Grafton Ghost Town

Grafton was founded in 1859 as part of the Cotton Mission, Brigham Young's effort to raise cotton and other warm-weather crops in the mild lower valleys of southern Utah so the young territory would not have to buy them from the outside world. The Virgin River bottom looked ideal, level and fertile, and settlers laid out farms and began raising cotton, fruit, and grain along its banks.

The trouble was the river itself. A great flood in early 1862 tore the original townsite apart, and the survivors rebuilt on slightly higher ground at the spot you visit today. But the Virgin flooded again and again over the following decades, silting up fields and canals and forcing the community to start over each time. Grafton's own records describe the endless labor of clearing mud and rebuilding ditches, a grinding fight that slowly wore the town down.

Conflict added to the strain. During the Black Hawk War in the mid-1860s the settlers were ordered to gather into larger, more defensible towns for safety, and Grafton was temporarily abandoned before families drifted back. Between the floods and the isolation, the population never grew large, and one household at a time the town began to empty.

The building everyone remembers is the church and schoolhouse, a dignified two-story adobe structure raised in the 1880s that served as meetinghouse, classroom, and social hall all at once, the beating heart of a small farm town. Nearby stand the Alonzo Russell home and the Louisa Marie Russell home, restored pioneer farmhouses you can step into, along with an old barn and the outlines of fields and lanes.

For years the buildings simply weathered, until in 1997 the Grafton Heritage Partnership formed to save them. Volunteers stabilized the church, re-roofed and repaired the homes, and put up plain, honest signs telling each building's story, so a visit today feels less like a scene of decay than a carefully kept window into 1880s farm life.

Up a short lane sits the Grafton cemetery, with graves going back to 1859. The weathered headstones tell the town's story in miniature, the children lost young, the settlers killed in the Black Hawk War, the families who kept coming back to the same hard ground. It is a quiet, moving place, and many visitors find it the most affecting part of the stop.

Grafton's second life is as a movie set. Its most famous appearance is in the 1969 classic Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, where the playful bicycle sequence with Paul Newman, Katharine Ross, and the tune Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head was filmed among these very buildings. The old church stood in as the schoolhouse, the barn is the real barn, and one small structure was built just for the film.

It was not the town's first turn on camera. Grafton had appeared decades earlier in the 1929 film In Old Arizona, an early outdoor talking picture, and it has drawn photographers and filmmakers ever since for the same reason it draws travelers: a genuine ghost town framed by Zion's red cliffs, with nothing modern in the frame.

Standing in the field today, with the sandstone glowing at sunset and the river murmuring beyond the cottonwoods, it is easy to see why the cameras came. Grafton looks like the West of the imagination because it is the real thing, a true pioneer town that the river finally won, left standing on its quiet bottomland below one of the country's grandest canyons.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.