Torrey: Tiny Town at the Edge of the Slickrock World
Near Torrey, Utah
Torrey is a town of just over two hundred people sitting at the base of the Colorado Plateau in Wayne County, Utah, one of the most sparsely populated counties in one of the most sparsely populated states in the nation. The Fremont River runs through the valley nearby, carrying snowmelt from the mountains to the west. To the east, about eleven miles down Utah Highway Twenty-Four, the cliffs and domes of Capitol Reef National Park rise above the desert floor in formations of red, white, and gold sandstone.
Torrey exists because of two forces: the Mormon Church that sent pioneer families to colonize remote corners of Utah in the eighteen eighties, and the red rock landscape itself, which draws travelers today the way it always did. The first settlers arrived in the early eighteen eighties as part of a broader church effort to occupy the canyon country of southern Utah. They established a community they called Youngtown, named for John Willard Young, a son of Brigham Young.
The settlers were farmers working at nearly seven thousand feet of elevation, where the growing season was short and water was precious. They planted alfalfa and fruit trees and dug irrigation ditches from the Fremont River, building a life in a place that offered spectacular views and genuine hardship in equal measure. For years the town went by several names, among them Central and Poverty Flat, before settling on Torrey in the late eighteen nineties when the community applied for a post office.
The name honored Jay L. Torrey, a Wyoming rancher and legislator who had briefly become famous in the Spanish-American War. His regiment never saw combat, but his name attached itself to this Utah valley and has stayed there ever since.
For most of its first century Torrey was a place people passed through or overlooked. The canyon country around it was not yet famous, the roads were rough, and the population drifted lower as young people left for easier lives. Then Capitol Reef became a national park in nineteen seventy-one, and State Scenic Byway Twelve was paved and promoted, and something shifted.
Torrey found itself at the crossroads of some of the most visited red rock country in the world, still small, still quiet, but no longer forgotten.
