Fort Harmony, where Washington County started.

Yes. Washington County was created in 1852 and New Harmony was named as its seat. The settlement that held the title was Fort Harmony, an adobe fort on the valley floor rather than the town standing today, and it kept the seat until 1859. St. George was not founded until the cotton mission of 1861.

It was begun in the spring of 1854, after a first settlement attempt on Ash Creek in 1852 that was abandoned before the settlers came back. Brigham Young is said to have turned the first dirt on the southeast corner of the foundation, and the families raised crops that season and wintered inside the fort.

It measured 300 feet on a side. The houses along the east side were one story against a wall ten feet high, and those on the west side were two stories against a wall sixteen feet high. It is described as the first fort in the territory built of adobe brick, and it housed most of the settlers in this part of southern Utah while it stood.

Rain. Twenty eight days of heavy rain in January and February 1862 washed away most of the adobe walls, because the bricks had been made without straw or hair to bind them. Families moved out of their houses and into their wagons as the walls came down, and the fort was abandoned in February 1862. It was never rebuilt.

They split in two directions. Most moved a short distance west onto higher ground and founded the town of New Harmony where it stands today, and the rest crossed east over the ridge and founded Kanarraville in what is now Iron County. That is why two towns in two different counties share a founding year, a founding event and a set of family names.

A monument and interpretive markers, not ruins. Nothing of the adobe structure survives above ground. A marker was placed in 1936 by the Utah Pioneer Trails and Landmarks Association together with members of the Parowan Stake, and the Daughters of Utah Pioneers added one later. The Fort Harmony Site was added to the National Register of Historic Places on November 16, 1979.

Yes. John D. Lee was among the men who built the first camp on Ash Creek in 1852 and among those who raised Fort Harmony in 1854, and he lived at the fort until the flooding of early 1862 forced the families out. He was one of the fort's founding settlers.

No, and the confusion is worth naming because it dominates search results. New Harmony, Indiana is a nationally famous nineteenth century utopian settlement founded by the Harmonists and later run by Robert Owen, with a National Historic Landmark district, a Roofless Church and an architecturally significant visitor center. Utah's New Harmony is a town of 236 people in Washington County with a wilderness on either side of it.

Barely at all inside the town limits. Washington County's general plan records that in 1865 the new town held twenty five families and 225 people, and the 2020 census counted 236 residents. The growth in this valley has happened outside the town, on county ground, where ten recorded subdivisions carry hundreds of platted lots. The town itself covers about six tenths of a square mile.