Delta

Fort Deseret and the Sevier Dams

A photograph dated 1910, held in the LaVell Sorenson Johnson collection at the Utah State Historical Society, shows the Milton Moody Land Office in Delta.³ Settlement in western Millard County has run in a string of boom and bust cycles, most of them tied to water.² Near Delta, the state marker records, Fort Deseret was built in 1866 of adobe mud by two teams of 98 men to protect settlers during the Black Hawk Indian Wars.¹

Pioneers worked to tame the tail end of the Sevier River with dams, canals, and reservoirs.² In August 1909 Hiette E. Maxfield kept the time log for work on Burtner Dam, and the river broke through in 1909-1910.³ Construction on the Sevier Bridge Reservoir was under way on 23 November 1913, and its dam, pictured in 1916, was renamed Yuba Dam in 1987.³ By the 1910s the major dams were stable, and a boom followed when the Union Pacific Railroad invited Midwesterners to farm the area.²

Main Street, Sugar Beets, and Fire

Photographs from 1910 show the S. W. Eccles General Merchandise Store on Main Street and a single building that served as church and school.³ The Bank Hotel appears in a picture from 1912, and other views show a Union Pacific train on the tracks at Delta Station.³ The Utah-Idaho Sugar Company kept an office building in Delta, and the Delta Sugar Factory had its own railroad, mess hall, and infirmary.³ Photographs taken at Sugarville show the Delta North Tract in 1919-1920 and the Cochrane Ranch in September 1919.³

Canals broke in the Great Wash in May 1919.³ A series of crop failures discouraged the Iowa transplants, but local Delta realtors soon invited new farmers onto the abandoned land.² In 1922 fire took the Ward Hotel, and photographs record Clark or Main Street after the blaze.³ In 1927 Pete Sampson tore down the sugar factory and shipped it away.³ In 1941 the state guide to Utah found the irrigated lands around Lynndyl and Delta quite productive, along a US 6 route paralleled by the Union Pacific between Elberta and Delta.⁴ A photograph in the Johnson collection shows the Brush Beryllium Plant northeast of Delta.³

Topaz, Fifteen Miles West

After Pearl Harbor, Delta realtors heard that the government wanted places to house Japanese-Americans removed from the coast, and secret meetings between Delta residents and officials took place as early as January and February 1942.² The 17,000-acre Central Utah Relocation Center, later renamed Topaz after a nearby mountain, went up fifteen miles west of Delta, beyond the small town of Abraham.² The camp opened 11 September 1942, and Japanese-Americans from the San Francisco area, held since March at Tanforan Race Track, came to Delta by train.² The Utah History Encyclopedia puts the camp’s population at about 8,000 soon after opening, while a state teaching guide says Topaz housed more than 11,000 people between 1942 and its closing in 1945.^2,5

Internees could get passes to shop in Delta and some found work there, though one man employed at the local newspaper was then charged “rent” at the camp.² On 11 April 1943 a guard shot James Wakasa, age 63, as he stood near the southwest section of the fence.² The camp closed in October 1945, and its buildings were dismantled or moved, leaving cindered roads and the foundations of latrines and mess halls.² In 1976 the Japanese-American Citizen League erected a monument near the site of the camp.²