Open ground near Moroni, Utah
A blacksmith's brick house survived decades of emptiness
About a mile from here, on Utah State Route 132, stands the Jabez Faux House and Barn. Jabez Faux was a blacksmith from Yorkshire, England. He converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and settled in Moroni in 1860.
Jabez Faux started with a dugout cut into the hillside, then a log cabin. By 1867, he had built a two-story brick house, and he lived there for more than 55 years.
The house stood empty from 1950 to 1970. Wilsford Clark bought it and fixed it up. It has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1976, one of the oldest brick homes in the whole valley.
Settlers returned to found Moroni after being burned out
About a mile away, Moroni, Utah was founded by George Washington Bradley in 1859. Bradley became the town's bishop that same year and held the job for 18 years. The settlers named the town after Moroni, a prophet in their faith.
The town was not the first try at farming this valley. Settlers had built an earlier settlement nearby in 1852, called Hambleton. Local Native Americans burned it down, and the settlers left. They came back in 1859 and built the town where Moroni now stands.
A fort-builder was killed in the Black Hawk War
James Russell Ivie helped build the fort that protected Mount Pleasant's early settlers. James Russell Ivie had stayed out of earlier fights between settlers and Native peoples in the valley. In 1866, during the Black Hawk War, Ute fighters killed him anyway.
A narrow-gauge railroad ran through for sixty years
The California Short Line railroad once ran through here, about 0.9 miles off. It carried freight and passengers through Sanpete County for over 60 years before it shut down in 1947.
Moroni counted over fifteen hundred residents in 2020
Moroni's 2020 census count stood at 1,544 people, in 472 households. Most were married couples, and almost half had children at home.
The valley around you is still open farmland, with Moroni's streets and the old Faux house a mile off toward the mountains.
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.