Ch16 — Mormon Colonization

On 22 August 1877, Brigham Young sent a letter from Salt Lake City to Canute Peterson, president of the Sanpete LDS Stake, calling for “at least fifty families” to locate in Castle Valley that fall. Seven days later the sixty-six-year-old president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was dead. That letter — his last significant colonizing directive — launched the settlement of what would, three years later, become Emery County. Every founding family in Castle Valley traces its presence, directly or at one remove, to the Sanpete wards that read Brigham Young’s call from the pulpit that September.

This chapter follows the colony from its first reconnaissances in the 1860s through the 1890s, the decade in which it transformed from a loose constellation of log-cabin homesteads into a politically and ecclesiastically organized region with five founding towns, a stake of Zion, a county seat, a courthouse, and an irrigation network that made dry-farming possible. It is a story of cooperative labor, ecclesiastical discipline, cyclical drought, federal polygamy prosecution, and a population that more than doubled in every decade of its first thirty years.

16.1 The Context — Sanpete Overflow & Pre-Colonization Scouts

Sanpete County, one valley to the west across the Wasatch Plateau, had been continuously settled since 1849. By the mid-1870s its arable lands were fully claimed; younger sons and second-generation Mormons needed outlets. Church leaders had long looked with interest at Castle Valley, the broad sage basin between the Wasatch Plateau and the San Rafael Swell drained by Huntington, Cottonwood, Ferron, and Muddy Creeks (Utah History Encyclopedia: Colonization of Utah).

Livestock arrived first. From at least the mid-1860s, Sanpete stockmen ran cattle and sheep seasonally into Castle Valley. Among the earliest grazers were the four Swasey brothers — Joseph, Charles, Sidney, and Rodney — whose names still mark dozens of San Rafael landmarks (Utah History Encyclopedia: Ferron). Orange Seely, the Mount Pleasant ward bishop, grazed his herds on what is now the Castle Dale–Orangeville bench and knew the country intimately before the call came.

In 1875, Leander Lemmon and James McHadden, searching for good winter range for their horses, found ample feed at the mouth of Huntington Canyon. Lemmon brought cattle and sheep over from Cottonwood, Salt Lake County, and in autumn 1876 built the first log cabin on Huntington Creek (Utah Historical Markers: Huntington Settlement). A year before Brigham Young’s official call, a permanent Anglo presence in Castle Valley had already begun. Informal shelters at summer grazing camps — some on Cottonwood Creek, some at the mouth of Ferron Canyon — pre-dated the colonization order by a season or two more.

The church’s interest was not purely demographic. By the 1870s non-Mormon grazers, prospectors, and speculators were pressing into Utah from Colorado and the railroad frontier. Securing Castle Valley before outsiders established priority in land and water was part of Brigham Young’s longer-term strategy of colonial consolidation.

16.2 Brigham Young’s Last Colonizing Call (22 August 1877)

On 22 August 1877, Brigham Young dictated a letter to Canute Peterson at Mount Pleasant. The letter asked the Sanpete Stake to send a party of settlers — “at least fifty families” — into Castle Valley “this fall,” under the pattern of earlier colonizing missions: volunteers named in ward councils, provisions arranged through cooperative labor, leadership assigned from within the sending stake (Utah History Encyclopedia: Emery County; Wikipedia: Emery County, Utah).

Young died on 29 August 1877, one week after signing the Castle Valley letter. Every historian who has examined the founding of Emery County identifies this as the last major colonizing directive Young issued. A man who had overseen the settlement of Utah from 1847 had, in his final days, opened a sixth eastern frontier. The psychological significance of that timing — a last blessing on the last colony — has never been lost on Emery County residents. Pioneer-day speeches through the twentieth century returned again and again to the image of the Great Colonizer’s final letter.

In practical terms the call was read in Sanpete wards in September 1877. Volunteers were named. Some families were “called” by the bishop — a more binding form of assignment — while others volunteered. By October, the first parties were moving over the Wasatch Plateau.

16.3 First Wave, Fall 1877 — Homesteads Without Families

The 1877 arrivals were predominantly men. They came to locate homesteads, break sod, and identify townsites, intending to return to Sanpete for the winter and bring families the following spring. Orange Seely led one of the first parties and, drawing on his grazing familiarity, located his claim on the bench between the Cottonwood and Huntington creeks. His men bunched their claims nearby at what would become Castle Dale and Orangeville (Utah History Encyclopedia; Castle Dale, History to Go).

