You’ve gotta love a traveling partner who allows you to leave the beauty of Bryce Canyon National Park to seek out abandoned ghost towns in the middle of nowhere, Utah.
Widtsoe is one of those places on earth where you scratch your head and think, “what were they thinking?”.
Yeah, the land was probably cheap, but who in their right mind would think this landscape would be a great place to start a farm?
I guess that guy would have been Jedediah Adair who bought land here In the early 1900s and started growing oats, wheat, and barley. Before this, the area was used only for running cattle seasonally. Soon others followed his lead and the area grew.
By 1908 the community became known as Adairville and an official townsite of 40 acres was donated by the Adairs. A few years later it was renamed Houston for John Houston, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints‘s local stake in Panguitch. The new town was granted a post office in 1912, and its name changed again to Winder, in honor of recently deceased Latter-day Saint leader John R. Winder but the postal service said there were too many towns named Winder so they changed the name again to recognize John A. Widtsoe, then president of the University of Utah and an agricultural scientist whose expertise in dry farming had been very helpful to area farmers.
Unfortunately science can only do so much against Mother Nature. The town’s fortunes began to change in the summer of 1920, when a severe drought threatened the crops. And families began to pack up and leave the area.
Widtsoe /ˈwɪtsoʊ/ is an unincorporated community and a near-ghost town in Garfield County, Utah, United States. Located in John’s Valley northeast of Bryce Canyon and along the Sevier River at the mouth of Sweetwater Creek, the town existed from about 1908 to 1936.
