Pioneers of Antimony

Few towns have changed names as often, or as strangely, as this one. Settlers took up this fertile pocket of the upper Sevier in 1873 and called it Grass Valley; a surveying party that lassoed a young coyote on the stream renamed the water Coyote Creek. Isaac Riddle's family were the first Latter-day Saints to farm here, and in time a school and a ward followed. Then in 1920 the town traded the coyote for a metal, taking the name Antimony from the mines of that brittle silver-gray element in the hills to the east.

What the plaque says

In 1873, Albert Guiser and others located in a fertile meadow which they named Grass Valley. Surveyors camped on a stream, lassoed a young coyote and called the place Coyote Creek. The first L.D.S. settlers were Isaac Riddle and family who took up land on the east fork of the Sevier River. Later a school house was built, and the Marion Ward organized with Culbert King as bishop. In 1920 the name was officially changed to Antimony after the antimony mines east of the valley.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Butch Cassidy Boyhood Home — 15 mi
  The restored Circleville cabin where the West's most famous outlaw spent his teens
• Hells Backbone Road — 24 mi
  A 38-mile gravel detour with a 1,500-foot drop on either side
• Panguitch — 31 mi
  A well-preserved pioneer town and gateway to Bryce Canyon
• Escalante Petrified Forest State Park — 32 mi
  Walk among 150-million-year-old stone trees

More markers nearby

• Piute County Courthouse — 15 mi
• Circleville Veterans Memorial — 15 mi
• Marysvale — 26 mi
• Memory of Black Hawk War Veterans 1866-1867 — 29 mi