Cedar City: Utah's Festival City at the Edge of the Plateau

The trees that gave Cedar City its name are not cedars. They are one-seed junipers, a species native to the high plateaus of the American Southwest, belonging to a genus only distantly related to the true cedars of the Mediterranean and Himalayas. When Mormon pioneers arrived in this valley in eighteen fifty-one, they had no particular reason to know the difference. They saw scraggly, aromatic, dark-green trees and called them cedars, the way they might have called any conifer back in Illinois or Ohio, and the name spread across the landscape and never came off. The misidentification is woven into the city, into Cedar Breaks National Monument twenty miles to the east, and into dozens of other named features across southern Utah. The trees don't seem to mind.

Cedar City sits at roughly five thousand eight hundred feet above sea level, at the western edge of the Colorado Plateau, and occupies one of the most extraordinary geographic positions in the American West. Zion National Park lies about forty-five minutes to the south. Bryce Canyon National Park is about fifty minutes to the northeast. Cedar Breaks National Monument, a colossal amphitheater of eroded limestone and iron-stained rock, sits twenty miles to the east on the edge of the Markagunt Plateau. The north rim of the Grand Canyon is roughly two and a half hours down the road. No other city its size in the country sits at the intersection of so much protected landscape.

Cedar City was founded in eighteen fifty-one as an industrial project, sent south by Brigham Young to build an iron foundry in the mountains above the valley. That mission ultimately failed, unable to compete with cheaper iron arriving by railroad from the East. The settlers stayed, and for a century Cedar City was a quiet Mormon ranching and agricultural community. Then in nineteen sixty-two, a theater professor at the local college launched a Shakespeare festival on campus in a wooden replica of an Elizabethan theater. Eleven thousand people came the first summer. The Utah Shakespeare Festival grew into one of the most attended Shakespeare festivals in North America, winning the Tony Award for outstanding regional theater in the year two thousand. The iron mission failed. What replaced it was something harder to manufacture: a high-desert city where red rock geology and live theater reinforce each other under the same summer sky.