No one has lived in Fruita, Utah, since 1969, and the town has never been better cared for.
That is the contradiction at the center of the greenest place in Capitol Reef National Park. The orchards are pruned every winter. The irrigation ditches run on the same gravity-fed schedule they have kept since the 1880s. The fruit is mapped, the trees are grafted, the grass is mowed, and in a good year roughly 1,900 cherry, apricot, peach, pear, and apple trees come into bloom along the Fremont River exactly as they were planted to do. What is missing is the people. The families who built Fruita are gone, bought out one household at a time, and the reason their orchards survive in such good order is precisely that the community around them was dissolved. Fruita is the best-preserved Mormon farm town in Utah, and it is well preserved because it was emptied.
In 1880, a man named Nels Johnson drove into the narrow valley where the Fremont River meets Sulphur Creek and built a house at the confluence. He was the first to file a claim, and the settlement that gathered around him took the plain name of the place: Junction. The Latter-day Saints had been pushing east off the high plateaus for a decade by then, under Brigham Young's standing instruction to go out and fill up the territory, and most of what they found on the Colorado Plateau was too cold and too dry to farm — country fit for running cattle and little else. The valley below the Waterpocket Fold was the exception. It sat lower than the plateau towns, the canyon walls trapped heat, the river ran year-round, and the growing season stretched long enough to ripen fruit that would die on the stem a few thousand feet higher. Johnson planted orchards from seed. The four original homestead claims — Johnson's, Leo Holt's, and those of Elijah Behunin and his son Hyrum — covered essentially the entire town, and for the next ninety years Fruita stayed about that size.
It never incorporated. It never elected a mayor; authority, what little a place this small required, rested with the local Mormon presiding elder. At its peak in the 1920s the population reached around a hundred people, and most years it was less — eight or ten families working small orchards and garden plots, raising sorghum for molasses and alfalfa for the animals, and selling fruit to make the cash a frontier household could not grow. They picked the crop green, loaded it into wagons, and hauled it over bad roads to Price and Richfield and whatever markets the canyon country could reach. Around 1902 they renamed the town Fruita, for the thing it did best, and for a while it was known across the region as the Eden of Wayne County.
The isolation that made the valley worth settling also kept it a century behind. The first tractor did not reach Fruita until 1940. Electricity did not arrive until 1948. The road in was not paved until the 1960s. A one-room schoolhouse went up in 1896 and served, as such buildings did, as the whole town's civic life at once — classroom on weekdays, chapel on Sundays, dance hall and meeting house whenever the community needed somewhere to gather. It still stands beside Highway 24, desks visible through the glass.
There is a narrow side canyon a half mile from the old townsite that the park now calls Cohab, and the name carries the one piece of Fruita's history that everyone repeats. "Cohab" is short for cohabitation — the charge under which the federal government prosecuted Mormon polygamists after the Edmunds Act of 1882 criminalized plural marriage. As the story goes, when the marshals came through, Fruita's polygamous men sent their plural wives up the hidden canyon to wait out the search. Whether it ever happened is doubtful; the canyon is an awkward place to flee to, and the surviving records document only one polygamist in the whole settlement. But the legend stuck, because it fit. These were people, in Wallace Stegner's description of the valley, "about equally good Mormons and good frontiersmen and good farmers," and the line between obeying the church and outlasting the government was one a remote Utah town in the 1880s was often asked to walk.
What ended Fruita was not failure but attention. The cliffs and canyons around the valley were made Capitol Reef National Monument in 1937, and after the Second World War the monument's fame began to climb. A working farm town in the middle of a landscape the public increasingly wanted to visit was, by the logic of the era, a problem to be resolved. Through the 1950s and into the 1960s the National Park Service bought out Fruita's families one parcel at a time. Most of the houses were torn down or hauled away. The last to go was Dewey Gifford, who sold his farm and left in 1969; two years later Congress redesignated the monument a national park. In 1974 the roughly two hundred acres of orchard and bottomland were entered on the National Register of Historic Places as the Fruita Rural Historic District — a town protected, officially, as a place where a town used to be.
And here the contradiction does its work. Most of the Mormon farm settlements of southern Utah either grew into ordinary towns — paved, wired, indistinguishable — or shrank into true ghost towns, their orchards going feral and their ditches filling with silt. Fruita did neither, because the Park Service simply kept doing the work the families had done. The same flood-irrigation ditches the settlers dug in the 1880s still water the trees. Crews prune by hand, map every tree, and graft heirloom varieties that have nearly vanished from the commercial world to keep the old stock alive. The count has fallen from something like 2,700 trees in the settlement's prime to about 1,900 today, but the fruit still ripens on the pioneer schedule, and in season the park lets visitors walk in and pick it, dropping payment in an honor box much as a neighbor once might have. A few steps away, the restored Gifford Homestead bakes that fruit into pies — which is to say the federal government now runs the family bakery the Giffords left behind.
Drive in from Torrey and the shift still lands the way it landed on the settlers: a hundred miles of red rock and blackbrush, and then, abruptly, mown grass and a green canopy of fruit trees under thousand-foot walls. The orchards are the closest thing in Utah to standing inside a nineteenth-century Mormon farm as it actually was, and the only reason you can do it is that the farm no longer belongs to anyone. The people who planted these trees are gone. The trees they planted are tended better than the planters could have managed. Fruita is a community preserved by subtraction — a town saved, in the end, by being emptied of the very thing that made it a town.