Parowan: The Iron Mission

Parowan is the oldest continuously occupied Anglo-American settlement in southern Utah, founded on January thirteenth, eighteen fifty-one. Brigham Young sent a company of one hundred twenty men, thirty-one women, and eighteen children south from Provo in December of eighteen fifty, sometimes building roads as they traveled. Their goal was iron. Deposits of ore had been discovered in the mountains nearby, and the pioneers desperately needed iron implements for their new territory.

George A. Smith led this Iron Mission, and Parowan became its agricultural base. Cedar City, about nineteen miles southwest, held the actual blast furnace. The foundry opened, struggled with floods, heavy freezes, and financial troubles, and finally closed in the late eighteen fifties without ever achieving a reliable supply of pig iron. Parowan stayed. Today the county seat of Iron County, population just under three thousand, it sits surrounded by red canyon country on the road toward Bryce and Cedar Breaks, its name borrowed from a Southern Paiute word.