Four Years in the Wilderness: Clarion and Utah's Jewish Heritage

Out a ways from a unpaved road west of Centerville, Utah (about 130 miles south of Salt Lake City), if you have enough time or know what to look for, you can find a couple of lone grave stones standing isolated upon a dusty knoll overlooking the Gunnison Valley.  Each of these protected by guardrails, and each has words written in Hebrew and in English.  A little ways west of these markers, closer to the road, are the remnants of a town, cement foundations and scattered bricks left over from would-be homes; dreams that died in the desert.  It was once called "Clarion," and some call it that still.
As a remarked in a newsletter published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in February 1928, "Salt Lake City is of particular interest to Jews since it is, perhaps, the only place in the world where Christians call themselves Jews and Jews are often called "Gentiles.""  Zion was a preoccupation of early Mormonism, in which it was an almost abstract concept with multiple meanings, but often used as a metaphor for the community of church members (aka "Latter-Day Saints") when they are "unified and pure in heart," as well as in reference to the gathering place of the Saints, wherever that maybe; at one time it was in Kirtland, Ohio, then Independence, Missouri, then Nauvoo, Illinois, and eventually, in the valleys of the Great Basin.  For many, many travelers walking on the Mormon Trail from Council Bluffs, Iowa to the Salt Lake Valley, they were "going to Zion."  Not long after the first pioneer companies arrived in summer 1847 and ever since, devotees of the Mormon faith dominated Utah's population, filling out the main corridor of travel along the Wasatch Front with Mormon settlements, from Brigham City, 60 miles to the north of Salt Lake City, to St. George, 300 miles to the southwest.  Of course, many non-Mormon settlements would crop up too, mainly in the years of increased westward expansion following the Civil War, mostly in the form of boom towns at centers of mining and railroad construction.  Towns east of the Wasatch Mountains like Park City and Price grew up around mining and in later years have continued to grow and evolve, while many others had their brief moments as raucous frontier towns, such as Corinne (60 miles north of Salt Lake City), which had 15 saloons in the late 1860s but now exists only as a dusty rural town of 600 or so on the way to Golden Spike National Historic Site, or Frisco, Mercur and Silver City, all of them once-thriving Utah mining towns that now exist only as cemeteries with a few ruins in the middle of nowhere.  Unlike those and many other failed settlements, Clarion was not a mining or railroad town, but rather, was an attempt to build another kind of Zion.

Clarion, though it, like so many others, was built on grand ambitions and short-lived, was of a very different sort.  37 years before the establishment of the modern State of Israel, the Jewish people were seen as a people without a true home, not truly part of any European or American nation, and feared, distrusted and despised by many of the nations in which they tried to make a home.  Beyond the anti-Semitic and erroneous notions in Christianity that the Jewish people were cursed for killing Jesus Christ, the loyalty of many Jews to their own tightly-knit communities with rituals and dress that seemed strange to the majority was used against them to create a common enemy for non-Jewish people.  This hate manifested itself in many nations in the form of exclusionary laws that forbade Jews from owning land, performing certain jobs, or living in certain areas of a community, and in particularly horrific instances, Jews were subjected to outbursts of mob violence called "pogroms" that included murders and destruction of property.  Because they were forbidden from owning land, Jewish people could not have farms or live many other lifestyles associated with rural living, and many of them adapted to urban lifestyles in cities.  Many anti-Semitic stereotypes that exist to this day have their roots in these medieval laws; for instance, when Jewish communities thrived in cities, they were seen as urban elites, and since Christians were forbidden from collecting interest on financial loans (called "usury" in the Bible) for a time, Jewish businessmen built up and dominated the financial and banking industries, leading to resentful accusations of greed against their communities.
Although the kind of mob attacks on Jewish communities now described as pogroms are recorded going back to the early medieval period, the word pogrom first appeared in Russian in the 19th century, in a time and place where pogroms were increasingly a violent outlet for the frustrations of impoverished Eastern European peasants.  Since Jewish living was usually restricted to designated areas, they could not move around residence within a country easily, if ever, and they were forced to live in densely populated communities, making them more vulnerable to these outbursts of antisemitic violence.

