Panguitch: The Brick Town at the Gateway to Bryce
Near Panguitch, Utah
Panguitch sits in a high valley at about sixty-six hundred feet, cradled between the Paunsaugunt Plateau to the east and the lower desert country of the Sevier River basin to the west. It is the county seat of Garfield County, one of the most sparsely populated counties in the contiguous United States, and it serves as the northern gateway to some of the most dramatic scenery in Utah. Bryce Canyon National Park is twenty-five miles to the east. Zion National Park is roughly ninety miles to the southwest. The long, winding corridor of Utah Highway Twelve begins near the edge of town and runs east over the Aquarius Plateau to Capitol Reef National Park, threading through some of the most remote and beautiful terrain in the American West.
For a town of fewer than two thousand people, Panguitch has a physical presence that exceeds its population. The historic district at its center is one of the largest rural historic districts in Utah, with three hundred seventy-nine contributing buildings concentrated in a walkable grid of streets. The dominant architectural style is Victorian, built almost entirely from a distinctive deep red brick that local craftsmen produced in a brickyard opened around eighteen ninety. For a period of roughly forty years, from eighteen ninety to nineteen thirty, the town's founding families and their children systematically replaced their earlier log and frame buildings with solid brick structures, many of them still standing and occupied today.
The town's history is unusually dramatic for a rural Mormon settlement. It was founded in eighteen sixty-four, abandoned due to the threat of conflict with Native American fighters during the Black Hawk War in eighteen sixty-five, and resettled in eighteen seventy-one under a fresh call from Brigham Young. The people who built Panguitch were a resilient sort who returned to a valley that had defeated them once before. Their brick houses suggest a determination to stay this time, and they did.
Today Panguitch is the kind of small Western town that rewards a slow walk: the brick facades of Main Street, the Victorian millwork on the residential blocks, and the wide-open plateau country stretching in every direction remind you that the America between the national parks is as interesting as the parks themselves.
