The history La Verkin
An 1889 company, an 1897 settlement, and a cliff in the way
The 800 foot tunnel that made La Verkin possible.
The bench was good ground with no water on it and a river in a gorge below. The answer was a canal cut along a cliff face and a tunnel driven straight through the limestone, and everything La Verkin became follows from it.
Start here
A good bench with the water several hundred feet underneath it.
Stand anywhere on the old grid in La Verkin and the problem the founders faced is visible in one glance. The ground is flat, warm, and long enough in the growing season to ripen almost anything. The river that would water it is at the bottom of a gorge several hundred feet below, and this corner of the state gets around eleven inches of rain in a year.
The answer, arrived at in the 1890s, was to stop trying to lift water and start carrying it. Take it out of the river far enough upstream that gravity does the work, run it along the canyon wall, and deliver it onto the bench at the near end. It is a simple idea that turns out to require blasting a ledge for a canal along a cliff face and then driving a tunnel straight through the rock where the cliff refuses to cooperate.
The company that took it on had incorporated in June 1889 as the La Verkin Fruit and Nursery Company, with $25,000 of capital stock and an explicit written plan for orchards and vineyards on this ground. Settlement followed in 1897. The city did not incorporate until 1927, a full thirty years after people were living here, which is a fair measure of how long the water took to become reliable.
The canal, at a glance
800 ft
of tunnel through limestone
1889
the fruit company incorporates
1897
settlement on the bench
1927
the city incorporates
The hard part
Eight hundred feet of rock, worked from both ends at once.
Most of the canal was cut into the face of the cliff, some of it through solid limestone and some through the talus that had broken off the ledges above, which is its own problem because talus moves. The section that gets remembered is the one where the cliff gave no option at all: a tunnel roughly 800 feet long, driven through the Kaibab limestone escarpment east of the bench.
The account that has come down locally is that crews worked it from both ends and met in the middle, and that the two headings lined up almost exactly. Whether that is precisely true or the polished version of a story told at enough family reunions, it is what the town says about itself, and it is the sort of claim worth attributing rather than asserting flatly.
What is not in doubt is the result. Water arrived on the bench, and everything La Verkin became follows from that: the orchards, the deep lots the gravity ditch made sensible, the fruit and the alfalfa, and eventually a hydroelectric plant at the bottom of the canyon running off the same canal.
This is not the Hurricane Canal, and the two get confused constantly. Hurricane's own canal was a separate and even longer effort on the other side of the gorge, built between 1893 and 1904, with water reaching the Hurricane bench on 6 August 1904. It has its own marker, its own trail and its own town telling its story. The 800 foot tunnel described here is La Verkin's.
What the water built
Fruit first, then lots, then a power plant.
The first crop was the point of the whole exercise. Peaches, grapes, figs and alfalfa went in on ground that had grown sagebrush, and for decades the identity of the place was orchard rather than suburb. The physical evidence is still the most obvious thing about the old grid: the lots run deep, because a gravity ditch feeding long rows is what the layout was designed around, and nobody has ever had a reason to subdivide the historic blocks the way a modern plan would.
The second thing the canal built was electricity, which was not the plan. In 1928 Dixie Power was permitted to put an 899 kilowatt hydroelectric plant on the riverbank at the confluence, fed by roughly a thousand feet of 42 inch wooden pipe running off the La Verkin Canal. It generated from April 1929 until 1983, and the empty building is still down there with the turbine in it.
The third thing is harder to see and easier to feel: a town that treats water as a subject rather than a utility. That instinct is still visible in how this valley argues about wells, shares and treatment plants. The Confluence Park page carries the plant and the newest chapter of it.
| The old grid | The bench subdivisions | |
|---|---|---|
| Laid out for | A gravity ditch feeding long rows | Cars, views and modern lot standards |
| Lot shape | Deep, narrow, orchard blocks | Wider, shallower, view oriented |
| Housing | Pioneer era homes and mid century infill | Mostly 1990s onward |
| What you are buying | Ground with a history and a mature canopy | A newer house with a longer view |
Both are La Verkin. The canal is the reason they look nothing alike.
The argument nobody wins
La Virgen, or a clerk who could not spell Beaver Skin.