On Ferron Creek, the Larson and Peterson families from Ephraim, Sanpete County, located claims in fall 1877 — one of the few first-wave groups to bring families that autumn (Utah History Encyclopedia: Ferron; Intermountain Histories). Downstream, Mike (Mitchell) Molen moved cattle and horses onto the lower Ferron reach; the community that grew up around his operation would be known as Molen (and briefly as Emery before a separate town of Emery was platted in 1881) (History of Molen, Utah; History of Ferron).

On Huntington Creek, new arrivals joined Leander Lemmon — who in August 1877 was the closest thing to an established resident. Huntington itself takes its name from the Huntington brothers (Dimick, Oliver, and William), Sanpete-based explorers and stockmen who first entered the valley in 1855.

Most 1877 arrivals wintered in Sanpete. The first Castle Valley winter was harsh; snowfall closed the plateau passes, and the exploratory parties’ log shelters were rough. When spring 1878 came, most men went back over the mountains to fetch their families and to plant.

16.4 Second Wave, 1878 — First Ditches, First Sawmill

A second formal church call went out in spring 1878, and a larger wave arrived that season (Utah History Encyclopedia). In Huntington Canyon, Elias Cox and Charles Hollingshead set up a saw mill to produce the lumber that would build the first frame houses, ditch flumes, and ward meetinghouses (Geary, A History of Water Development in Emery County).

Settlers on all three major creeks — Huntington, Cottonwood, and Ferron — began constructing diversion ditches. The work was cooperative by necessity: no single family could move the volume of earth and rock required to bring creek water onto the benches. Ditch companies were organized on a shares-of-labor basis, which later evolved into the irrigation company structure that still governs Emery County water (treated in more depth in Chapter 19). The first completed ditches were short, shallow, and prone to washout; many of the 1878 crops failed.

The principal crops of that first agricultural season were wheat, oats, barley, and some corn, planted on freshly broken sod. Soil quality varied dramatically — benches alongside Huntington Creek were productive; heavier clay soils nearer the San Rafael proved difficult. Frost arrived early in September. A significant number of 1878 settlers again wintered in Sanpete.

16.5 Third Wave, Spring 1879 — Families Set Roots

Spring 1879 is the date historians most often cite as the true founding of the Emery County colony. Families arrived in number, log cabins were raised on the homesteads located in 1877–78, and the social apparatus of a Mormon community began to appear. Schools opened in log rooms doubling as ward meeting halls; the first choir was organized at Orangeville; and the first post office, at Orangeville, was established that year — named for Orange Seely, the first settler called to Castle Valley (Wikipedia: Orangeville, Utah).

Ecclesiastical organization followed quickly. The Huntington Ward was organized on 7 October 1879 (FamilySearch: Emery Stake Wards and Branches). The Ferron Ward was organized the same year (Utah History Encyclopedia: Ferron). Castle Dale and Orangeville functioned as branches through 1879 and were formalized as wards in the early 1880s. Each ward meetinghouse, typically a log or adobe single-room building, served triple duty: Sunday worship, weekday school, and civic gathering.

The 1880 United States Census, taken in June of that year, recorded 556 residents in what was then Emery County. More than two hundred of them — 237 — lived in a string of homesteads along six miles of Cottonwood Creek (Wikipedia: Emery County, Utah).

16.6 County Organization — The Act of 12 February 1880

On 12 February 1880, the Utah Territorial Legislature passed the act creating Emery County, carved from parts of Sanpete, Sevier, and Piute counties. The new county was named for George W. Emery, the outgoing Utah Territorial Governor (1875–1880), whose term was ending as the act was debated. Castle Dale was designated the county seat owing to its central position among the settled creeks (Utah History Encyclopedia: Emery County; Castle Dale, History to Go).

The original county was enormous — larger than several eastern states — reaching north to include the Spring Glen/Price area (future Carbon County) and east to include the canyonlands around Moab (future Grand County). Grand County was carved out in 1890; Carbon County was separated in 1894. The present Emery County, approximately 4,462 square miles, is less than half the area of the 1880 creation.

