in and is past president of the Orchestra of Southern Utah, which dates back to Southern Utah University’s founding in 1897. Every public school in Cedar City has an orchestra of its own, she said, “and we probably have more pianos per capita than almost any small town.”

Penny is also involved in the Cedar City Arts Council, which hosts art walks on the final Friday of the month from June through September. Live music and artists’ displays fill Center Street from Artisans Gallery to SUMA. The nonprofit Artisans Gallery showcases the work of 60 artists, nearly all from Iron County. Most are not full-time artists but rather locals who draw inspiration from the surrounding red rock scenery.

Like many artistic people in the community, Penny’s roots are in agriculture. For more than a dozen years, members of her extended Nelson family provided the sheep for the annual Sheep Parade.

In decades past, sheep walking down the city streets was a regular occurrence not just reserved for the parade. Ranchers still move their sheep up to Cedar Mountain to graze in the summertime and back down in the fall. However, since the start of the 21st century, when a Wal-Mart and surrounding Providence Center shopping area were built where the trail from the mountain meets the town, most ranchers truck their sheep up and down the mountain.

Around the time the Wal-Mart was built, a group of locals founded the Cedar Livestock & Heritage Festival to make sure the sheep tradition remained a visible part of the community. Lori Nelson Rowley would ride an ATV in each year’s Sheep Parade, as she and her many relatives sought to keep her family’s sheep from running loose as they marched through town.

Rowley grew up around the cycles of sheep ranching: Shearing the animals in March, lambing in April, moving the sheep to the mountain in June, returning in October, then wintering in desert pastures before starting the process anew the next year.

Every year, Rowley looked forward to spending time on Cedar Mountain, when the whole family would reunite while taking turns looking after the sheep. While the kids slept in tents, grownups would stay in the sheep wagon, which looks like a covered wagon with a tin roof but functions as a primitive RV for sheep herders to stay in – someone must stay with the herd 24/7 to ward off mountain lions and other predators.

The family would spend days playing in the nearby pond and stream, and cooked supper in a Dutch oven. The time on the mountain was blissful if uneventful, but some episodes live on in family lore. One such incident happened in 1967, before Rowley was born, when her dad’s mother left the sheep wagon in the middle of the night to answer nature’s call. The moment Grandma opened the door, she was face to face with a bear, perhaps no more than 10 feet away.

The bear quickly scampered off. The next morning, Rowley’s grandparents contacted the county tracker. They tracked down the bear, which was a danger to the herd, and shot it. The meat didn’t go to waste. As it happened, Rowley’s mother was to meet her father’s family for the first time shortly thereafter. And on the menu for that first meet-the-parents moment? Bear. Her mother, who had grown up as a city girl in Midvale, graciously ate the meal provided by her soon-to-be in-laws. It tasted like pork.

The Sheep Parade goes down Main Street, past the blocks near City Hall that form the heart of Cedar City’s historic downtown. For generations, one of the anchor businesses here has been Bulloch Drug. The drugstore has been in business since 1955, but the building it occupies is much older, and the stone archway over the door reading “Cedar Sheep Association” still names its original occupant.

Evan Vickers, who currently serves as majority leader in the Utah State Senate, purchased Bulloch Drug in 1996. Around that time, he decided to add an old-fashioned soda fountain like the ones that were ubiquitous in drugstores in the ’40s and ’50s. He tracked down a 1942 stainless steel Bastian-Blessing soda fountain and hired a local cabinet maker to build the wood around it. As the finishing touch, he received a gift from Utah Shakespeare Festival founder Fred Adams: tile panels taken from his own father’s bygone soda fountain. Adams even taught Bulloch Drug employees in the ways of the soda jerk.

Today, people can buy a Fred Adams Chocolate Coke, or any number of other soda and ice cream combinations. The soda fountain also has a prodigious assortment of candy, including rare treats like Pez sold in bulk by the pound.

The city is working to get this part of Main Street designated as a national historic district. It is part of an overall historic preservation effort backed by many in town. The issue of preserving Cedar City’s past feels urgent, because the city is growing – quickly.

From July 1, 2020 to July 1, 2021, Iron County was the fastest growing county in Utah, with a population growing 6.2 percent in just one year. Cedar City is expanding in all directions except east, where Cedar Mountain blocks development. Places like the Cedar Livestock Market, which once were beyond the outskirts of town, are now right in the middle of it.

Ranchers and longtime residents often attribute the recent traffic and development to “move-ins” – outsiders who have settled in Cedar City. There can be tension between newcomers and old-timers, but the two sides can sometimes find common ground.

Sara Patterson can attest to the help she has received from the local “good old boys” since moving here from California with her parents in 2005 at age 10. The family settled on a rural acre, where, at just 14 years old, Patterson founded her own organic farm.

“Some days, it’s just crazy to think that I started the farm when I was 14,” she said, “but our community has been there for me since the beginning.”

Red Acre Farm is nothing like the traditional farming done in the Cedar Valley, where vast fields of alfalfa and pastures of sheep and cattle are the norm. Patterson’s farm, on the other hand, is the only one in the county devoted to vegetable production as a sole source of income. Also different from the rest, Red Acre Farm sells its harvest by subscription as community-supported agriculture, or at its farmstand on the farm grounds, which are free for the public to visit every day but Sunday.

Though the old-timers didn’t quite get what it was Patterson was trying to do, they didn’t hesitate to help her. Patterson didn’t have any heavy farm equipment, so Dave Staheli, then-manager of Brent Hunter Farms, the area’s largest hay grower, brought a tractor to till Red Acre Farm’s fields. The late sheep rancher John Pace donated manure to fertilize the crops.

With help, Red Acre Farm has grown from a young girl’s dream to an established part of the community. And with everyone pitching in, Cedar City seeks to achieve the delicate balance of growing bigger while maintaining its strong roots.

So many new houses have been built in recent years that Cedar City is gradually becoming contiguous with Enoch, the city to the north. Despite the influx of new people, the sense of community remains intact. This fact was underscored last year when a catastrophic flood hit Enoch.

On Sunday, Aug. 1, 2021, what can only be described as a megastorm erupted over Enoch, unleashing a credulity-straining 6 inches of rain in just 45 minutes. It was more than the city’s drainage system could handle, and flood water poured into 300 of Enoch’s 2,300 homes.

As soon as the rain stopped, a second flood began – a flood of people coming in from Cedar City to help. It was a completely spontaneous effort, Enoch City Manager Rob Dotson said. “It was people walking up and down the streets, stopping and saying, ‘I’m here to help. What can I do?’ ” Dotson said.

Businesses in Cedar City closed and had all their staff come to Enoch to remove damaged housewares, repair drywall and haul out debris from flooded homes. Restaurants handed out free food to volunteers. Cedar City’s Canyon View High School football team skipped practice to come help.

On Tuesday, two days after the flood, a national disaster relief organization approached Dotson to let him know they could be in town on Saturday to lend aid. Dotson told them there was no need – by that time, the cleanup would be complete. Sure enough, by Saturday, the all-out community cleanup effort was finished, having hauled out a thousand tons of debris.

“In a time of crisis, we’re all one big family, and people’s hearts will lead them to go where help is needed,” Dotson said. “If we can continue to serve each other, then this place we live will become a home. It’s not just a house, a piece of property we own – it’s home, where we can actually become a family.”