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Show OMB No. 10024-0018 NPS Form 10-900-a Microsoft Word 2.0 Format United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section No. 8 Page 13 Grafton Historic District. Rockville. Washington County. UT The Hurricane Canal and the Final Decline of Grafton The population of Grafton remained steady during the last decades of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth centuries. The 1880 United States Census listed seventy-one people at this settlement. The 1890 records were destroyed in a fire, but LOS Church Historian Andrew Jenson noted after a visit to Grafton in April, 1892 that there were sixteen families, totaling seventy-eight people. 41 The 1900 U.S. Census indicated that the number had increased to ninety-eight residents, and to 107 in 1910. By 1920, however, the population of Grafton had plummeted to forty-six people. The last census taken at Grafton was in 1930, and the population had dwindled by half to twenty-three. There were several important factors which led to the ultimate demise of this small community. Irrigable land at Grafton was severely limited, and it was all claimed by the first generation of settlers. As children grew up and created families of their own, there was no available farm land, and they were forced to look elsewhere to make a living. The same problem contributed to the downfall of other neighboring settlements such as Mountain Dell, Duncan's Retreat, Northrup and Shunesburg. Furthermore, modern utilities such as electricity and running water were never introduced to the struggling settlement of Grafton, which provided further incentive for the younger generations to move away. Farming at Grafton had always been very difficult. The soil was sandy and alkaline, a less than ideal condition for raising crops. Furthermore, the Virgin River was very unpredictable and could rise as much as four feet in a single day, destroying dams and flooding the town: ... a great number of dams were built only to be washed away, sometimes two or three in a single year. With each flood the ditches were filled with sand, a circumstance which made an almost continuous job of cleaning, amounting in some cases, almost, to building a new ditch. Some of the settlers remarked, with a grim humor, that making ditches at Grafton was like the household washing; it was a weekly chore!42 The river could also drop so low that it became a meandering stream. Even the well-engineered irrigation system had its limitations, and the farmers worked extremely long and hard for their moderate harvests. For example, Thomas Woodbury, the nurseryman who initially stayed at Grafton because Franklin Wheeler Young gave him a good farming lot, left after two planting seasons because the cut worms ate all of the buds on his fruit trees every spring, and the red ants and gophers destroyed what the cut worms did not. 43 The final and perhaps largest blow that led to the abandonment of Grafton was the construction of the Hurricane Canal. With a shortage of farm land for the younger generations, the Hurricane Bench, approximately fifteen to twenty miles downstream, was ripe for cultivation, but it was too high above the river to be irrigated with a common ditch. Greater measures would have to be taken, and the Hurricane Canal Company was organized on July 11, 1893. Each stockholder would be entitled to twenty acres of farmland up on the bench, thus providing plots for approximately one hundred young men. Wages for the construction workers were set at $2.00 per day, a Significant step up from the money they could make at Grafton, although most of the workers took 25% of their _x_see continuation sheet 41 Jenson. History of Grafton Ward, 1892. I was called to Dixie, pp. 95-6. 42 Andrew Karl Larson. 43 Thomas H. Woodbury. Letter to the Domestic Gardeners' Club. Deseret News, February 2.1863. |
