Summit Creek, and the families who followed it.

In the spring of 1858, when Samuel T. Orton and other families moved onto Summit Creek and began farming and keeping bees, sheep and cattle. Before that the ground had been grazing country for Parowan, four miles north, which had itself been settled in 1851. So the families who came here in 1858 were not discovering the place, they were settling water their own town had been using for seven years.

Samuel T. Orton and other families, in the spring of 1858. Unlike many settlements in this territory there was no fort, no mission call and no single dramatic founding event, which is fairly typical of the second wave of settlement: the difficult and strategic sites were taken first, and good grazing on a creek at 6,000 feet was settled later by people who had been looking at it the whole time.

A Latter-day Saint ward was organised at Summit in July 1877, with Sylvanus C. Hulet as its first bishop. Nineteen years between the first families and a ward of its own is a long interval by the standards of settlement here, and it is a fair measure both of how small the community was and of how closely it sat inside Parowan's orbit.

There were three in succession, and none for the last ninety years. Children were first taught in a one room log schoolhouse, later replaced by a concrete building, and then from 1920 to 1936 by a two room brick schoolhouse serving pupils up to the seventh grade. Since then children have attended Iron County schools elsewhere in the valley, which is the modern version of the same arrangement.

Nothing built, and quite a lot if you can read a landscape. There is no preserved building, no marker, no museum and nothing on any register. What survives is the alignment of the old highway through the community, the older houses along it, the water company on the same corridor, and a pattern of landholding and irrigation that follows claims made in the 1850s and 1860s.

Because it was a normal part of a mixed high valley farm economy in the 1850s, and it is the detail that gets left out of most accounts. Farming, bees, sheep and cattle is the specific combination recorded for the first families here, and it tells you what this ground could actually carry: grass and water country at 6,000 feet rather than orchard country.

In Parowan, the county seat four miles north. An unincorporated community of 170 people does not run a historical society, and the documentary record for this end of the Parowan Valley sits with the county. If you are researching a family, a parcel or a water right here, that is where the paperwork is, and the Parowan companion on this site covers the valley's settlement story at greater length.

Remarkably little in shape and a great deal in function. It is still fields, pasture and acreage rather than streets and storefronts, on roughly the same land pattern. What has gone is the institutions: the ward, the schools and any services at all. What has arrived is a freeway through the middle of it with an exit of its own, which is why a farming community of 170 people is fifteen minutes from a university town.

Yes, and it is still the reason the community works. The creek and the irrigated ground it supports are the local economy, and the water rights attached to that ground are now regulated under a state groundwater management plan adopted for the whole Parowan Valley in October 2024. The creek that brought families here in 1858 is the same subject that decides land values here in 2026.