Harrisburg: Cotton Town on the Virgin River

A few minutes north of Saint George, the stone ruins of Harrisburg stand near the point where Quail Creek meets the Virgin River. Mormon settlers arrived here in eighteen fifty-nine under Moses Harris, answering a church call to colonize the warm country of Washington County and grow cotton for the Utah Territory. They built fine stone homes, and by eighteen sixty-four the population reached one hundred twenty-eight people.

Then the river turned against them. Flooding in eighteen sixty-two forced the entire community to move upstream, and the floods kept coming. Grasshopper plagues wiped out crops.

By the early eighteen nineties, most families had given up and moved on. The town was largely empty by eighteen ninety-five. The stone walls of the Orson Adams House, built in eighteen sixty-four, still stand in the desert, a handsome remnant of Utah's short-lived cotton frontier.