Capitol Reef Cultural Landscape Report

CULTURAL TRADITIONS

Early Mormons in Utah were agrarian, strengthened by a sense of gathering as they sought refuge as a people from religious persecution. From the outset, they preferred agriculture over mining or industry, even though the territory was woefully lacking in arable land. Through centrally planned and executed acts of land management, they established what is known to historians and geographers as the Mormon Cultural Area, distinguished by the diversion of mountain streams for irrigation and by a distinctive village settlement pattern. Most early Mormon towns were laid out in a four-square grid with adjacent agricultural fields. Property rights were subordinate to religious and community objectives, and speculation in land was denounced. In response to the scarcity of good agricultural lands, Mormons established institutions of austerity, in which the land was valued at least as much for its social and political benefits as its economic uses.

North end of Fruita, looking southeast toward Johnson Mesa, 1993.

Land-related values were closely interwoven with religious faith, giving agrarian ideals added significance. Central to the belief in agrarian values was the idea that Mormons would be blessed by providence and that the "desert should blossom as the rose," as prophesied by Brigham Young. Agriculture was to be basic in the early "Kingdom of God." It was to be the Saints moving into "the nooks and corners. . . wherever there is a spring or a bit of land—building up, making the earth bring forth its products." Every man would "take up a piece of land [thus forming] the nucleus of his prosperity, wealth, and comparative independence." [3]

In his article "Imprint of Agricultural Systems on the Utah Landscape," Historian Charles S. Peterson states that Utah produced three distinctive agricultural landscapes: 1) the Mormon village, 2) the homestead landscape, superimposed by 3) the landscape of dry farming (the latter emerged after the turn of the century, and does not apply to the landscape of Fruita). [4] The Mormon village landscape was based on the City of Zion concept developed by Joseph Smith and others in 1833. The plan called for each community to be laid out in a square grid pattern, with ample land for each family to have a home, orchards, and garden. Wide streets and irrigation ditches separated individual lots. The LDS ward chapel was centrally located in the town square. Fields were distributed in 5-, 10-, or 20-acre plots, and were required to be outside the town boundaries. Villages were thus surrounded by a greenbelt that was both protective and growth limiting. Speculative withholding of land from use was prohibited by common consent, as the survival of the community depended on the maximum use of available land and water resources. The pattern was established and prescribed by Church leadership and strongly influenced the character of early Mormon communities, particularly the string of colonies along the west front of the Wasatch Range that formed what cultural geographers call the "Mormon Corridor."

The Homestead Act of 1862 and other Federal land laws eventually imposed a different pattern of settlement on the land by granting much more acreage per person than that distributed by the Church. This pattern is the one most evident in the settlements of the Colorado Plateau region, including that of Fruita. Large land grants were more conducive to livestock raising and commercial farming, but tended to scatter rather than concentrate communities and farmland. Peterson describes the homestead in Utah after 1890 as a landscape of increased "Americanization," or transition from Mormon-dominated cultural values to those more akin to the larger American society. [5] While the late-nineteenth-century Mormon homestead showed the influence of the early village pattern in its self-sufficient lifestyle and dependence on irrigation, it nonetheless signified a change in direction. The homesteading Mormons in the final decades of the nineteenth century and thereafter looked increasingly to speculation and commercial farming. Land acquisition, distribution, and use became less a factor of community and more a matter of individual initiative.

Residents of Fruita at farewell gathering for Amasa E. Pierce family, about 1915.

Fruita was settled during this transitional period in Utah's history when Mormon domination over patterns of land use was weakening, and distribution and patterns had experienced a transition from a distinctively Mormon village landscape to a turn-of-the-century homestead that was not unlike many others throughout the West. In this regard, Fruita differs from most historians' view of the typical Mormon settlement. It was not founded directly as part of a colonizing mission, as many Mormon towns were prior to the 1880s. Nor did its river valley topography allow for the typical Mormon townsite plan, one that imposed a rigid NSEW grid system on the land and whose nucleus was the LDS meeting house. [6] Fruita never possessed a formal meeting house nor even had its own LDS ward. A number of its early residents may never have attended the religious meetings held in the Fruita Schoolhouse or in local homes when the visiting Bishop from Torrey came to town. Fruita was primarily composed of what author Wallace Stegner has referred to as "relaxed" Mormons. Still, as in most small communities, it was common knowledge who were the faithful and who they were not. [7]

