The Mormon Trail and Utopian Iowa

This stretch of southern Iowa carried one of the great migrations in American history. After their prophet Joseph Smith was murdered, the Mormons were driven from Nauvoo, Illinois, and in eighteen forty six they began a hard trek west across Iowa toward the Great Salt Lake Valley. Along the way they built temporary settlements, including Garden Grove and Mount Pisgah in this region, way stations for the thousands who followed.

The marker also recalls a stranger chapter. These same hills drew utopian dreamers. In eighteen fifty one, a communal group called the Hopewell Colony formed and later founded the town of Hopeville in Clarke County, sharing property and labor.

Most such experiments faded quickly, but Hopeville's remnants lingered into the twentieth century, a reminder that southern Iowa was once a landscape of both faith and grand social experiment.