Across the river Rockville
Four miles from the highway, and a century back
Grafton, and the road out to it.
An 1859 farming settlement on a bench above the Virgin River, emptied out by flood, thin water and a better canal somewhere else, and held up since 1997 by a volunteer partnership. It costs nothing to visit, there is nobody there to take a ticket, and getting the road right is the only difficult part.
By Scott Buehler, Rockville local
Updated September 2026
The short answer
Grafton is one of the best preserved ghost towns in Utah, an 1859 farming settlement on a bench above the Virgin River about four miles from the highway at Rockville, and yes, you can visit it, for free. Five original buildings still stand out of the thirty or so that once did: the 1886 adobe schoolhouse that doubled as church and social hall, the 1861 home of Alonzo Russell, the 1877 John Wood home, the Louisa Russell home and a barn. Four of them are open to walk into, the cemetery is signed on the way in, and interpretive signs stand at every stop.
The town emptied out over eighty five years of flooding, thin water and, eventually, better ground down the valley, and a volunteer partnership has held the buildings up since 1997. It is self guided, unstaffed and open in daylight, paid for by the donation boxes beside the signs. The only real difficulty is the road out: three of the four miles are graded dirt, easy for an ordinary car in dry weather and a genuinely bad idea when it is wet.
The road in
Four miles, three of them dirt.
Turn south off State Route 9 onto Bridge Road, at the east end of Rockville. The turnoff is easy to miss at highway speed and the giveaway is the steel truss bridge a couple of hundred yards down it, which you will cross. It is single lane, so wait if something is already on it.
Past the bridge the road forks at about a third of a mile. Bear right. It forks again around a mile and a third; bear right again. Signs point the way at both. From the bridge it is a little under three miles to the townsite, so call it four from the highway, and the cemetery is signed on the left before you get there.
The surface is graded dirt and in dry weather an ordinary passenger car does the trip without drama. In wet weather it does not. The clay out here turns slick within minutes of rain starting and stays greasy for a day or more afterwards, and people get stuck every season in vehicles that had no business being out there. There is no phone signal for most of it.
The other fork, the one you did not take, climbs onto the mesa as the Smithsonian Butte National Back Country Byway and is a much harder road. That one has its own page, and the difference between the two matters: Grafton Road is a Sunday drive and the byway is not.
Check the sky over the high country, not over the parking lot. Rain that falls twenty miles away on the Kolob plateau arrives here as a road surface problem hours later and, in the washes, as water. This is the same drainage that has repeatedly flooded the settlements along it, and monsoon season runs roughly July through September. If the forecast is unsettled, go on a different day. The town and the site will still be there.
Why it emptied
Eighty five years of losing to the same river.
Settlers came up from Virgin in 1859 and started a cotton settlement on the floodplain, on a site about a mile downstream from the one you visit today. That first Grafton lasted less than three years.
In January and February 1862 it rained on Southern Utah for forty four days. The Virgin and the Santa Clara came up and took out nearly every settlement on them: Grafton, Adventure, Northop, Duncan's Retreat, and the ground at Fort Clara. Grafton's survivors moved up onto the bench where the buildings stand now. The people flooded out of Adventure and Northop went further upstream and founded Rockville, which is why the two towns share a birthday and a reason for existing.
Higher ground fixed the flooding and did nothing about the water supply, which still had to be carried onto the bench by ditch and which the river kept silting up. Life out here was hard in the ordinary ways of a remote frontier farm: a short growing season, a doctor a long way off, and illness that fell heavily on the youngest. Families stayed on anyway, but the town never really recovered its footing.
The slow ending came from a canal rather than a catastrophe. When irrigation opened up better and more reliable ground down the valley in the early twentieth century, families moved to it, and Grafton's population fell away after about 1907. A handful of households hung on into the 1940s. The last of them left in 1944.
Read the cemetery and you get the whole argument in one field: a farming town on a flooding river, a long way from a doctor, burying a great many of its children.
The reason there is anything left
A partnership formed in 1997.
Abandoned adobe does not last. What saved Grafton was the Grafton Heritage Partnership Project, organized in June 1997 to bring the private landowners, the county and the public agencies with an interest in the site around one table and keep the buildings up. It is a non profit, it is run by volunteers, and it meets monthly.
The work since has been structural rather than cosmetic: new roofs, doors and windows, and stabilization on the church and schoolhouse, the Russell home, the Louisa Foster home and the John Wood home, plus restoration of an iron fence in the cemetery. Four of the houses are sound enough that you can step inside. In September 2010 the whole site went onto the National Register of Historic Places as the Grafton Historic District.
