A ranching corner in Charleston, Utah
South Charleston Road in Charleston, Utah, runs through a 150-acre tract surveyed as farmland in Wasatch County's land books. First farmed in 1859 and organised as a town in 1862, Charleston lost two-thirds of its land to Deer Creek Reservoir in the 1930s, but this tract stayed dry ground.
Ranching country gave way to a drowned valley
You're standing on South Charleston Road, in Charleston, a small Wasatch County town first recorded in 1862. The ground under your feet is part of a 150-acre tract the county still carries on its land books, long before any house stood here. Charleston sat in open ranching country, tucked into the Heber Valley, with farms and pastures running down toward the Provo River.
Charleston's quiet lasted less than a century. In the 1930s, a severe water shortage pushed state engineers to dam the river just southwest of town, and the resulting reservoir, Deer Creek, drowned two-thirds of Charleston's land. Ranching families who had worked those fields for generations were forced out, their farms submerged under what is now a popular reservoir about 1.3 miles from where you stand.
This tract stayed dry while the reservoir rose
The flood left Charleston smaller, but the 150-acre tract here stayed dry ground, still carried on the Wasatch County books as farmland. The county's record does not name when a house went up on it or who built one. What survives is simpler: a surveyed tract, outside the water, that outlasted the reservoir that took so much of the town around it.
South Charleston Road still runs along this dry edge of Charleston, with Deer Creek Reservoir glinting a mile and a half to the southwest.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.