Brigham City, Mormon Ghost Town

In April of eighteen seventy-six, twenty Mormon families and fifteen bachelors arrived at the Little Colorado River in what is now Navajo County, Arizona, sent by church leadership to build a fortified settlement in the region. They dammed the river, planted crops, and dug a flour mill from the sandy soil. The soil was the problem: salty, draining poorly, prone to early frost.

They renamed the camp Brigham City, after church president Brigham Young, hoping the name would help. Floods washed out the dams repeatedly. By eighteen eighty-one the last families had left.

The site sat empty for nearly a century before being added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-eight. Today the ruins lie just north of Winslow, which became the town that Brigham City never could.