Wayne Wonderland: How Capitol Reef Became a Monument
Near Torrey, Utah
Before Capitol Reef was protected land, boosters in Wayne County called it Wayne Wonderland and tried to lure travelers to the sandstone domes and painted cliffs east of Torrey. The roads were terrible and the country was remote and most Americans had never heard of it. That changed on August second, nineteen thirty-seven, when President Franklin D.
Roosevelt signed a proclamation designating Capitol Reef National Monument. The name combined two references: the pale sandstone domes that early travelers thought resembled the Capitol building in Washington, and the western term reef, applied to any long rocky ridge that blocked travel. For Torrey, the designation was a promise more than an immediate transformation.
The monument had almost no infrastructure, the roads were still rough, and visitors were few. Torrey continued farming. Over the following decades, as the National Park Service built a visitor center and paved routes into the canyon, the relationship between the town and the protected land deepened.
When Congress upgraded the monument to a full national park on December eighteenth, nineteen seventy-one, Torrey's role as the gateway community was settled for good. Today the park draws well over a million visitors each year, and nearly all of them drive through Torrey on their way in or out. The small town that struggled for a century in isolation became, almost by accident, the front door to one of the great landscapes of the American West.
