The first town New Harmony
The first county seat, and the storm that dissolved it
Fort Harmony, where Washington County started.
An adobe square 300 feet on a side, begun in 1854 on the valley floor, holding the seat of a county that then had no St. George in it. Twenty eight days of rain in the winter of 1862 took the walls down, and the families who walked out founded two towns in two counties. A monument stands where it was.
Start here
Washington County began in this valley, not in St. George.
Washington County was created in March 1852, and the seat it was given was New Harmony. That is the fact almost nobody in the county knows, and it reorders the whole local history when you learn it: the courthouse town, the temple town, the metropolis of a hundred thousand people down the freeway, all of it came later. The county started here.
The settlement that held the title was not the town standing today. It was Fort Harmony, an adobe square down on the valley floor near where the interstate now runs, begun in 1854 and reckoned the first adobe fort in the territory. It was 300 feet on a side. The houses on the east side were single storey against a ten foot wall; the ones on the west were two storeys against a sixteen foot wall. Brigham Young turned the first dirt on the southeast corner.
It was the base from which the settlement of everything south of the Great Basin was organised, and it served as the headquarters of the church's mission to the Southern Paiute. It kept the county seat until 1859. Eight years after the first dirt was turned, it was gone.
Fort Harmony, at a glance
March 1852
Washington County created, New Harmony named its seat
300 ft
on a side, the first adobe fort in the territory
1859
the year the county seat moved away
Feb 1862
the month it was abandoned
What ended it
Twenty eight days of rain, and adobe with nothing holding it together.
The winter of 1861 and 1862 produced the largest flood event in the recorded history of southern Utah, and this valley got the same storm that destroyed Grafton and emptied three other settlements down on the Virgin River. Here it lasted twenty eight days, and the fort's own construction was the problem. The adobe bricks had been made without straw or hair to bind them, so the walls did not so much erode as dissolve.
Families moved out of their houses and into their wagons while the walls came down around them, and by February 1862 the fort was abandoned outright. Nobody rebuilt it. What happened instead is the part that shaped the map: the families split. Most moved a short distance west onto higher ground and laid out the town that is New Harmony today. The rest went east over the ridge and founded Kanarraville.
That is why two towns in two different counties share a founding year, a founding event and a set of surnames. It is also why New Harmony is not where New Harmony started, and why anybody looking for the old townsite has to leave the modern town and drive back toward the freeway to find it.
The fort did not burn, and it was not attacked. It rained on it for twenty eight days and the walls went back to being mud.
Two founding dates circulate, and both are in print. The National Register listing and the standard reference works give 9 May 1854. The Washington County Historical Society gives 20 May 1854. Both are attributed to reputable sources and this page does not pick one. The year is not in dispute and neither is the sequence: settlers arrived in 1852, left, returned in 1854, raised crops that season and wintered in the fort.
The name attached to it
John D. Lee lived here, and this page states the record.
John D. Lee was among the men who built the first settlement on Ash Creek in 1852 and among those who built Fort Harmony in 1854, and he lived here until the fort was abandoned. Any honest account of this site names him, because leaving him out would be a choice rather than an omission.
He was later convicted of his part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 11 September 1857, in which roughly 120 emigrants of the Baker and Fancher wagon train were killed about forty miles west of here, and he was executed at the site on 28 March 1877. He was the only person ever tried and convicted for it. The Mountain Meadows page on the Enterprise companion covers the site, the burials and the long, contested history of who the markers there have named.
This page does not adjudicate any of that. Historians still argue over responsibility, over how far up the chain knowledge and direction ran, and over how the blame came to be shifted where it was, and a page about an adobe fort is not the place to settle it. What belongs here is the plain fact that the man is part of this site's history and that the massacre is part of his.
Where the fort's story and the massacre's story are told on this site. The memorial, the burials, the four locations, the 2011 National Historic Landmark designation and the full marker history belong to the Enterprise companion, which is nearest to the site and covers it as a memorial rather than an attraction. This page covers the fort, the storm and the two towns that came out of it.
The site today
A monument in a field, and two markers from two different eras.
