Historic Chesterfield

The story begins in 1879, when Chester Call and his kinsman Christian Nelson set up a horse ranch on this high ground above the Portneuf River, along the route the Oregon Trail had worn across southern Idaho. Within a year or two Latter-day Saint families followed and began building a proper town, and it took Chester Call's name: Chesterfield. They laid it out on the broad, square grid their church favored, with generous lots and straight streets, and set about farming the surrounding benchland.

The colony grew steadily through the 1880s and 1890s into a settled farming community, and by about 1920 it had reached its height at roughly seven hundred residents. It was one of hundreds of towns that Latter-day Saint pioneers planted across the Great Basin and the Intermountain West after reaching the region, and few of them survive today anything like as whole as Chesterfield.

The building everyone remembers is the meetinghouse, a dignified brick church raised between 1887 and 1892 that still anchors the townsite. Around it stand the amusement hall built in 1895, where the town gathered to dance and put on plays, and the tithing office and granary from 1900, where farmers brought a share of their harvest. Many of the homes are brick too, built between the mid-1880s and about 1904, and some carry the tidy lines of Greek Revival or the fancier trim of the Queen Anne style, unusual craft for so remote a place.

Mixed in among the brick are hewn-log cabins from the earliest years, so you can read the whole arc of a frontier town on a single walk, from a settler's first one-room cabin to the substantial brick house a prosperous farm family built a generation later. Something over two dozen original buildings survive on the old grid, enough that the streets still feel like streets rather than a scatter of ruins.

Two things undid Chesterfield. When the railroad came through, it followed the valley past Bancroft to the south instead of climbing to the plateau, so trade and new arrivals gathered down there rather than up here. Then the hard farm economy of the 1920s and the dry, difficult seasons that followed made a living on the high benchland harder and harder to hold. The school closed in 1941 and the general store held on until 1958, and by then Chesterfield had become a ghost town.

Its very remoteness saved it. Because nothing replaced the old town and no new development rolled over it, the buildings simply stayed, weathering in place. In 1980 the whole townsite was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, and a foundation of descendants and volunteers has worked ever since to stabilize the meetinghouse, the cabins, and the homes, so that a visitor today walks through an almost intact 19th-century pioneer village rather than a memory of one.

Chesterfield lies on the plateau about eleven miles north of Bancroft, and roughly forty minutes north of Lava Hot Springs by road, reached at the end by gravel. The last stretch is easy in dry weather but can turn to mud after rain, and the roads are not kept up in winter, so aim for a fair-weather day and top off water and fuel in town first, since there is nothing on the plateau itself.

In the summer season the foundation opens the village for guided walking tours, often led by people whose own great-grandparents lived here, and a small museum in one of the old brick buildings fills in the rest of the story. Give yourself an unhurried hour or two to walk the grid, step into the meetinghouse, and look closely at the cabins and homes. It is the kind of quiet, honest place that rewards slowing down, a real town the frontier built and then let go, still standing on its windy plain for anyone willing to drive the gravel to find it.

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