Although anti-Semitism, including anti-Semitic violence, certainly existed in the United States (the much-publicized lynching of Leo Frank in Atlanta, Georgia, 1913 for the alleged rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl being a particularly famous example), there were no anti-Jewish laws of the sort that were so prevalent in Europe.  During the United States' early years, there wasn't a significant enough Jewish population to motivate organized anti-Semitic action, and despite frequent attempts to override the separation of church and state throughout the nation's history, the Constitution prevented any widespread regulations against Jews.  One rare exception was Major-General Ulysses S. Grant's General Order No. 11 in December 1862, in the middle of the Civil War, which attempted to expel all Jews from his military district, including Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky, based on the premise that "certain Jews" were responsible for perpetuating a black market for Southern cotton that was undermining the Union cause, but the order was met with swift and sudden criticism, with President Abraham Lincoln rescinding the order a couple weeks later and memories of the order coming back to haunt Grant in his later presidential races.  Grant would strive to distance himself from and repudiate the order, and became the first sitting U.S. President to attend a synagogue in 1874 at Adas Israel in Washington, D.C.  As for millions of other souls from across Europe and Asia, the United States appeared as a land of new promise to Jews fleeing persecution, and the 1880s through the early 20th century saw a massive migration of Jews from Eastern Europe, especially Imperial Russia (if you've ever seen AN AMERICAN TAIL, the Mousekewitz family is analogous to Russian-Jews (except they're mice), who travel to America to escape the vicious attacks of cats, which are analogous to Russian Cossacks (except they're cats)).  As with many immigrants, they tended to cluster in ethnic enclaves within large cities on the East Coast such as New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.  That's where the settlers of Clarion began their journey to Utah.

In the early 20th century, America's cities were increasingly overcrowded, and a cultural movement to return to life on farms and take part in agricultural enterprises was kindled and promoted by President Theodore Roosevelt, among others.  Increased interest in rural living arose in the Jewish community, in particular, who had for generations been accustomed to city life due to the overtly anti-Semitic policies of European nations, but in America were seeking new starts and new possibilities.  The Jewish Agricultural and Colonial Association, founded by Ukrainian-born Benjamin Brown (born Benjamin Lipshitz) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was engaged in finding a suitable location for such a colony in the western United States in 1911 when they were courted by the State of Utah, which had an interest in attracting more settlers to their largely uninhabited state.  Utah had a few prominent Jewish residents who pledged support to the colony, and for much of the majority religious denomination, the Mormons, they had always had a intense fascination with Judaism.  Although elements of the phenomenon of "philo-Semitism" within Mormonism have been based on erroneous claims and misunderstandings, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has tied itself closely to a Jewish identity, claiming lineage to the House of Israel and adherence to "lost" ancient Israelite rituals, and they donated $500 to the effort of settling Clarion.  In calling the Saints to Utah, they often referred to "gathering in Zion."  Again, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency mused in 1928, "Salt Lake City is of particular interest to Jews since it is, perhaps, the only place in the world where Christians call themselves Jews and Jews are often called "Gentiles.""  However, there were explicitly, specifically Jewish figures in Utah as well, such as Simon Bamberger, a German-born immigrant and entrepreneur who came to Utah in the 1870s and opened a hotel in Ogden, then in Salt Lake, invested in a silver mine in Juab County that made him rich and began constructing railroads to service the mines throughout the state and streetcars that connected Utah's urban centers in Salt Lake and Ogden.  Bamberger opened Lagoon in 1886, a resort along his railroad line which eventually evolved into the modern amusement park in Farmington, Utah, became a state senator from 1903 to 1913, and by 1917, the self-made millionaire was elected as the first non-Mormon governor of Utah since it achieved statehood in 1896.

The plot of land offered to the Jewish Agricultural and Colonial Association was desert land and far from the most fertile soils of the Utah Lake Valley, just south of the main stretch of Utah settlements, but the state proposed the building of a canal to bring additional water from a reservoir in the Sevier River to the Clarion plot 65 miles away.  The JACA agreed to the purchase of 6,085 acres with water rights about 5 miles southwest of the existing settlement of Gunnison in Sanpete County in 1911.  The JACA would subsidize the settlers of the colony they called "Clarion," to be the clarion call to their fellow Jews to come together and return to a life of soil, farming, and to put down roots, and by the first small harvest of wheat, oats, and alfalfa in 1911, it was home to 23 families.  Some 150 families from New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia (having immigrated to those cities from Imperial Russia) had settled in Clarion by the fall of 1912, making it a comparably large town at the time.  Eager to celebrate the settlement and draw more residents to his state, Bamberger's predecessor, Governor William Spry (also an immigrant, born in England), made the long 135-mile journey to Clarion from Salt Lake City to celebrate their first harvest and traveled east to promote the settlement with the JACA.  But the Utah winters were frigid, and the summers with scorching, and worst of all, the water was scarce.  While the promised Piute Canal was supposed to be ready in time for the colonists arrival, it wouldn't reach their settlement until 1918, far too late after they'd gone.  The soil was not conducive to farming, and even today is desolate, mostly used for cattle grazing.  Eventually, all would leave, except for four, including two children and two men, but only two of the graves remain marked today.

