Gifford Homestead

 

The Gifford House is open seasonally every year.

NPS/Nathan Gross

The Gifford farm lies in the heart of the Fruita valley, a desert oasis described by Wallace Stegner as "...a sudden, intensely green little valley among the cliffs of the Waterpocket Fold, opulent with cherries, peaches, and apples in season, inhabited by a few families who were about equally good Mormons and good frontiersmen and good farmers."¹ The 200 acre Fruita Rural Historical District is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Capitol Reef Natural History Association, in cooperation with the National Park Service, has renovated and refurnished the Gifford farmhouse as a cultural demonstration site to interpret the early Mormon settlement of the Fruita valley. The house depicts the typical spartan nature of rural Utah farm homes of the early 1900s. In addition to the farmhouse, the Gifford homestead includes a barn, smokehouse, garden, pasture, and rock walls.

 

The Pendleton Barn is part of the Gifford Homestead now, but was originally built by Calvin Pendleton.

NPS/Lewis

Residents and Improvements

The original home was built in 1908 by Calvin Pendleton. He and his family occupied it for eight years. The original house had a combined front room/kitchen and two small bedrooms. An outside ladder accessed two upstairs bedrooms. Pendleton also constructed the barn and smokehouse, as well as the rock walls near the house and on the mesa slopes above it.

The second residents of the home were the Jorgen Jorgensen family who resided here from 1916 to 1928. Jorgensen's daughter, Nell, married Dewey Gifford in 1923, and Jorgensen sold the homestead to his son-in-law in 1928. The Gifford family occupied the home for 41 years (1928-1969). Gifford added a kitchen in 1946 and the bathroom, utility room, and carport in 1954. That same year, the Giffords also built a small motel for people visiting Capitol Reef.

Life On the Farm

The Giffords raised dairy cows, hogs, and sheep, as well as chickens and ducks. They also ran cattle in the South Desert. They used the smokehouse to preserve meat for their own use and for sale. Dewey Gifford also worked for the State Road Department and later for the National Park Service, to supplement his farm income.

The family ate whatever they raised. The garden produced a variety of vegetables including potatoes, beans, peas, squash, lettuce, radishes, corn, and watermelons. The family also had orchards and grew sorghum. They preserved fruit and vegetables for later use by bottling or drying. Bottled foods were stored in the cellar below the front of the house. Dry goods, such as potatoes, were kept in the root cellar on the back side of the house.

Water was carried to the house from the Fremont River and was used untreated. A two-hole outhouse served the family until an indoor bathroom and plumbing was installed in later years. The house received electricity in 1948.

The Giffords frequently got together with other Fruita residents, especially the Chesnut and Mulford families, for suppers, singing, games, cards, baseball, reading, and quilting. The families were good friends and helpers to each other, an important relationship in a small isolated community like Fruita. Listen to Gifford reflect on his life in Fruita (below).

The Giffords were the last residents of Fruita. Dewey and Nell Gifford sold their home and land to the National Park Service in 1969 and moved away. With the Giffords' departure, the story of Fruita as a farming community came to a close. Today, the pioneer spirit of Fruita can be experienced by exploring the Fruita rural cultural landscape and by visiting the Gifford Homestead.

 

• Dewey Gifford

  
  

  Dewey Gifford calls Fruita “paradise” as he remembers his time farming and ranching in the area from 1928 to 1969. He describes growing apples, peaches, and pears in the orchards while his children attended school at the Fruita Schoolhouse. Gifford lived in what is now the Historic Gifford Homestead.

  Date created:

  10/14/2020

  Audio Transcript

  My name is Dewey Gifford, and I was a farmer and rancher in Fruita from 1928 until 1969. For much of that time, we had no running water, electricity, or telephone. There was little cash to be had from farming, so I had to be away when I was young. I worked on the state roads, herded sheep, and ran cattle in the South Desert. But the most pleasant memories I have were those of family, farming and friends here in Fruita. Until 1940, we used all teams and horse-drawn implements, mostly for growing and cutting alfalfa for animal feed. The orchards of course, took a lot of work, but we had beautiful fruit: apricots, peaches, pears, apples, plums and cherries. We trucked a lot of it out of Fruita for cash sale or traded for grain with other farmers near Loa and Lyman.

  All my children were raised here and attended the one-room school. Life wasn’t much different from 1880, when pioneers first settled here. You had to be very self-sufficient to make it. Most everybody here had been raised as Latter Day Saints, but some weren’t very active. We held Sunday School over in the schoolhouse. The eight or so families here got along pretty good, considering the isolation. Oh, we didn’t agree on everything; I remember Cass Mulford supported Hoover while I was a Roosevelt man, myself.

  Both men and women worked hard here, but we took time to play. Our family enjoyed high country hunts and fishing. The women quilted. We read a lot in the winter and enjoyed baseball in the summer. We saw few travelers here until after 1937, when the park came. Most were cattlemen and sheep herders. There were huge herds of sheep trailing through Fruita in those days. For me, Fruita was paradise. I will never forget it.

 

Dewey Gifford built and operated a small motel (to the right of the large wooden barn) for visitors to Capitol Reef National Monument. He and his wife Nell moved to Torrey in 1969. In 1971, by an act of Congress, Capitol Reef changed designations from a national monument to a national park.

NPS/ Ralph Webb

 

The Gifford House is operated by the Capitol Reef Natural History Association and offers many local and handmade items for sale, in addition to the well-known pies.

NPS/Chris Roundtree

The Gifford House Today

The former kitchen (a non-historic addition to the original house) has been converted into a Natural History Association sales outlet. Items for sale include reproduction utensils and household tools used by Mormon pioneers in their daily tasks. These unique handmade items are made by local artisans and craftsmen and include such things as quilts, aprons, woven rugs, soap, crockery, candles and toys. A wide selection of books, historic postcards, jams, jellies, and locally baked fruit pies and homemade ice cream, are available.

The Gifford Homestead is located 1 mile (1.6 km) south of the visitor center on the Scenic Drive. The Gifford House is typically open from March 14 (Pi Day) to late November (closing dates and operating hours may vary). A small parking lot is adjacent to the Gifford yard. Parking for oversized vehicles is available at the picnic area. Follow the signs and trail from the picnic area.

¹Wallace and Page Stegner, American Places, photographs by Eliot Porter, John Macrea, III, editor (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1981), 122.