The Fruita Orchards: When Mormon Irrigation Made the Desert Bloom

In the eighteen eighties, a handful of Latter-day Saint families settled the Fremont River valley at the base of a red-rock reef and planted trees. Apricot, cherry, peach, pear, apple: they set out approximately two thousand seven hundred trees in the flood plain of the Fremont River, dug irrigation ditches, built sandstone cabins, and named their community Fruita.

The orchards are still producing. The National Park Service manages the trees and opens them to the public during harvest season each summer; visitors can eat fruit in the orchards for free and pick extra to take home for a small per-pound fee, a living artifact of the settlement-era homestead economy that the park has decided is worth preserving as working history.

What the orchard's present-day charm tends to elide is the layering underneath it. The Fremont people farmed this same valley for eight centuries before the Mormon settlers arrived. They grew corn in the flood-irrigated bottomland using the same river, the same water pockets in the fold above, the same logic of desert agriculture. The Paiute used the valley seasonally for generations after the Fremont's archaeological record ends. The Mormon homesteaders who planted the orchards arrived on land with a long agricultural history that is less visible than the trees.

The NPS has worked to tell both stories at Capitol Reef, and the visitor center exhibit foregrounds the Fremont occupation alongside the Fruita community narrative. But the orchard is the park's most photographed feature, and photographs tend to show fruit trees in red-rock country, not what was there before them.