Nothing of the fort stands. Adobe that dissolved in 1862 was not going to be waiting in 1979 when the site was added to the National Register, and what is on the ground now is a monument, some interpretive text and a field with a fence around parts of it.
The older marker went up in 1936, placed by the Utah Pioneer Trails and Landmarks Association together with members of the Parowan Stake, in the middle of a decade when that organisation was putting monuments on pioneer sites all over the state. The Daughters of Utah Pioneers added a marker later. Both are worth reading as artefacts of when they were written as much as for what they say.
The subdivision nearest the site is called Fort Harmony and carries six lots on nineteen acres in the county's own records, which is a small and quiet way for a place to keep its name. The freeway interchange people use to reach New Harmony sits within sight of where the walls were.
| Fort Harmony, 1854 to 1862 | New Harmony, 1862 to now | |
|---|---|---|
| Where | The valley floor near the present interchange | Higher ground about four miles west |
| What it was | An adobe fort 300 feet on a side | An open townsite on a grid |
| Status | County seat until 1859 | Incorporated in 1936 |
| Population | Most of the settlers in the region | 225 in 1865, 236 in 2020 |
| What survives | A monument and two markers | The town, the ditch and the cemetery |
The first log schoolhouse in the new town went up in 1863, the year after the move. There has been no school in New Harmony for a long time now.
The number that says the most
Twenty five families in 1865, and 236 people in 2020.
Washington County's own general plan records that in 1865 New Harmony held twenty five families and 225 people. The 2020 census counted 236 residents inside the town limits. In a hundred and fifty five years, across a period in which the county around it went from a scatter of forts to well over a hundred and eighty thousand people, this town added about eleven.
That is not stagnation exactly, and it is certainly not decline. What it reflects is that the town limits are small, about six tenths of a square mile, and that the growth in this valley has happened outside them, in ten platted subdivisions on county ground. The valley has hundreds of lots. The town has a couple of hundred people.
That division is the single most useful thing to understand before buying anything here, and it is not obvious from a listing. The mover page works through what falls on each side of the town line.
Keep reading
More of New Harmony on The Local.
Things to do
The top 8, ranked
Eight picks, ranked, from a creek walk past two 1930 cabins to a valley with nothing in the sky.
Read the guideZion's other door
Kolob Canyons
Zion's other entrance, ten minutes away, with this town's address on the visitor center.
Read the guideThe mountain
The Comanche Trail
A trail that leaves town on an 1860s irrigation ditch and ends on the crest of the range.
Read the guideThe water
The Town Ditch
Six miles of canal cut in 1865, four water companies now, and a reservoir that leaks.
Read the guideMoving here
Five acres and a well
Two rulebooks, two lines on the map, and 294 lots that were sold and never built on.
Read the guideThe companion
New Harmony, from a local
The park entrance, the trail, the fort and the water, in one place.
Read the pageQuick answers
Fort Harmony, answered.
Yes. Washington County was created in March 1852 and New Harmony was named as its seat, a fact recorded in the county's own general plan for this valley. The settlement holding the title was Fort Harmony, an adobe fort on the valley floor rather than the town standing today, and it kept the county seat until 1859. St. George was not founded until the cotton mission of 1861.
It was begun in 1854, following a first settlement attempt on Ash Creek in 1852 that was abandoned before the settlers returned. Sources differ on the exact day: the National Register listing and standard reference works give 9 May 1854, while the Washington County Historical Society gives 20 May 1854. Brigham Young is recorded as having turned the first dirt on the southeast corner of the foundation.
It measured 300 feet on a side. The houses along the east side were single storey against a wall ten feet high, and those on the west side were two storeys 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 16 November 1979.
Yes. He was among the men who built the first settlement on Ash Creek in 1852 and among those who built Fort Harmony in 1854, and he lived there until the fort was abandoned. He was later convicted of his part in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 11 September 1857 and executed at that site on 28 March 1877, the only person ever tried and convicted for it. The massacre site itself is covered on the Enterprise companion.
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.
A county seat that rained away in a month.
Places like this are why I like working in Southern Utah, and why I think buyers should know what happened on the ground they are standing on. If this valley interests you, I can tell you what the land does now as well as what it did then.