Gunnison

Gunnison is the biggest town at the southern end of Sanpete Valley, the point where US-89 leaves the string of Little Denmark villages and the land flattens into the broad floor of the lower San Pitch. It is a working agricultural hub — cattle, alfalfa, and turkeys — rather than a preserved pioneer showpiece, and it wears its history a little more plainly than the Scandinavian towns to the north.

The town was named for a man who never lived here. Captain John W. Gunnison was surveying a transcontinental railroad route when he and several of his men were killed near Sevier Lake in 1853; nine years later Brigham Young looked at the swampy settlement on the river and told the settlers to name their relocated town after his late friend. The original site had been so muddy the pioneers called it Hog Wallow — a name the new town on higher ground was glad to leave behind.

The early years were hard. When the Black Hawk War broke out in Manti in 1865, Gunnison's families pulled inside a fort, and the town became the refuge for settlers driven out of the Sevier Valley to the south. It steadied after the fighting, and the railroad's arrival near the turn of the century doubled its population and made Gunnison the commercial center of the valley.

The standout on Main Street is the Casino Star Theatre, built in 1912 — the oldest operating theater in Utah. Its Beaux-Arts façade was designed in Paris and shipped in by rail, an improbable extravagance for a farm town, and the tunnel beneath it once moved bootleg liquor during Prohibition. From here you can either turn back north up the US-89 Heritage Highway toward Sterling and the Little Denmark towns, or carry on south into the Sevier River country.