Cedar City, The Iron Mission
Near Cedar City, Utah
Cedar City exists because Brigham Young needed iron. When Mormon exploring parties in the late eighteen forties reported vast iron ore deposits in the red hills of southwestern Utah, Young immediately recognized the strategic problem facing his desert kingdom: the Great Basin had no source of iron, and every nail, plow blade, and wagon axle had to be hauled across a thousand miles of plains at brutal expense.
His solution was the Iron Mission. He called the Iron Mission in eighteen fifty, and in January of eighteen fifty-one settlers founded Parowan, nineteen miles north of here, as an agricultural base of support. The following November, on November eleventh, eighteen fifty-one, two companies of men led by Henry Lunt arrived at this site and established Fort Cedar, the ironmaking settlement that would become Cedar City. They were mostly Welsh, English, Irish, and Scottish miners who knew the trade.
A furnace went into operation in September of eighteen fifty-two, proof that manufacturing in the Great Basin was possible. Church leaders were thrilled. But the operation never flourished. The ore was of variable quality, flooding plagued the works, and the daily demands of frontier survival kept pulling workers away from the furnace. The iron mission eventually failed, and Utah continued importing metal from the East.
The town survived without the ironworks, growing as a supply hub on the road south and eventually becoming known as the Gateway to Utah's national parks. Today Cedar City is home to Southern Utah University, a thriving Shakespeare festival, and the jumping-off point for Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Cedar Breaks. The iron ore is still in those hills.
