Richfield, Utah

Richfield sits in the Sevier River valley about a hundred and fifty miles south of Salt Lake City, and its founding story has a stubborn quality to it. Mormon settlers first arrived in eighteen sixty-four, naming the place for the rich wheat fields they hoped to grow. The Utah Territory made it the county seat of newly formed Sevier County in eighteen sixty-five.

Then the Black Hawk War, three years of conflict between Ute bands and settler militias, forced every family out of the valley in eighteen sixty-seven. They came back around eighteen seventy-one and rebuilt from scratch. Today Richfield is a small city of about eight thousand people, the commercial hub for a vast stretch of central Utah ranching and farming country along Interstate Seventy.