Littlefield: First Farm on the Arizona Strip

Just inside the Arizona border on Interstate Fifteen sits one of the oldest Anglo-American settlements in the state. Littlefield was established in eighteen sixty-four or sixty-five when Henry W. Miller led a group of Latter-day Saint pioneers to the north bank of the Virgin River in the remote Arizona Strip.

The settlers called the place Beaver Dams, for the animals that had built their lodges in the wash nearby. It is among the earliest agricultural settlements by non-Native people in northern Arizona, carved out of the Mojave Desert fringe along the river. The town served as a waystation on the emerging Mormon road linking Utah settlements to California.

The original Beaver Dams name eventually gave way to Littlefield, and the community has survived in this isolated river corridor for more than a hundred and fifty years, one of the quietest towns on the modern interstate.