Parowan, Utah
Near Cedar City, Utah
Parowan was the first settlement in southern Utah, and it arrived in the middle of winter. On January thirteenth, eighteen fifty-one, a company of a hundred and sixty-nine people, men, women, and children, reached Center Creek after weeks of travel through snow and cold from Provo. Mormon apostle George A.
Smith had led them south on orders from Brigham Young, whose scouts had found iron ore deposits near what is now Cedar City. Young needed iron badly for tools and rails, and he needed a town to anchor the mission. Parowan became that anchor, the first permanent settlement south of Utah Valley.
The Iron Mission, as it was called, never fully succeeded. The iron proved difficult to smelt. But Parowan survived, became the county seat of Iron County, and served as a staging point for every wave of settlement that pushed deeper into the canyon country and desert of the Colorado Plateau.