Clarion wasn't the only attempt by Jews in this period to start an agricultural community, but it was the largest.  Cotopaxi in Colorado, Sicily Island in Lousiana, New Odessa in Oregon were just a few of dozens across North America, as well as others in South America.  Although, at the time, much of the Jewish movement known as Zionism was not yet specifically aimed at the creation of a Jewish state in Israel specifically, but rather, sought the creation of a Jewish state anywhere, some Zionists had begun immigrating to Palestine, which was under the control of the Ottoman Empire until it was claimed by the British in the aftermath of World War I.  There, they attempted to create farming communities as well.  There is an old Christian legend dating back to the Middle Ages called "The Wandering Jew," (sometimes called "The Eternal Jew") about a Jewish man who rejects Jesus Christ in some form or other along the way to the Crucifixion, and is cursed, Cain-like, to wander the Earth in continuous exile until the Second Coming of Christ.  In the legend, the Wandering Jew is a specific man (usually known as Ahsaver; ironically named for the non-Jewish King Ahasuerus from the Book of Esther; and sometimes known by other names), but the character of the Wandering Jew came to represent the Jewish people as a whole, as a people without a home.  In the first couple centuries A.D., a trio of wars of rebellion between the Jews in Judea and the Roman occupiers resulted in the siege and destruction of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 A.D., fracturing the symbolic center of Jewish identity, and their ousting was solidified in 136 A.D. after a bloody four year rebellion ended with more than half a million Jews killed and forbidden from the city of Jerusalem by the Roman Emperor Hadrian as part of his efforts to root out Jewish nationalism.  During the next several centuries, the Jewish people immigrated north into Europe and around the Middle East, but they were widely seen by other people of these lands as outsiders, people without a nation.  Even while some attempted to assimilate into other cultures, people of prejudice remained distrustful of the Jews who if, they thought, weren't members of any nation, could not be beholden to any nation.  In addition to charges of deicide, they were blamed for defeat in wars and accused of subversion, of spreading disease, and of numerous other anti-Semitic conspiracies.  They were driven from place to place, seen as neither a people of the nations they lived in, or of any nation beyond the Jewish identity.  Clarion was an attempt to move beyond that, to tie their people to a life on the land.

Many things conspired to prevent the long-term success of Clarion.  There was not enough potable water, and the their years of experience in the cities left the settlers unprepared to work the land when such knowledge became a necessity to survive.  One of the ruins that remains at the Clarion townsite is a cistern that it was hoped would store filtered water, but at its first filling, one of its walls gave way and spilled their most precious resource into the desert ground.  Each subsequent harvest disappointed more than the last, and even today, experienced farmers with the benefits of today's technology have deemed only about half the land suitable for farming.  Gradually, their stamina was beaten down.  In their fourth year, the number of people remaining in Clarion dropped precipitously, and most began to return to the cities, some from where they came, and other seeking opportunities in new but familiar urban environments like Chicago.  In the late fall of 1915, the state officially terminated their title, and in early 1916 began to auction off the land.  A few stayed, or dispersed into nearby areas of Utah before eventually returning to the urban centers in the next few years.  The 1920s saw a meager attempt by a Mormon community to fill out the area, with the establishment of an LDS ward in the 1930s, but it only lasted a couple of years before they left too, on account of the lack of water.  Benjamin Brown, of the JACA, would remain in Utah for a while longer, helping to found the Utah Poultry Association (today known as Norbest Turkey in Moroni, UT) in 1923.  He later attempted another farming venture in New Jersey during the Great Depression.  A few other families would linger, but when left without a Jewish community and faced with the prospect of their children marrying into Mormon families, they ultimately left as well.
There were, it seems, once four headstones on this hilltop left by the people who settled Clarion, but sometime in the 1950s, the site was paid little attention while the land was being used for cattle grazing.  Presumably, a couple of the stones were knocked over by cows, but whether they're still out there beneath the dirt or removed to somewhere else is unknown.  The land is still used for cattle grazing, and the stench wafting over from the Barex Dairy nearby is intense (not to slight the dairy though, who I have to thank for putting me in the right direction in locating the Clarion cemetery, which is out of plain sight), but the two remaining headstones are protected by sturdy iron guardrails.  Both are marked in Hebrew, with some English at the bottom.   

EDWARD H.

SON OF

SAM AND ROSE

LIEBERMAN

MARCH 3, 1913

JAN. 7, 1914 

 

Less than a year old, I can't find any specifics on his death; chalk it up to the hardships of the time and place that claimed so many infants buried in pioneer cemeteries.

BE RESTFULL

AARON 

SON OF

ABRAHAM

DIED AUG. 14, 1913 

This is Aaron Binder, born in Russia, who came to Utah from Baltimore and was killed in a logging accident in the nearby mountains.

These stones remain quiet in the desert, a testament to what transpired here over a century ago.  

Sources: 
Schenker, Lisa. "100 years ago, Jewish colony left its mark on Utah and a people." Salt Lake Tribune, 19 September 2011 

Walker, Joseph. "Clarion call: Failed settlement lives on in Jewish hearts." Deseret News, 2 September 2011

Hansen, Roger. "A Short History of Clarion." WaterHistory.org 

Clarion information kiosk at the intersection of Center Street and U.S. Route 89