The county’s first courthouse was a log building in Castle Dale that doubled as the LDS ward meetinghouse. The first commission court met in 1880; the first elected sheriff was William Taylor; the first recorder kept his books in a trunk. The institutions of county government would mature rapidly over the 1880s (Chapter 23).

16.7 The 1880s — Consolidation, Stake, New Settlements

The decade that followed was one of consolidation. By 1883, Castle Valley had roughly 1,200 residents, five named settlements, and substantial if still-primitive irrigation networks (Geary 1984). Agricultural experimentation broadened: alfalfa, discovered to thrive on the alkaline benches, became the dominant forage and remains Emery County’s principal crop. Livestock — cattle and increasingly sheep — expanded into the San Rafael Swell and up onto the Wasatch Plateau summer ranges.

The Emery Stake of the LDS Church was formally organized in 1880 with Christian G. Larsen as its first president, with the Relief Society established on 13 August 1882 [exact stake-organization date pending verification with the LDS Church Historical Department]. The stake encompassed all Castle Valley wards and provided the institutional framework for coordinated church, civic, educational, and economic decision-making (FamilySearch). New settlements followed the stake’s organizational capacity: Cleveland was founded in 1884 on a gravel bench east of Huntington; the Muddy Creek drainage was homesteaded in the mid-1880s; and the railroad arrival at Blake Station (later Green River) in 1883 pulled a small settlement into the county’s southeast corner (Chapter 18).

Five founding towns of the 1877–1880 colonization era — Huntington (1878), Castle Dale (1879), Orangeville (1879), Ferron (1878), and Molen/Emery (1877) — remain the demographic spine of the county today.

16.8 Federal Polygamy Prosecutions (1882–1890)

Emery County’s formative decade overlapped with the federal government’s most vigorous campaign against plural marriage. The Edmunds Act of 1882 criminalized polygamy and disenfranchised polygamous men; the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 disincorporated the LDS Church and seized much of its property.

Emery County was affected but less directly than the Wasatch Front. A smaller percentage of Castle Valley men practiced plural marriage than in older settlements like Sanpete or Utah Valley, and enforcement pressure in the remote county was lighter. Even so, several Emery County men served terms at the Utah Territorial Penitentiary during the 1880s, and others took refuge temporarily on remote ranches — the San Rafael Swell’s isolated canyons acquired a local reputation as a place where men “on the underground” could wait out federal marshals. Family histories from the period, read carefully, routinely mention absences of fathers who were “visiting Sanpete” for extended periods during the mid-1880s.

The Manifesto of 1890, issued by LDS Church President Wilford Woodruff, officially ended the practice of new plural marriages and reopened the path to Utah statehood, which came in 1896. Emery County, like the rest of Utah, adjusted.

16.9 Cooperative Economy & United Order Legacy

Brigham Young’s last years had been dominated by the United Order, a communal economic experiment that swept Utah in 1874–75 and largely dissolved by 1877. Emery County was settled after the United Order had faded, and no formal Order was organized in Castle Valley. But the cooperative habit persisted. Ditch companies, cooperative herds, shared threshing machines, and ZCMI-affiliated cooperative stores in Huntington, Castle Dale, Orangeville, and Ferron defined the economic life of the 1880s (Geary 1984; Utah History Encyclopedia).

The cooperative ethic outlasted the economic institutions that expressed it. Long after the ZCMI branches closed, Emery County retained a strongly communal culture — the same neighbors who would loan hay, pull a calf, or fix a ditch remained through the late twentieth century the county’s economic fabric. The 1877–1890 founding decade established the pattern.

16.10 LDS Ward and Stake Organization through 1890

By 1890, the Emery Stake included wards at Huntington (1879), Cleveland (1884), Castle Dale (1881), Orangeville (1881), Ferron (1879), Molen, and Emery, plus branches at several outlying ranches (FamilySearch; Geary). The ward meetinghouse — typically log at first, rebuilt as frame or brick by the 1890s — was the hub of community life. It served as Sunday worship space, weekday schoolhouse, weeknight cultural hall, and, in Castle Dale’s case, the county’s first courthouse.

