Enoch, Utah
Near Cedar City, Utah
Enoch sits between Cedar City and Parowan in the Iron County valley, a small city that spent four decades under a different name. Joel H. Johnson settled the area in eighteen fifty-one as part of the same Iron Mission that founded Parowan, and his springs became known simply as Johnson's Springs, later Fort Johnson.
The settlement existed quietly under that name for nearly forty years. Then in eighteen ninety, to avoid confusion with another Johnson Springs elsewhere in the territory, residents chose a new name: Enoch, drawn from the Mormon concept of the Order of Enoch, sometimes called the United Order, the cooperative economic system that early Latter-day Saint communities practiced and aspired to. The name carried theological weight.
Enoch was the biblical city of perfection, a community so righteous it was taken bodily into heaven. The little settlement in Iron County never quite achieved those heights, but the name remains.
