Emery County · Utah Territory

Castle Dale 1890

The county seat on Cottonwood Creek, drawn on M. J. Shelton’s townsite survey of 28 December 1880 and set on present-day USGS terrain.

Go to

Light

20 September 18904:00 p.m.

Show

Street & place names 1880 plat: blocks & lots Trees & brush Slow orbit

Key

Cottonwood Creek and ditches (water) Graded streets and wagon roads Lucerne (alfalfa), third cutting Wheat and oat stubble, grain in shocks Fall-plowed ground and kitchen gardens Sagebrush, rabbitbrush and shadscale

What the map is built on

Street grid and blocks follow the Castle Dale plat (surveyed by M. J. Shelton, 28 Dec. 1880; filed 19 Dec. 1889; recorded 7 Oct. 1891). Blocks 1–43, the Public Block (20) and the courthouse lot (Block 12, Lot 1) are placed as drawn.
Georeferencing. The plat’s east edge falls on the center of Section 34 (T18S R8E), and the J. W. Seeley house sits on the south half of Lot 2, Block 11, at Center and First South. Both put Main and Center Streets on today’s Main and Center.
Terrain is USGS elevation data (AWS Terrain Tiles), sampled every 11 m in and around town and more coarsely out to 11 miles, taking in the Wasatch Plateau to the west. Heights are true to scale with no vertical exaggeration.
Cottonwood Creek follows its present channel from OpenStreetMap. The Castle Dale Bridge at about 200 S. Center marks the same crossing.

What is reconstructed

The 1890 census counted about 409 people. The model shows about 50 homes and two stores on the platted lots, ten outlying farmsteads and two old dugouts. Which lots were built on, and by whom, is not documented here. Houses are placed by a seeded draw weighted toward Main and Center.
House types follow Castle Valley practice of the 1880s: hewn-log cabins (some still with dirt roofs), adobe and sandstone hall-and-parlor houses, a few two-story I-houses, frame houses, lean-to kitchens, log barns, granaries, pole corrals and haystacks.
The town ditch, its street laterals and the field pattern are drawn from the terrain, not from a survey. The homestead map names a West Town Ditch and a Jeffs Ditch, but their routes are not recorded.
Plants are limited to what grew here in 1890: native Fremont and narrowleaf cottonwood, coyote willow, box elder, Utah juniper, pinyon, big sagebrush, rubber rabbitbrush (in yellow bloom in September), greasewood and shadscale; and settler plantings of Lombardy poplar, apple, plum and peach, lucerne, wheat and oats. Tamarisk and Russian olive arrived later and are left out.

Sources

Plat of Castle Dale, County Seat of Emery Co., Utah (traced by Johansen & Tuttle, 1975).
“Location Map: Original Homesteads, Castle Dale–Orangeville Area.”
Emery County, “Castle Dale” narrative (schoolhouse at 200 E 100 N; Public Square; hospital c. 1894).
NRHP nomination, Justus Wellington Seeley II House (1889).
American Courthouses: Emery County (1883 courthouse).
Utah History Encyclopedia, “Castle Dale” (1890 population).
NRHP listings, Emery County (Castle Dale Bridge).

200 ft

Drag to rotate · Right-drag or two fingers to pan · Scroll or pinch to zoom

Castle Dale, 1890

Laying out the townsite…