Grafton ghost town

Grafton is said to be the most photographed ghost town in the West, and the filmography backs it up.

It stands just south of Zion National Park in Washington County, Utah, inside the legal boundaries of Rockville, the nearest inhabited town. In Old Arizona was shot here in 1929, the first talkie filmed outdoors, and so was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

The settlement began in December 1859 as part of the southern Utah cotton-growing project ordered by Brigham Young. A group from Virgin led by Nathan Tenney founded a place they called Wheeler. It did not last: on the night of 8 January 1862 a weeks-long flood of the Virgin River, part of the Great Flood of 1862, largely destroyed it. They rebuilt about a mile upriver and named the new town after Grafton, Massachusetts.

It grew fast. By 1864 there were some 28 families, each farming around an acre, and they dug irrigation canals and planted orchards, some of which are still standing. Grafton was briefly the county seat of Kane County, from January 1866 until 12 January 1867, and boundary changes in 1882 moved it into Washington County.

Flooding was not the only problem. The Virgin River carries a great deal of silt through this stretch, and residents had to dredge the irrigation ditches clear at least weekly, far more often than neighbouring settlements. Grafton was also the only community in the area on the south bank of the river, which left it isolated, and in 1866 the outbreak of the Black Hawk War brought widespread fear.

What is left is looked after by the Grafton Heritage Partnership Project, which describes its work as bringing historic and landscape preservation together, and asks people to help preserve the natural and human traces that show what one generation can leave for another. That is the right frame for the place: the buildings and the valley they sit in are the same exhibit.