Grafton, Utah: The Ghost Town Below Zion That Refused to Stay Buried

Grafton is a preserved pioneer ghost town on the south bank of the Virgin River, a few miles downstream from Zion National Park near the town of Rockville. It was settled in December 1859 as part of Brigham Young’s cotton-growing push in southern Utah, abandoned twice, battered by floods for six decades, and left empty for good in 1944. Today it’s often called the most photographed ghost town in the West, and most people who have seen it don’t know they have: its schoolhouse and one of its old homes stand in the background of the bicycle scene in the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Three million people a year drive the highway to Zion. A tiny fraction turn off at Rockville, cross the river, and follow the dirt road two miles to Grafton. That’s the whole appeal. A famous place has a forgotten neighbor, and the neighbor has the better story.

Why a cotton town ended up here

The reason Grafton exists at all is cotton. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, Brigham Young wanted the Utah Territory to stop depending on goods shipped in from the United States, and cotton was near the top of the list. The warm, low country along the Virgin River could grow it. That’s how the region earned the nickname it still carries: Utah’s Dixie.

Growing anything down here took two things that were both in short supply — flat ground to farm and water to irrigate it. Settlers found just enough of both in a string of small towns strung along the upper Virgin: Virgin in 1857, Grafton in 1859, then Rockville, Springdale, Shunesburg, and a handful of others over the next few years. A group from Virgin led by Nathan Tenney started the first Grafton townsite about a mile downstream of where the ghost town stands now. They called it Wheeler.

The cotton did well. In fact, Grafton’s farmers planted so much of it that first year that they didn’t put in enough corn and cane to feed themselves. In the seasons that followed they learned to grow food first and cotton second. Survival next to the Virgin River demanded that kind of attention, and then some.

The river that kept winning

The Virgin looks harmless most of the year. It is not. On the night of January 8, 1862, a weeks-long flood — part of the enormous Great Flood of 1862 that hit the whole West — tore through the valley and destroyed most of the original townsite. A man in Virgin watched the wreckage go by and wrote that “the houses in old Grafton came floating down with the furniture, clothing and other property of the inhabitants,” including three barrels of molasses hauled back out of the water.

The survivors rebuilt a mile upriver, on higher ground, and named the new town New Grafton after Grafton, Massachusetts. Higher ground helped, but it didn’t fix the real problem. The river carried enormous loads of silt, and Grafton’s irrigation ditches clogged constantly — settlers had to dredge them out at least once a week, far more often than neighboring towns. One resident’s line about it has outlived everything else he ever said: “making ditches at Grafton is like household washing; it’s a weekly chore.” Irrigation dams washed out two and three times a year. The town spent its whole life repairing the same infrastructure.

By 1864 there were about 28 families, each farming roughly an acre. Grafton grew slowly, held a dance every Friday night, and buried its dead in a small cemetery on the bench above town. For a single year, from January 1866 to January 1867, it was even the county seat of Kane County before a boundary change moved it into Washington County.

Abandoned once, then abandoned again

Grafton is a rare thing: a town that became a ghost town twice.

The first time was 1866. The Black Hawk War — the longest and most destructive conflict between Utah settlers and Native peoples — had spread fear through the southern settlements, and Brigham Young ordered the small, scattered villages to consolidate into towns of at least 150 people for safety. Grafton, alone on the south bank and cut off from its neighbors by the river, was completely evacuated to Rockville. The farmers didn’t give up their fields; they crossed back over the river each day to work the land and returned to Rockville at night. When the fighting wound down, families began moving back in 1868, though fewer than had left.

The second time was slower and permanent. In 1906 a new canal finally delivered Virgin River water to the wide, flat Hurricane bench twenty miles downstream — land that could grow far more than Grafton’s cramped, flood-prone acres ever could. Grafton’s own men had helped build that canal. When it opened, families packed up and left for Hurricane, and some literally took their houses with them. The local church branch was discontinued in 1921. The last residents, the Russells, moved away in 1944, and Grafton has stood empty ever since.

The movie almost nobody realizes they’ve seen

Grafton’s emptiness turned out to be an asset. A town frozen in the 1880s, with almost nobody in it, is exactly what a film crew wants.

The cameras showed up early. In 1929, the mostly intact and barely inhabited town became the set for In Old Arizona, the first talking picture ever filmed outdoors. Warner Baxter won the Academy Award for Best Actor playing the Cisco Kid, and the film picked up several other nominations. More Westerns followed through the 1930s and ’40s.

Then came the one everybody has seen without knowing it. In 1969, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid filmed its most disarming sequence here — Paul Newman as Butch pedaling a bicycle around a farmyard with Katharine Ross while “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” plays. The buildings behind them are Grafton’s: the 1886 schoolhouse and the old Russell home. The movie won four Oscars. The scene is one of the most recognized in American film. The location has stayed a quiet dirt road two miles off the highway.

What’s still standing

Grafton was nearly lost the way most pioneer villages are lost — either paved over as a town grows or swept off by a flash flood. It survived because people who came from here refused to let it go.

In June 1997, descendants and preservationists organized the Grafton Heritage Partnership to protect and restore the site. Working with the Utah State Historical Society, the Bureau of Land Management, and the Utah Division of State History, they repaired the old church, the Alonzo Russell home, the Louisa Foster home, the John Wood home, and the Berry family fence in the cemetery, adding period-correct windows, doors, and roofing. They bought 150 acres of surrounding farmland and keep it in agricultural use so the setting still reads as a working valley rather than a parking lot.

The centerpiece is the 1886 schoolhouse, built of adobe with lumber the settlers hauled roughly 75 miles from Mount Trumbull, across the Arizona line. It doubled as the town’s church and meeting hall, and it’s the building most people photograph. The cemetery sits on the bench a quarter-mile before the townsite, and it tells the hard version of pioneer life plainly: six of its graves hold babies who didn’t reach their first birthday, most of them from the settlement’s earliest, hungriest years.

The ghost story, kept in its place

Grafton being a graveyard town in the desert, the stories found it. The most repeated one comes from 1927, when a girl named Vilo said she saw the spirits of two children who had died in an accident in Grafton back in 1866, and the tale was later set to music by the local ensemble Red Rock Rondo, performed at the cemetery. It’s folklore, not history — a good campfire version of a real place with real graves. Worth telling as exactly that, and no more.

How and when to actually go

Grafton is free and open, and getting there is simple. From Rockville, about 3.5 miles west of Springdale, turn south on Bridge Road, cross the one-lane bridge over the Virgin River, and turn right on Grafton Road. The pavement gives out and the road turns to gravel; follow it a couple of miles past the cemetery to the townsite and park at the red gate. A regular car handles it fine in dry weather. After rain, the dirt can turn greasy, and this is flash-flood country, so skip it when storms are in the forecast.

Go early or late. This is southern Utah, and from June into September the middle of the day runs well past 100 degrees with no shade to speak of. Early morning and the hour before sunset are cooler, quieter, and the light on the adobe and the red cliffs behind town is the reason photographers keep coming back. Treat the buildings gently — they’re held together by volunteers and donations. Stay out of the fenced structures, leave the cemetery as you found it, and pack out everything.

One more thing worth timing a trip around: former Grafton families still hold a reunion at the townsite on the last Saturday of September, midday, and visitors are welcome to come, bring lunch, and hear the stories from the people whose great-grandparents dredged those ditches every week.

Grafton is what most of Utah’s pioneer settlements would look like if the river had been a little kinder and the highway had run somewhere else. It didn’t grow into a city and it didn’t wash away entirely. It just stopped, and stayed, two miles past a turn almost everyone skips.