Called to Hard Country: Pioneer Isolation in Wayne County

The LDS Church that directed Mormon settlement across Utah used a specific mechanism for its most remote territories: a mission call, which was understood as a religious obligation that was difficult to decline. Families who received a call to colonize southern Utah's canyon country were going somewhere most of them had never seen, to farm land they had not chosen, in places that experienced settlers would have found daunting. The pioneers who built what became Torrey in the early eighteen eighties arrived in a landscape of spectacular beauty and unforgiving conditions.

The growing season at nearly seven thousand feet of elevation was short. Irrigation required hard labor to ditch water from the Fremont River across the terraced land. The soil in some places was rich enough for fruit and alfalfa; in other places it was too alkaline or too thin to support much of anything.

Families that had come from the gentler valleys of central Utah found themselves farming at the edge of a red rock wilderness with no road connecting them to anything that could be called a city. The log church and school that still stands in Torrey dates to the late eighteen hundreds, well over a decade after the first settlers arrived. It took that long to build something permanent, to believe the community would last.

The building is still there, made of logs. It is a record of what it took to stay in a place like this.