The founding Paragonah
Founded for water in 1851, renamed, incorporated in 1916
First called Red Creek, and named for the water.
Parowan was settled in 1851 as the first town in southern Utah, and in the same year settlers went four miles up the valley to a second creek and founded another settlement on it. They called it Red Creek, which tells you exactly what they had gone for. The name came later, from the Southern Paiute and from a lake on the valley floor.
Start here
Four miles up the valley, for a creek.
Parowan was settled in 1851 as the first town in southern Utah, the base from which the rest of this corner of the territory was organised. In the same year, settlers went four miles northeast to another creek coming down off the same mountains and started a second settlement there. They called it Red Creek, after the water, which tells you exactly what they had gone for.
That is the whole founding logic of the place. A valley this size supports more than one settlement only if there is more than one reliable creek in it, and Red Creek is the second. Everything after it, the grid, the fields, the irrigation shares and the town limits, follows from where that water comes out of the mountains.
The name changed later. Paragonah traces to the Southern Paiute and to the Little Salt Lake out on the valley floor, and it is the name the town carried when it incorporated in 1916.
The founding
1851
Parowan settled, and Red Creek founded the same year
4 mi
between the two, which has never changed
1916
the year of incorporation
~536
residents at the 2020 census
What they laid out
Streets wide enough to turn a wagon team.
The original grid is the most legible thing the 1851 settlers left, and it is still the shape of the town. Wide straight streets on a regular plan, generous lots that were sized for a household to grow its own food and keep its own animals, mature trees along the frontages, and the town hall, the church and the park within a few blocks of each other.
The width is the part people notice. These roads were laid out to let a wagon team turn round, and a hundred and seventy five years later they read as extravagantly generous for a town of five hundred and thirty six people. That is not planning ambition, it is a practical specification for the vehicles of the period, and it is one of the clearest surviving examples in this valley of how a settlement of that generation was actually set out.
There is no preserved fort, no museum and no marker trail. The plan is the artefact, and walking it is the visit.
A road built for animals and equipment, still reading that way a hundred and seventy five years later.
The name
From the Paiute, and from a lake on the valley floor.
Paragonah is not a pioneer name and it is not a family name, which makes it unusual in this valley. It traces to the Southern Paiute and to the Little Salt Lake, the shallow intermittent water out on the valley floor that has been a feature of this landscape for far longer than any of the settlements around it.
That is worth pausing on. A town founded in 1851 by settlers who called it after their own creek eventually took a name from the people who had been in this valley long before them, referring to a lake they had named. It is a small thing and it is not a straightforwardly happy one, given the wider history of this period, but it is a genuine thread of continuity in a valley where the layers of occupation run very deep.
Those layers are the real subject here. A Fremont village of four hundred mounds, a Southern Paiute presence, a name carried over, an 1851 settlement and a 1916 incorporation, all on the same few square miles of valley floor around one creek. The mounds page covers the oldest of them.
The valley's records are in Parowan, four miles southwest. Paragonah is small enough that the documentary record for this end of the valley, including the county's own archives, sits with the county seat rather than here. If you are researching a family, a parcel or a water right, that is where to start, and the Parowan companion on this site covers the valley's wider settlement story at greater length than a town of this size can support.
Keep reading
More of Paragonah on The Local.
Things to do
The top 6, ranked
Six picks, and one of them is eleven hundred years older than the town.
Read the guideThe Fremont village
The Paragonah Mounds
Four hundred mounds in the late 1800s, and twenty eight protected now.
Read the guideThe water
Red Creek Reservoir
Sixty acres of trout water at the top of nineteen miles of gravel.
Read the guideThe calendar
The Pioneer Day Pie Auction
Six events a year, no venue, and no budget but the last one's takings.
Read the guideMoving here
Five minutes off the interstate
The land is here and the services are four miles away.
Read the guideThe companion
Paragonah, from a local
The mounds, the creek, the founding and the calendar.
Read the pageQuick answers
The founding, answered.
In 1851, the same year as Parowan four miles southwest, by settlers who went up the valley to a second creek and founded a settlement on it. They called it Red Creek after the water. The town took the name Paragonah later and incorporated under it in 1916. The founding logic is simple: a valley this size supports more than one settlement only if it has more than one reliable creek.
Because that is the water it was founded on, and naming a settlement for its creek was the obvious thing to do when the creek was the entire reason for going there. Red Creek rises at about 9,560 feet near Willow Spring on the Markagunt Plateau, comes down through the town and out to the fields, and it is still what the irrigated ground here runs on.
From the Southern Paiute, and from the Little Salt Lake, the shallow intermittent water out on the valley floor. It is not a pioneer name or a family name, which makes it unusual in this valley: a town founded in 1851 and named after its own creek eventually took a name from the people who had been in this valley long before the settlers arrived, referring to a lake they had named.
In 1916, sixty five years after it was founded, under the name it carries now. That gap is not unusual for a small agricultural settlement in this period: incorporation followed when there was enough to administer, and a farming town of a few hundred people on a creek managed for a long time without a formal municipal structure.
The plan, which is the artefact here. There is no preserved fort, no museum and no marker trail, but the original wide street grid is intact and still the shape of the town: straight streets laid out to let a wagon team turn round, generous lots, mature trees along the frontages, and the town hall, church and park within a few blocks. Walking it is the visit.
Because they were laid out for the vehicles of the 1850s. A road wide enough to turn a wagon team is a practical specification rather than a display of ambition, and it is why a town of five hundred and thirty six people has thoroughfares more generous than most city centres. It is one of the clearest surviving examples in this valley of how a settlement of that generation was actually planned.
Closely, and it always has been. Parowan was settled in 1851 as the first town in southern Utah and Paragonah was founded from it in the same year, four miles away. The two still share schools, clinics and errands, and the county seat carries the services and the archives. Four miles has been the distance between them for a hundred and seventy five years and it has never really changed anything.
In Parowan, four miles southwest, where the county seat and its archives are. A town of this size does not maintain its own documentary collection, so anybody researching a family, a parcel or a water right here starts there. The Parowan companion on this site covers the valley's wider settlement story at greater length than a town of Paragonah's size can support on its own.
A Fremont village of more than four hundred mounds, occupied from about A.D. 700 to 1300 and counted among the largest known in Utah, and a Southern Paiute presence that gave the valley the name the town eventually took. The layers of occupation on these few square miles of valley floor run very deep, and the mounds page on this companion covers the oldest of them.
One creek, two settlements, a thousand years apart.
Fremont families farmed this valley floor for six centuries and pioneer settlers came four miles up the valley for the same water in 1851. If the layers have you looking at the ground rather than the buildings, the mounds page is where the older story is.