Grafton

The original townsite washed away in the Great Flood of January 8, 1862 — forty days of rain sent houses down the Virgin River with the furniture still in them, per a settler's account from Virgin, where residents hauled Grafton's property out of the water, including three barrels of molasses. The survivors rebuilt about a mile upriver on higher ground under the name New Grafton, after the Massachusetts town. In 1866, Paiute raiders killed three members of the Berry family traveling toward Kanab, and the town emptied briefly to Rockville; about forty residents returned in 1868.

The rebuilt town put up its landmark in 1886 — the two-story adobe schoolhouse that doubled as church and meeting hall, dedicated July 8, 1888 — and peaked at about 120 residents in 1900. Farming here was a weekly argument with the river; one resident's line survives in the file: "The making of ditches in Grafton was like the washing of clothes in a household, it had to be done every week." The Hurricane Canal then opened easier farmland downstream and pulled the population away. The LDS ward was demoted to a branch in 1907 and discontinued in 1921, the date the file marks as the town's death certificate; the last residents left in the mid-1940s.

Grafton's haunting is mostly a matter of standing still. Visitors file the standard ledger of a preserved ghost town — felt presences in the schoolhouse, figures among the orchards and old lanes, the sense of interruption that comes with a place where the buildings outlasted the congregation. The cemetery beneath Mount Kinesava supplies the specifics: named graves from the flood years and the raiding years, including the Berry family.

Local memory holds that the town's spirits are its keepers. The poem James T. Jones wrote for Grafton in the county history runs 'I know the spirits that walked the paths, and those that have come here to stay' — which is the ghost file's founding document and its finest sentence.

Hollywood kept the buildings standing. In Old Arizona in 1929 was the first talkie filmed outdoors; crews for The Arizona Kid, Ramrod, The Red Fury and Child Bride of Short Creek each repaired the old church and reglazed the windows as a condition of the set. When preservation efforts faltered and vandals arrived, Lu Wayne Wood — born in Grafton in 1911 — launched the Grafton Heritage Partnership in 1995 to stabilize a schoolhouse in imminent danger of collapse. The work expanded to the whole townsite, and the district joined the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.

Today Grafton sits inside Rockville's legal boundaries, a short drive from Zion's entrance lines, visited by more cameras than it ever had residents. The record keeps a flood, a cemetery and a discontinued ward. The legend keeps the spirits that stayed. The film credits keep the bicycle.