First called Red Creek, and named for the water

In the early 1850s, within a year or two of 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 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, a name often translated as red water or many springs. It is not a pioneer name or a family name, which makes it unusual in this valley: a town founded in the early 1850s and named after its own creek eventually took a name from the people who had been in this valley long before the settlers arrived, a Southern Paiute name often translated as red water or many springs.

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 artifact 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 around, 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 536 has thoroughfares more generous than most city centers. 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 a year or two later, four miles away. The two still share schools, clinics and errands, and Parowan carries the services and the county 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 offices and 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. Our Parowan pages cover 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 run very deep, and the mounds page here covers the oldest of them.