Grafton Ghost Town
Rockville, Utah
POINT OF INTEREST: Settled by Mormons in 1859, this abandoned frontier town appears in several films including “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
We drove down the dusty, rocky road just outside of Zion National Park not knowing what to expect. Ghost towns are a fleeting thing. They only exist for a brief moment of time. Old photographs don’t predict what you might see today.
Wood rots, buildings fall. Developers bulldoze. Flood water washes clean.
Ghost towns come alive again and hide the remnants among trailers and “no trespassing” signs.
But the Grafton ghost town consists today of a few brick buildings that have been preserved.
Several movies were shot in this abandoned frontier settlement, including several scenes from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the 1929 film In Old Arizona, the first talkie filmed outdoors.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/grafton-ghost-town
The “bicycle” scene in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” was filmed in Grafton Ghost Town.
Troubles with local Native America tribes and building in a flood zone caused the ultimate failure of the town. Originally settled by Mormons at the direction of Brigham Young – the area was though to be good for cotton which was highly valuable to early settlers.
The town of Grafton was settled a few miles south of Zion National Park on the Virgin River in 1859 by five Mormon families but cotton didn’t work so they switched to food crops.
If you’ve visited the Zion Valley, you can imagine what water can do if it rushed down the steep cliff walls and funnelled into the valley. In 1862, the Virgin River flooded and washed away the entire original town.
Turn onto Bridge Road from UT-9 in Rockville. Signs point the way from there. Be prepared to travel on a clay road for about 1.5 miles (out and back), which may be impassable during/after periods of heavy rain.
The Lonesome Dream
BY LISEL MUELLERIn the America of the dream
the first rise of the moon
swings free of the ocean,
and she reigns in her shining flesh
over a good, great valley
of plumped, untrampled grasses
and beasts with solemn eyes,
of lovers infallibly pitched
in their ascendant phase.
In this America, death
is virginal also, roaming
the good, great valley
in his huge boots, his shadow
steady and lean, his pistol
silver, his greeting clear
and courteous as a stranger’s
who looks for another, a mind
to share his peaceable evenings.
Dreaming, we are another
race than the one which wakes
in the cold sweat of fear,
fires wild shots at death.,
builds slippery towers of glass
to head him off, waylays him
with alcohol traps, rides him down
in canyons of sex, and hides
in teetering ghost towns.
Dreaming, we are the mad
who swear by the blood of trees
and speak with the tongues of streams
through props of steel and sawdust,
a colony of souls
ravaged by visions, bound
to some wild, secret cove
not yet possessed, a place
still innocent of us.