Rockville's own land use code is part of the arrangement, and it is a nice piece of small town governance. The Agricultural zone that covers the site carries provisions written specifically for it: interpretive signing, a sanitation facility, gates and barriers, and permission for an on site steward to live there in a self contained trailer, seasonally or year round, with the partnership's board approving it. A town of only a few hundred people wrote a caretaker into its zoning.
The other reason people come
Hollywood found it in 1928 and never let go.
Grafton had been empty of most of its families for twenty years when the film crews turned up, and the thing that made it useless as a farm made it perfect on camera: an intact frontier street with red cliffs behind it and no telephone poles.
In Old Arizona came first, shot around 1928 and released in 1929, and it matters beyond this valley because it was the first talking picture made outdoors. Ramrod followed in 1947. Then in 1969 came the one everybody knows. The bicycle sequence in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Paul Newman and Katharine Ross, was filmed here, and the buildings behind them are the schoolhouse and the Alonzo Russell home you can walk up to today.
It is a strange kind of preservation. A settlement that failed at everything it tried became valuable precisely because it had stopped changing, and the money and attention that came with the films are part of why anyone bothered to save the buildings later. Grafton is regularly called the most photographed ghost town in the West, which is the sort of claim nobody can verify and nobody who has stood there wants to argue with.
It is a historic site, not a set. The buildings are original adobe and timber and they are fragile. Do not climb on them, do not lean on the fences, do not move anything, and treat the cemetery as what it is. The houses immediately around the site are lived in and the fields are farmed, so the no trespassing signs mean it.
Scott Buehler
Moving Utah About Scott
Keep reading
More of Rockville on The Local.
The crossing
The 1924 bridge
Utah's last Parker through truss still carrying cars, and the vote that saved it.
Read the guideThe back road
Smithsonian Butte
Nine and a quarter miles of BLM road over the mesa, and one steep rutted climb.
Read the guideThe companion
Rockville, from a local
The quiet mile, the ceiling the town set itself, and the bridge out the back.
Read the pageQuick answers
Grafton, answered.
From State Route 9 at the east end of Rockville, turn south onto Bridge Road, cross the 1924 steel truss bridge, then bear right at the fork about a third of a mile past it and right again about a mile further on. Signs point the way at both junctions. It is a little under three miles from the bridge to the townsite, so roughly four from the highway, and the cemetery is signed on the left before you arrive.
No. There is no fee, no permit and no booking. The site is free, self guided, unstaffed and open during daylight hours, with donation boxes beside the interpretive signs. Those donations are what pays for the roofs, doors, windows and fence repairs, so if you have cash on you it is worth using.
Slowly, and for several reasons, but water was behind most of them. The original 1859 site was destroyed by the great flood of 1862 and the survivors moved onto the higher bench where the buildings stand now. That bench was hard to water, the river kept silting the ditch, and the growing season was short. The real ending came later, when irrigation opened better and more reliable ground down the valley and families left for it after about 1907. The last residents moved out in 1944.
Partly. Bridge Road is paved and Grafton Road is graded dirt that a normal car handles in dry conditions. Wet weather is the thing that changes the answer.
Five buildings on the bench above the river, including the 1886 schoolhouse and the 1861 Alonzo Russell home, plus the cemetery signed before the townsite.
The famous one is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, whose bicycle sequence was shot here with the 1886 schoolhouse and the 1861 Alonzo Russell home in the background. Earlier films used it too: In Old Arizona, shot around 1928 and released in 1929, which was the first talking picture filmed outdoors, and Ramrod in 1947.
Some of them. Four of the restored houses are stabilized well enough that visitors can step inside, and interpretive signs explain each structure. What you must not do is climb on any of the buildings, lean on the fences, or move anything. The adobe and timber are original, the repairs were paid for by donations and done by volunteers, and the houses immediately around the site are private property that is still lived in.
An hour and a half is comfortable for the drive out from Rockville, the cemetery, the townsite and the walk between the buildings. Two hours if you read every sign, and photographers routinely spend longer than that because the light on the cliffs behind the town changes all afternoon. Add the drive back and the whole outing is a half morning.
First light, or the last hour before dark. It sits four miles off the highway and most Zion visitors never turn off, so even a busy season morning can be empty.
The town across the river did not survive. This one did.
Rockville exists because the same flood that finished the first Grafton pushed a different set of families onto higher ground, and the rules the town lives under now still start from what the river can do. That is worth understanding before you buy anything near the water here, and it is the sort of thing I would rather tell you early.
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