Thus while Fruita is not, in the strict historical sense, the "typical" Mormon town, what is evident in Fruita's past (and in its landscape) are the profound ways in which this small community is typically Mormon. Peterson wrote regarding Fruita:

Habit, family, environment (isolation as well as aridity), economics, and Americanizing influences all tended to make Mormonness a matter of individual, family, and locally based group patterns. These vary from place to place as well as with time but. . . there was a Mormon culture that was recognizable on the landscape during that [historic] era and there still is. [8]

Fruita once contained a number of significant landscape characteristics identified as "typically Mormon," some of which still exist: a prevailing rural feeling created by orchards, pastures, humble dwellings and "rough" agricultural outbuildings, an extensive irrigation system of ditches, and particular types of vegetation (particularly fruit trees, nut trees, mulberries, and poplars; vegetable gardens and ornamental flowering bushes are also characteristic). Another feature of Mormon landscapes is a general "unkempt" appearance of farms whose outbuildings, corrals, and fences, were never painted. The typical "Mormon fence," an irregular mixture of various types of poles, posts, slabs and pickets, documented in historic photographs of Fruita, can still be seen in surrounding towns on the Colorado Plateau. [9] The landscape often looked, and in fact may have been, impoverished.

Fruita followed a social pattern that had signs of cooperation and continued religious ties, as well as increasing individualism and commercialism. Fruita's initial pattern of settlement, in which a number of families actually occupied an individual claim, provides evidence that those who homesteaded in the valley discovered a practical way of modifying the federal system to accommodate both the needs of the individual and those of the community. While the Fruita area was initially claimed in its entirety by four settlers, there were seven families living on the land. Consistent with the Mormon belief that no man should own more land than their family could farm, Fruita's early settlers developed an arrangement that, by mutual consent, divided the 160-acre tracts into more manageable pieces. Shortly after (and sometimes even prior to) obtaining legal title, the land was sold by the claimant to the occupants that were residing there. The sale price rarely exceeded $1.25 per acre, thus it is doubtful that land speculation was a motive. Rather, it appears that allowing additional families to live and work on the land may have benefited everyone, both claimant and squatter alike. With more than one family working a claim, development necessary to "prove" the claim (particularly irrigation works) was more easily accomplished. Thus mutual cooperation assured both the claimant (and any others who lived on the claim) that the land would be theirs at the end of 5 years.

In addition to having a tradition of different attitudes toward land distribution and an emphasis on cooperative agricultural practices, the Saints were distinct from non-Mormons in their handling of land disputes. In "Homesteading in Zion," Historian Lawrence B. Lee writes that the

. . . homesteading practices [of Mormons] certainly revealed that they were a unique people. Claims contesting was minimal among the Mormons, while it was the order of the day on other homestead frontiers. Mormons in good standing with their church simply did not use the land office machinery for settling land disputes with other Mormons. The priesthood courts of ward and stake mediated between rival claimants, and the disputes were never aired in public. [10]

Because environmental conditions often played a role in the success or failure of Mormon settlements, the Mormon tradition of cooperative agriculture was particularly important to communities settling beyond the Mormon Corridor. Of the nearly 500 settlements established in the West by the LDS during the latter half of the nineteenth century, an estimated 46 settlements, or nearly 10 percent, failed because of environmental factors. By the time Utah attained statehood in 1896, practically all the acres that could be brought under irrigation had been occupied. The year 1900 has been recognized as a practical terminal date for Mormon colonization. [11]

While one might expect that the major reason for settlement failure in the semiarid and arid West would be inadequate water supply, more often an excess of water created serious problems. As settlers established homesteads along the Colorado Plateau by using irrigation water from the tributaries of the Colorado River, they encountered and contended with periodic flooding. Nearly all of the settlements founded in these areas struggled at some time with the fluctuation of the rivers and streams. Dams built to control and divert water for irrigation purposes were destroyed repeatedly by sudden floods.

From 1890 through the early twentieth century, flooding of massive proportions devastated the settlements downriver from Fruita and eventually made ghost towns of several, including Aldridge and Blue Valley (Giles). Insufficient irrigation water was also a factor in the failure of two other Mormon communities downriver, Clifton and Elephant. Since the size of most Mormon settlements were small and environmental conditions were precarious, cooperation among families on the Colorado Plateau could (and did) make the difference between success or failure of the community.