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Show INTRODUCTION Bloomington is located in the Southwest corner of Utah on the banks of the Rio Virgin two miles north of the Arizona border. Its elevation is the lowest of any town within the State of Utah at 2,500 feet. It lies within a region called "Dixie" as its mild climate approximates to that of the South as opposed to the rest of the Rocky Mountain West. Over the last 115 years, what is now called Bloomington encompassed three or four different settlements, including Heberville, Price City, Tonaquint and the village of Bloomington itself. This group of vi llages, all of which were ultimately abandoned, played an important and instrumental role in the development of Dixie. A map follows with details of their location. The history of the Dixie region's development is unique in many respects within the overall Mormon settlement of the West. It was here that Brigham Young staked some of his highest hopes of developing crops and It was here goods that would insure the independence of his Kingdom. that Brigham Young chose to build the first Mormon temple after his pioneers reached Utah. Dixie was also where Brigham Young spent the last few winters of his life overseeing the attempts of his followers to conquer one of the harshest and most uncontrollable parts of the great Mormon empire. Attempts to settle the Bloomington area were among the first that occurred within the Dixie region. The area combined both the advantages and the problems that faced each of the towns that were ultimately developed within Dixie - seemingly productive soil along the Rio Virgin and a cl imate that allowed the growth of cotton, grapes, figs and other crops that were unavailable in any other part of the Mormon settlement. However, Bloomington also suffered the ravishes of the Virgin as it periodically raged through the pioneers ' farmland, washing the soil, crops and often homesites down towards the Colorado river. In fact, the constant floods, which plagued all of the towns of Dixie, were perhaps harshest along the Virgin Bottoms, as the Bloomington area was sometimes called, and, in the end, along with the lack of any other water supply for drinking, etc. probably doomed the area into obscurity whi Ie other areas, many homesteaded after the Bloomington area, developed into prosperous farming and tourist communities over time. At differing points of time, between 75 and 100 individuals 1 ived at Price City or in Bloomington. By the 1930 ' s, however, most of the famil ies had abandoned the area. The town as such disappeared from maps, and, though the land was farmed by the residents of St. George, most of the signs of the settlements that existed as early as 1858 had vanished. In the late 1960 ' s, a rancher, spending part of his time 1 iving at Bloomington's Blake House, a stone farmhouse without water or modern ammenities, began to assemble a large enough tract of land to interest a group of land investors in the area. This led to the development of the new Bloomington, one of |
