Grafton

The story

Grafton is the ghost town in the photographs: a lone adobe schoolhouse against the red cliffs of Zion, ten minutes from the national park's south entrance. It may be the most photographed — and most filmed — ghost town in the West, including the bicycle scene in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Mormon settlers founded Grafton in 1859 to grow cotton along the Virgin River. The river was the whole problem. The Great Flood of 1862 destroyed the original townsite and the settlers rebuilt a mile upstream, then spent the next eighty years re-digging irrigation ditches the Virgin kept tearing out. When better land opened near Hurricane, families left a few at a time. The last moved out in 1944.

A local heritage partnership has restored the 1886 church-schoolhouse and several homes, and the cemetery across the road records the floods and accidents that made the place so hard to hold.

What remains today

The restored 1886 adobe church-schoolhouse, several houses and barns, orchards, and the Grafton cemetery. One of the most intact and scenic townsites in Utah.

From the archives

Part of the crude cemetery in Grafton, a ghost town, but a well preserved, not decayed and falling-down one, s

Approach to Grafton, a ghost town, but a well preserved, not decayed and falling-down one, south of Zion Natio

A surviving structure in Grafton, a ghost town, but a well preserved, not decayed and falling-down one, south

The austere landscape approaching Grafton, a ghost town, but a well preserved, not decayed and falling-down on

Source: Library of Congress digital collections.