Washington, Utah

Washington, Utah, was founded in eighteen fifty-seven as an attempt to grow cotton in the desert. Brigham Young had dispatched Robert Dockery Covington, a Mississippi plantation owner who had converted to Mormonism, to lead twenty-eight families into the Virgin River basin and establish a cotton-growing colony. Many of the settlers from the American South with experience in cotton cultivation.

They dubbed the region Dixie, a name the Saint George area still carries informally today. The cotton never yielded well. The soil and water were difficult, and the enterprise never became economically viable, though a cotton mill operated for a time.

What the Cotton Mission did accomplish was settling southern Utah's most fertile valleys, and Washington became one of the first permanent communities in the region. Today it is a fast-growing city, caught up in the same sun-belt surge driving Saint George and the surrounding red-rock country.