The Barn That Made Everyone Famous

Thomas Alma Moulton started building his barn in nineteen twelve. He finished in nineteen forty-five. Thirty-three years, because a hay barn at an altitude of sixty-eight hundred feet in Wyoming gets built when there is time and materials and energy left after everything else that a dry-land homestead demands. His family had come to Jackson Hole in the eighteen nineties, part of a wave of Latter-day Saint settlers who dug irrigation ditches, broke sod, and grew hay and grain in the high valley east of the Snake River.

The barn Moulton built, with its vertical plank siding and square roof lines, happens to sit at an angle to the Teton Range that makes it one of the most photographed structures in the United States. The mountains come up behind it with no foothills transition, the full height of the range arriving at once, thirteen thousand feet of granite rising from the valley floor in under seven miles. The barn is in the foreground. The mountains are everywhere else. The composition was not planned by anyone. It is the accident of a homesteader who built where the land was flat and the irrigation ditch ran.

John D. Rockefeller Junior's Snake River Land Company purchased much of the Antelope Flats land around Mormon Row in the nineteen twenties and thirties. Some families sold willingly; some under pressure; some held out. The Moulton family retained their land longer than most. When the park expansion was finalized in nineteen fifty, the federal government acquired the remainder. The homesteaders who built Mormon Row did not choose to become park history. They became it anyway.

The barn is still standing. The Tetons have not moved.