Today it’s a desirable place. Somewhere people flock to for vacation or to live, attracted by the breathtaking landscape and the mild winter weather, among other superlatives. In fact, it’s one of the fastest growing cities in the nation.
In the late 1850s and early 1860s, however, Washington County wasn’t a place many wanted to be. Some of those who received the call to settle here did not heed it with excitement.
Instead, many felt a sense of dread at the prospect of eking out a living on what was then considered a foreboding landscape.
Despite the odds against them, they persevered and grew cotton, which became both the foundation of the settlements of Southern Utah as well as the foundation of the pioneer’s faith.
Economic independence
The Cotton Mission is one of the best illustrations of early LDS pioneers trying to achieve economic independence, striving for locally sourced cotton after seeing that the outside market for it could dry up during the Civil War.
“Economic independence was, in fact, an aspect of Mormon theology,” wrote renowned LDS historian Leonard J. Arrington in a 1956 article entitled ‘The Mormon Cotton Mission in Southern Utah,’ which appeared in the ‘Pacific Historical Review.’
“The Cotton Mission was initially a series of experiments to determine whether cotton could be grown in Utah,” Arrington wrote.
Fort Harmony, established in 1852, became the jumping-off point to establish the Cotton Mission. Fort Harmony missionaries petitioned the Utah territorial legislature as early as 1854 to send 150 men to establish cotton plantations and vineyards in the Santa Clara and Virgin river basins, but the legislature denied the request, citing lack of capital and Indian hostilities.
Other missionaries sent to Santa Clara to work with the Native Americans planted a quart of cottonseed in 1855, which yielded enough lint to produce thirty yards of cloth. Samples were sent to Church President Brigham Young as proof that the region could, in fact, grow cotton. The cotton harvest the following year was also meager, but “seemed to demonstrate the providence of God in providing the wherewithal for a self-sufficient Kingdom,” Arrington wrote.
In the April 1857 General Conference, church leadership called fifty families and unmarried men to settle Washington, Utah, located along the Virgin River. Most in this company were converts from the southern states, who knew a thing or two about growing cotton.
They were instructed to supply the territory with cotton, constructed dams and ditches, then planted fifty pounds of cottonseed in quarter-acre patches scattered over a 400-acre field, but the yield that year was not particularly good, Arrington explained. They planted it late, in the sand. The hot weather didn’t do the crop any favors either.
A few years later, elsewhere in southern Utah, cotton was grown “so successfully that several settlements were opened up over a forty-mile stretch along the Virgin River,” Arrington noted.
However, Doug Alder and Karl Brooks, in their book “A History of Washington County: From Isolation to Destination,” note that the settlers’ early attempts at growing cotton proved costly. The two authors reported that the 1858 crop of 575 pounds was produced at a cost of $3.40 per pound. The next year, “they delivered a load of cotton to Brigham Young at $1.90 per pound,” Alder and Brooks wrote.
“This was still too costly to compete with cotton raised by southern states where rainfall eliminated the need for irrigation, but it suggested possible success for Mormon attempts and self-sufficiency,” Alder and Brooks explained.
“By December, 1859, a territorial legislative committee was able to report that cotton culture was ‘not impracticable’ and that ‘the experiments which have been made . . . give good reason to hope for sufficient success to enable the Territory at no distant day to supply itself without importation.’”
Total production reported in 1860 was 155 bales, which would have been greater, it was reported, if cotton had been “the subject of an active demand.” Some settlers, for instance, thought that Chinese sugar cane was a superior crop because of the ready sale for molasses, Arrington explained.
On the other side of the coin, there were settlers who grew too much cotton for their own good. One year, Grafton’s residents were too obedient to Young’s call to grow cotton and did not plant enough edible crops to feed their families.
With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the Church adopted policies which elevated cotton culture beyond the developmental stage.
The expansion
“No longer able to import clothing from the States, and no doubt encouraged by the prospect of building up an export trade of their own, Mormon leaders determined to expand the southern colonies,”Arrington wrote.
Categories: Missouri, Crops, General, Weather