One reading takes the name as a worn down version of the Spanish la virgen, after the Virgin River the town sits above. It is tidy, it fits the geography, and it is the version most visitors are told.
The other reading points at a letter dated 26 June 1852 which refers to the creek as Leiver Skin. The argument runs that an early writer transposed a letter and that the original was Beaver Skin, which would make the name a fur trade artefact rather than a Spanish one. That version has the awkward virtue of being written down earlier than anybody was arguing about it.
The honest position is that the record supports both and settles neither, and that the town has never been in a hurry to decide. It is the rare local argument where nobody actually wants a resolution, and asking about it in the right room is a good way to lose an afternoon.
A town that drilled 800 feet through a cliff to get water onto a bench has never felt much pressure to also settle what to call itself.
Keep reading
More of La Verkin on The Local.
Things to do
The top 8, ranked
Eight picks, ranked, from 107 degree water to a 1929 power plant on the canyon floor.
Read the guideThe hot springs
Zion Canyon Hot Springs
Fifty pools of mineral water, and why the original riverside site is still closed.
Read the guideThe river park
Confluence Park
Three hundred and forty four acres where two creeks reach the Virgin River together.
Read the guideThe road east
Zion Park Scenic Byway
Mile zero of a 54 mile national byway sits at a junction on the edge of town.
Read the guideMoving here
Two city halls, one valley
Two cities four minutes apart, two of everything, and about 14 percent between them.
Read the guideThe companion
La Verkin, from a local
The springs, the river park, the tunnel and the byway, in one place.
Read the pageQuick answers
The history, answered.
Because the bench the town sits on is flat, warm and dry, and the Virgin River that would water it runs several hundred feet below in a gorge. Rather than lift the water, the founders took it out of the river upstream and carried it along the canyon wall by gravity, which meant cutting a canal into a cliff and driving a tunnel through the rock where the cliff left no ledge to follow.
Roughly 800 feet, driven through the Kaibab limestone escarpment east of the bench. Local accounts say crews worked it from both ends and that the two headings met almost exactly, which is the story the town tells about itself.
No, and the two are constantly confused. The Hurricane Canal was a separate and longer effort on the other side of the gorge, built between 1893 and 1904, with water reaching the Hurricane bench on 6 August 1904. It has its own historical marker and its own trail. La Verkin's canal and its 800 foot tunnel are a different project on a different bench.
Settlement dates from 1897, and the city incorporated in 1927. The La Verkin Fruit and Nursery Company had incorporated earlier still, in June 1889, with $25,000 of capital stock and an explicit plan for orchards and vineyards on this ground.
Because they were laid out for a gravity ditch feeding long rows of fruit trees. Orchard blocks want depth rather than frontage, and nobody has had a reason to redraw the historic grid since. The newer bench subdivisions were laid out for cars and views instead, which is why the two parts of town look nothing alike.
Fruit, mostly. Peaches, grapes and figs alongside alfalfa, on ground that had grown sagebrush before the canal arrived. The town's identity was agricultural for decades and the deep lots in the old grid are the surviving physical evidence of it.
It generated electricity. In 1928 Dixie Power was permitted to build an 899 kilowatt hydroelectric plant on the riverbank at the confluence, fed by roughly a thousand feet of 42 inch wooden pipe running off the La Verkin Canal. It generated from April 1929 until 1983, and the empty building still stands in Confluence Park with the turbine inside it.
Nobody has settled it. One reading makes it a worn down version of the Spanish la virgen, for the Virgin River. The other points to a letter dated 26 June 1852 that calls the creek Leiver Skin, possibly a garbled Beaver Skin from the fur trade era. The record supports both readings and proves neither.
Not as a maintained public route, and this page will not send anyone into a working or abandoned irrigation structure on somebody else's ground. The canal alignment is visible from parts of the gorge rim, and the trail system in Confluence Park below covers the country the water was taken through.
A town that had to earn its own water is worth understanding before you buy in it.
The old grid and the bench subdivisions here are genuinely different products, laid out a century apart for different reasons, and the difference shows up in lot shape, canopy, and what a renovation actually involves. That is the kind of thing worth walking through in person.