The nearest temple throughout the settlement era was the Manti Temple in Sanpete County, dedicated in 1888. Emery County residents traveled over the Wasatch Plateau to Manti for sealings, endowments, and other temple ordinances — a round trip of several days until automobile roads arrived in the 1910s. The Manti Temple’s centrality to Emery County’s religious life persisted through the twentieth century; no temple has been sited within Emery County proper.

16.11 Non-Mormon Minorities — Ranchers, Rail Workers, Native Communities

Castle Valley was overwhelmingly Mormon through 1900 — perhaps 95% or higher in the decade after settlement. Non-Mormon minorities were present but small. A handful of non-Mormon cattle and sheep operations took up range in the San Rafael Swell and the outer margins of the county. The Denver & Rio Grande Western railroad’s arrival at Green River in 1883 (Chapter 18) brought small populations of Italian, Greek, Slavic, and Anglo-American rail workers and, farther north in what was still Emery County, coal miners. Most of these non-Mormon populations ended up in what became Carbon County when it was separated in 1894 — the boundary was drawn, in part, around the demographic difference.

The Ute and Paiute peoples whose presence in Castle Valley is documented in Chapter 10 largely departed after the 1879–1880 removal to the Uintah-Ouray Reservation. Transient Ute bands continued to travel through the valley and the San Rafael Swell into the early 1900s, particularly along traditional routes to piñon harvest and to seasonal camps. Archaeological evidence suggests intermittent Ute use of the San Rafael well into the twentieth century, even as the settled population of the valley became almost exclusively Mormon.

16.12 Demographic Summary, 1880–1900

U.S. Decennial Census counts tell the story of the colony’s first three decades:

• 1880 — 556 residents (the original Emery County, covering what is now Emery + Grand + Carbon).
• 1890 — 5,076 residents (Emery County as still bounded in 1890; Grand was separated earlier that year).
• 1894 — Carbon County separated from Emery.
• 1900 — approximately 4,657 residents in Emery County proper.

The 1880–1890 growth — nearly tenfold — is among the steepest growth curves of any Utah county in the nineteenth century, and reflects the combined effect of the 1877 call, continued Sanpete out-migration through the 1880s, and the Mormon demographic norm of large families. After the separation of Carbon in 1894, Emery County’s population leveled at roughly 5,000 where it remained, with fluctuations, until the mid-twentieth century coal boom (Chapter 21).

The founding colony had succeeded. Five towns, a county government, a full LDS stake, functioning ditches, established livestock operations, and a cooperative civic culture were all in place by 1890. The economic transformation — coal, railroads, energy — that would define the twentieth century was already beginning at the county’s edges. It is to that transformation that the next chapters turn.

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Sources

1. Utah History Encyclopedia, “Colonization of Utah.” https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/c/COLONIZATION_OF_UTAH.shtml
2. Utah History Encyclopedia, “Emery County.” https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/e/EMERY_COUNTY.shtml
3. Utah History Encyclopedia / History to Go, “Castle Dale.” https://historytogo.utah.gov/castle-dale/
4. Utah History Encyclopedia, “Ferron.” https://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/f/FERRON.shtml
5. Utah Historical Markers, “Huntington Settlement.” https://utahhistoricalmarkers.org/era/end19th/huntington-settlement/
6. FamilySearch, “Emery Stake, Utah LDS Church Wards and Branches.” https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Emery_Stake,_Utah_LDS_Church_Wards_and_Branches
7. FamilySearch, “Emery County, Utah Genealogy.” https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Emery_County,_Utah_Genealogy
8. Wikipedia, “Emery County, Utah.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emery_County,_Utah
9. Wikipedia, “Orangeville, Utah.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangeville,_Utah
10. Geary, Edward A., “A History of Water Development in Emery County, Utah.” https://www.waterhistory.org/histories/emery2/emery2.pdf
11. Simonds, William Joe, “A History of the Emery County Project.” https://www.waterhistory.org/histories/emery/emery.pdf
12. Utah Historical Quarterly, vol. 48 no. 4 (1980), “Rebels and Relatives: The Mormon Foundation of Spring Glen, 1878-90.” https://issuu.com/utah10/docs/uhq_volume48_1980_number4/s/131091
13. Utah Historical Quarterly, vol. 66 no. 3 (1998), “History Written on the Land in Emery County.” https://issuu.com/utah10/docs/uhq_volume66_1998_number3/s/10363215
14. Intermountain Histories, “Ferron, Emery County, Utah: A History of Early Settlement.” https://www.intermountainhistories.org/items/show/886
15. History of Ferron, Utah. https://onlineutah.us/ferronhistory.shtml
16. History of Molen, Utah. https://www.onlineutah.com/molenhistory.shtml
17. BYU Library Special Collections, “Latter Day Saints — Colonization — Utah — Emery County.” https://archives.lib.byu.edu/subjects/3506
18. U.S. Decennial Census data, 1880, 1890, 1900, 1910 (U.S. Census Bureau).

