The Town Ditch, and the water that made this valley green.

In 1865, at a cost of three thousand dollars. It was an earthen canal six miles long, six feet wide and three feet deep, carrying water from Ash Creek, Kanarra Creek, Spring Creek and Big Spring to the town and the farm ground around it. The New Harmony Reservoir and Irrigation Company still owns and maintains the Town Ditch that descends from it.

Because the Southern Division of the Utah Militia camped at Harmony Flats for its fall training in 1866 and 1867 during the Black Hawk War, and a camp needs water. The valley sits at about 5,300 feet and runs cool in late summer, which is the same reason people drive up here from the desert now. The canal served the settlement and the farm ground as its primary purpose and the camp as a secondary one.

Four culinary systems serve the valley: the Town of New Harmony, Harmony Heights Water Company, Harmony Farms and Mountain Springs Water Company. Many acreage parcels are served by none of them and run a private well instead. Irrigation is separate again and runs on shares through local irrigation companies. Which system serves a given address is a per parcel question and it is the first thing to establish on any purchase.

A small private culinary water company serving homes on the outskirts of New Harmony, entirely outside the town limits despite the New Harmony postal address. It runs on a single well and pump feeding an 80,000 gallon and a 104,000 gallon tank on a central hill plus a smaller buffer tank, with six inch mains in phase one and eight inch in phase two, and it serves Harmony Heights phases one through three, Flint Ridge and adjacent homes. It is planned to reach ninety connections.

Four days of heavy rain flooded Ash Creek and ruptured one of two parallel water pipes running under the creek. Only one of the pair broke, it was isolated, and the homes it served kept their water through the remaining pipe. It is the same drainage whose flooding dissolved the walls of Fort Harmony over twenty eight days in the winter of 1862, a hundred and sixty three years earlier.

Because it has been losing meaningful water to seepage for years. The Washington County Water Conservancy District's Ash Creek Project, at roughly ninety four million dollars, runs a pipeline of about nineteen miles from the reservoir near New Harmony down to the new Chief Toquer Reservoir near the Anderson Junction interchange, capturing water that was soaking away and moving it somewhere it can be held and used.

No. Irrigation shares convey by the language in the deed rather than automatically, which means a parcel with shares and an otherwise identical parcel without them are entirely different purchases. Confirm which company the shares are in, how many come with the property, and whether the deed actually conveys them, before an offer rather than after. Culinary service is a separate question again.

Washington County's general plan for this valley says plainly that there is a limited amount of water here and that it will determine the extent to which development takes place. The plan counted existing valley water at 2,419 acre feet underground and 1,447 acre feet of surface water. That constraint, written into a county document for decades, is the reason for the five acre valley density and a large part of why hundreds of platted lots have never been built on.

It has been recommended but not done. The county's general plan for the valley includes a policy suggesting consideration of unifying the various water systems into a single district with professional management and operation, and separately raised the idea of a special service district covering the whole valley including the town. Neither has happened, and four separate systems still operate independently today.