Cove Fort: Brigham Young's Stone Waystation on the Mormon Corridor

The squat black walls you can see near this junction look almost medieval, and in a sense they are: a fortified waystation built in eighteen sixty-seven by hand, out of locally quarried volcanic rock, in one of the loneliest stretches of the American West.

Brigham Young ordered Cove Fort constructed that year to protect travelers, telegraph operators, and postal riders moving along what Latter-day Saint settlers called the Mormon Corridor, the chain of communities and roads stretching from Salt Lake City south toward California. The site sat roughly halfway between Fillmore and Beaver, a gap of nearly forty miles with no shelter, no water, and no help if things went wrong. Young assigned the task to Ira Hinckley, a trusted church leader who spent the next seven months directing quarrymen, stonemasons, and carpenters from surrounding settlements.

The result was a one-hundred-foot-square enclosure, the walls eighteen feet high and four feet thick at the base, built entirely from the black basaltic lava rock that dots this part of Utah's west desert. Inside, twelve rooms lined the north and south walls, housing the Hinckley family, a kitchen and dining room that could feed up to seventy-five travelers at a sitting, and, crucially, a telegraph station. The telegraph relay had been installed even before the walls were finished, in February of eighteen sixty-seven. The fort also became a stop for two daily stagecoach lines and served as a regional post office. Sand-filled wooden doors and gun ports in the walls reflected the reality of the Black Hawk War, the armed conflict between Mormon settlers and Ute bands that was grinding on through the same years.

The fort passed out of church hands across the following decades, changed owners repeatedly, and by the late twentieth century had fallen into disrepair. In nineteen eighty-eight, Ira Hinckley's direct descendants, including his grandson Gordon B. Hinckley, who would later become president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, purchased the property and donated it back to the church. A full restoration followed. Gordon B. Hinckley dedicated Cove Fort as a church historic site on May twenty-first, nineteen ninety-four. It is open to visitors today, the walls still standing exactly as the stonemasons left them in the fall of eighteen sixty-seven.