Built in black rock, not brick, and the honest history behind it.

A colonization party out of Parowan settled Beaver in February 1856, the same year the territorial legislature created Beaver County around it. The town formally incorporated in 1867.

Because the ground east of town, at the edge of the volcanic Tushar Mountains, produced black basalt and pink volcanic tuff that pioneer builders quarried and cut instead of shipping in brick or firing their own. A Scottish born stonemason named Thomas Frazer is credited with a large share of the finest surviving stone houses, built through the 1870s and 1880s, and Beaver now carries more than a hundred individually listed National Register buildings as a result.

A U.S. Army post that stood on the north side of the Beaver River from 1872 to 1883, established as the Post of Beaver and renamed Fort Cameron in 1874 after Colonel James Cameron, killed at the First Battle of Bull Run. Its buildings were built from the same black volcanic rock found throughout town. After the Army abandoned it in 1883, its grounds hosted the Beaver Branch of Brigham Young Academy, an early forerunner of Brigham Young University, from 1898 to 1922. Little survives above ground today.

Yes. Robert LeRoy Parker, later known as Butch Cassidy, was born in Beaver on 13 April 1866, the first of thirteen children of English immigrant parents. That fact is well documented. What is often conflated is his childhood home: the family relocated while he was young, and he actually grew up near Circleville in Piute County, where the home most associated with his upbringing still stands and is under consideration for Utah state historical monument status.

That is genuinely uncertain, and worth saying plainly. Many Beaver residents associate his birth with a property tied to his grandmother, Jane Gillies, but the structure that stands on that site today postdates 1866, so it is not literally the original 1866 building. The birth date and location, Beaver in April 1866, are well documented even though the specific standing structure is not the original one.

Philo T. Farnsworth, generally credited as the inventor of the first fully electronic television, was born in 1906 in a log cabin near Beaver, in the small settlement of Manderfield a few miles north of town. He later moved to Idaho as a teenager, where he developed the idea that led to his invention. Beaver honors him with a 1990 bronze statue on the old courthouse grounds.

More than a hundred individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places, most of them black basalt or pink volcanic tuff pioneer houses built in the 1870s and 1880s, plus the red brick Beaver County Courthouse, finished in 1882 and now a summer museum. It is one of the higher concentrations of historic stone architecture found in rural Utah.

Little of the fort survives above ground. It stood on the north side of the Beaver River from 1872 to 1883 and was built of the same black volcanic rock as the town's houses, but after the Army sold the buildings, the site went on to house the Beaver Branch of Brigham Young Academy from 1898 to 1922. What remains today lives mainly in records and a historical marker rather than standing walls.

Thomas Frazer, a Scottish born stonemason, is credited with a large share of the finest surviving stone houses, working by hand through the 1870s and 1880s. Other local masons also worked in the same black basalt and pink volcanic tuff, which is why the style is consistent across so much of the old grid rather than tied to one single builder's work alone.