The Red Brick Era: Panguitch Builds to Last
Near Panguitch, Utah
The brick buildings of Panguitch tell a story about prosperity finally arriving in a place that had known hardship. When the town was resettled in eighteen seventy-one and began to grow through the following decades, its buildings were typical frontier construction: log walls, rough-cut lumber, whatever could be gathered locally or hauled at great expense from a distance. Functional but not permanent.
That began to change when local brickyards opened using clay deposits in the area. The clay fired into a deep, warm red brick unlike anything produced in other parts of Utah, a shade somewhere between orange and burgundy that catches the afternoon light differently depending on the time of day. Local craftsmen learned to work it, and over the following decades, the town's families systematically replaced their earlier buildings with brick structures.
The style they chose was Folk Victorian, a simplified version of the ornate Victorian architecture fashionable in American cities, adapted to the tastes and resources of rural builders far from the nearest architectural magazine. The buildings feature symmetrical facades, decorative brickwork around doors and windows, wooden porches, and occasional ornamental cornices. They are not grand, but they are solid and handsome in a way that makes Panguitch's streetscape unusual among small Utah towns.
The Panguitch Historic District, which encompasses three hundred seventy-nine contributing buildings, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand six. It is one of the largest intact rural historic districts in the state, a concentrated and surviving record of what a prosperous Mormon pioneer community looked like when it finally had the means to build something meant to last.
