Brigham City, Arizona: The Mormon Fort Where Everything Went Wrong

Brigham City had the worst luck of all. In five years of trying, the settlers managed to grow crops exactly twice.

Brigham City, Arizona is a ghost town and National Register of Historic Places site in Navajo County, about a mile north of present-day Winslow. It was one of four fortified Mormon United Order settlements on the Little Colorado River, founded in 1876 and abandoned by 1882. The site is now within Winslow's city limits and undergoing restoration.

01The March South

The colonization party of about 300 settlers departed Utah in February 1876, divided into four groups under separate captains. The group that reached the site of Brigham City — first called Ballinger's Camp after Captain Jessie O. Ballinger — arrived in late March. Twenty families and fifteen bachelors from Salt Lake City began building.

They built a fort: protective walls 200 feet long and 7 feet high, enclosing homes within. This was the United Order — a Mormon communal economic system where property was held collectively and labor was shared. The four settlements were intended to be self-sustaining farming communities anchored by their cooperative structure.

02Five Years of Failure

The Little Colorado fought them from the start.

1876: The settlers built a dam to irrigate their fields. The dam failed to deliver water to the crops. They grew nothing their first year.

1877: Success — finally. They acquired a sawmill, built a grist mill, and established a dairy. Crops came in. The population grew.

1878: A flood destroyed most of the crop. The settlers organized as an LDS ward, a sign of institutional commitment, but the land was working against them.

1879: Another successful harvest. Two good years out of four.

1880: No crop at all. The water was alkaline. The soil was uncooperative. The U.S. Census that year counted 191 residents — people who had endured four years of near-starvation for a religious mission. Most of them left that year.

1881: Elder Erastus Snow, an LDS apostle, officially released the remaining settlers from their colonization duties. They were free to go. And then came the Apache raids. Geronimo's warriors were active across the region. Smallpox swept through. The remaining families fled to a nearby Army fort for protection.

1882: The last settlers left. Brigham City was abandoned.

03The Other Three Settlements

Brigham City was not alone in failure. Of the four 1876 settlements:

• Sunset was abandoned by 1888, partly because of the domineering leadership of Lot Smith
• Obed was abandoned by 1878 due to leadership problems and continuous sickness
• Joseph City (originally Allen City, then St. Joseph) was the sole survivor — it still exists today on Route 66

The Little Colorado colonization was one of the LDS church's most ambitious settlement campaigns and one of its most thorough failures.

04What Remains of Brigham City Today

The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 9, 1978. It has been annexed into the city of Winslow and is currently undergoing restoration. Archaeological work has documented the fort's layout, foundations, and artifacts from the five-year occupation.

The Brigham City Restoration Project aims to preserve the site as a heritage attraction. Winslow itself — famous for the Eagles lyric "standin' on a corner in Winslow, Arizona" — sits a mile south of where 300 settlers tried to farm a river that would not let them.