Cedar City to Fillmore: The Mormon Settlement Grid

The small cities between Saint George and Salt Lake, Cedar City, Fillmore, Nephi, Payson, were laid out according to a plan that Brigham Young derived from Joseph Smith's City of Zion concept. The streets are wide and follow compass directions. The blocks are uniform and large, designed for each family to have a house lot with room for a garden.

The center of each town has the ward meeting house or tabernacle. The pattern repeats because it was designed to repeat, a template for colonizing a landscape according to a specific theological vision of how a community should be organized. Fillmore was briefly the territorial capital of Utah in the eighteen fifties.

The territorial legislature met there only briefly. The building still stands: Territorial Statehouse State Park, the oldest government building in Utah. It was never finished.

The federal government moved the capital to Salt Lake before the building was complete. What you see in the landscape between these towns is the result of irrigation: green valleys in a desert state, fed by streams coming off the Wasatch and the Sevier River system, engineered almost immediately after settlement to support agriculture in a place that receives ten to twelve inches of rain a year. The irrigation infrastructure that the pioneer settlements built in the eighteen fifties and eighteen sixties is still the basis of agriculture in this corridor.

The Ute people, who had wintered in these valleys and hunted across the plateau above, were systematically pushed off this land as the settlements expanded. Several armed conflicts over land access occurred in the eighteen fifties and sixties. The towns that replaced those conflicts are quiet and tidy and do not put their origin stories on the signs.