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GRAFTON — Southwestern Utah may be primarily desert, but heavy rain and flooding are not uncommon in the region's history. In fact, flooding determined the fate of Utah's best-known ghost town, Grafton, and it's even been celebrated in song. In one case, a baby boy there was actually named for a flood because of a desperate rescue during childbirth.
We're not as vulnerable to flooding these days. But in Grafton's pioneer days, floods washed away crops and destroyed livelihoods. The town couldn't stay where it was because of flooding.
"Grafton had to move, I think at least twice," said composer and musician Phillip Bimstein.
He wrote his own song about Grafton called "Marvelous Flood." It's featured in an Emmy-winning video by Bimstein's band, Red Rock Rondo, that's been shown around the country.
The song tells a true story from 1862 when pioneers in Grafton were threatened by rain of Biblical proportions, supposedly, 40 days and nights of rain.
"There was a wagon-box home right by the river," Bimstein said. "The waters were swirling around it. And in that home, a young woman was about to give birth. And so a bunch of the men pulled the wagon-box home out of the waters just in time for her to give birth to a baby boy. And so they named the boy "Marvelous Flood Tenney."
But flooding every few years wasn't so marvelous for the pioneers in Grafton.
"People who don't live in a desert don't understand that the biggest problem in a desert is floods," said Doug Alder with the Grafton Heritage Partnership. The Partnership stabilized the buildings, making the town into a historical attraction just outside Rockville near Zion National Park.
In the 1800s, he said, Grafton kept losing its farmland.
"Some years they'd go in there and put a farm right next to where it's flat," he said. "Well, four months later, there'd be a flood and all their farm would be washed out."
Where: Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center
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After moving the town once, they abandoned it in 1906 and resettled in Hurricane where there was lots of farmland. But floods have been a factor all over southwest Utah as long as people have lived there.
"That flood in Santa Clara, we have a flood like that every five years," Alder said.
The town, meant to be permanent, became a relic and a reminder that flood disasters have shaped many lives in this desert.
Video Performance Credit: Western Folklife Center/KUED