Proposed Maps / Figures

• Map 16.1 — Sanpete-to-Castle-Valley pioneer routes, 1877–1879.
• Map 16.2 — Emery County as organized in 1880, showing original boundaries and the later carve-outs (Grand 1890, Carbon 1894).
• Map 16.3 — Founding LDS wards, 1879–1884.
• Figure 16.1 — Facsimile of Brigham Young’s 22 August 1877 letter to Canute Peterson (LDS Church Historical Department — permission required).
• Figure 16.2 — Portrait of Orange Seely, first settler called to Castle Valley (if pre-1929 image available).
• Figure 16.3 — Early photograph of a Castle Valley irrigation ditch work party, c. 1880s (Utah State Historical Society).
• Figure 16.4 — First Castle Dale courthouse / ward meetinghouse.

Proposed Tables

• Table 16.1 — Founding wave chronology: 1875 (Lemmon), 1876 (first cabin), 1877 (call), 1878 (ditches), 1879 (families & wards), 1880 (county), 1882 (stake), 1883 (railroad), 1884 (Cleveland), 1888 (Manti Temple).
• Table 16.2 — Founding settlements with date, founding families, creek drainage.
• Table 16.3 — Emery County population, U.S. Census 1880–2020 (with notes on boundary changes 1890 & 1894).
• Table 16.4 — LDS ward and stake organization dates, 1879–1890.

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Engagement Features

Did You Know?

• The first LDS-sent settlers reached Castle Valley in 1875–1876, but the formal “call to Castle Valley” was issued from Salt Lake pulpits in October 1877, making the valley one of the last major settlement pushes of the Utah territorial period.
• The Emery Stake, organized in 1882, and Emery County, organized in 1880, were both named for George W. Emery, Utah Territory’s Secretary and Acting Governor — not for the town of Emery, which was itself named for the county.
• The 1888 dedication of the Manti Temple, just over the Wasatch Plateau in Sanpete County, transformed religious life for Castle Valley settlers, who could now reach a temple in a single long day rather than undertake the multi-week journey to Salt Lake City or St. George.

Family Activity

Ward History Scavenger Hunt. Visit the Daughters of Utah Pioneers (DUP) displays at Castle Dale, Huntington, Ferron, or Emery, or look at the pioneer exhibits in the Museum of the San Rafael. As a family, find (1) a founding-family name, (2) a first-settler photograph, (3) a pioneer-era artifact (rifle, Bible, spinning wheel, or kitchen tool), (4) an early map showing ward boundaries, and (5) an entry about a woman pioneer. Discuss what each reveals about settlement life.

Youth Challenge — Pioneer Journal

Using this chapter’s settlement chronology table, imagine you are a twelve-year-old in one of the founding families arriving in Castle Valley in 1879. Write three journal entries: (1) your first view of the valley from the top of the Wasatch Plateau divide, (2) a day of ditch-digging or spring planting, (3) a family event such as the birth of a younger sibling. Include real details from the chapter — weather, food, livestock, scripture.

Field Trip

Castle Dale Pioneer Museum and Museum of the San Rafael (Castle Dale, Emery County). A combined visit gives an overview of both the LDS settlement story and the paleontology and archaeology of the surrounding region. The Pioneer Museum features reconstructed log cabins, period tools, and rotating exhibits of founding-family artifacts.

Photo Assignment

Photograph a still-functioning irrigation ditch that traces back to the 1870s–1890s. Most Castle Valley towns still use main ditches that follow century-old alignments. The photograph should emphasize the continuity between pioneer water engineering and the modern agricultural landscape.