The story
Chesterfield is a rarity: a ghost town that was a farming community, not a mining camp. Mormon settlers founded it in 1881 in the Gem Valley of southeastern Idaho, near a route of the Oregon Trail, and in 1883 church leaders had them regroup off the Portneuf River floodplain into a proper gridded village of ten-acre blocks.
For a generation it was a tidy, self-sufficient town of brick and log houses, a meetinghouse, a store, and a school. Its decline was undramatic: a railroad line built through Bancroft to the south pulled commerce away, dry-farming grew harder, and families drifted off until the place was largely deserted by the end of the 1930s.
Since 1980 the Chesterfield Foundation has bought and restored the townsite, and it is now a National Register historic district. A couple of dozen original buildings survive on the old grid, open for tours in summer — one of the best-preserved pioneer villages in the Intermountain West.
What remains today
About two dozen restored brick and log buildings on the original townsite grid — the meetinghouse, tithing office, store, school, and houses. A National Register historic district.
Questions from the field
- Is Chesterfield, Idaho a ghost town or a museum?
- Both — it is an abandoned 1880s Mormon farm village whose original buildings have been restored on their original lots and opened for summer tours by the Chesterfield Foundation.
From the field
The most valuable part of this record is the part only visitors can write.
Stamp your passport
Check in at Chesterfield — GPS-verified visits earn an inked stamp.
File a field report
Road conditions, what's still standing, what's gone — your report joins the record.
Add photographs
Credited, dated, and preserved as part of Chesterfield's permanent record.
No field reports yet — sign in to file the first.
Primary sources for this record
- — USGS GNIS feature 396274
- — National Register of Historic Places — Chesterfield Historic District
- — Chesterfield Foundation / Idaho State Historical Society