Joseph City, Arizona
Near Holbrook, Arizona
Joseph City, sitting along the Little Colorado River in northeastern Arizona, is the only one of the four Little Colorado River Mormon colonies that survives. In eighteen seventy-six, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sent four colonizing parties to settle the Little Colorado Valley. One of them, led by Captain William C.
Allen and seventy-three settlers, established a camp they called Allen's Camp. The harsh desert river flooded and salted the fields repeatedly, and the other three companion settlements, Brigham City, Sunset, and Obed, were eventually abandoned. Allen's Camp survived, was renamed Saint Joseph, and then Joseph City in the early nineteen hundreds to avoid confusion with Saint Joseph, Missouri.
It has never been large, but it has been continuously occupied for a hundred and fifty years.
