page_title: Clarion, Utah
section_title: Historiography
hierarchical_section_title: Clarion, Utah / Historiography
caption_attribution_description: English: Clarion, Kiosk - Gunnison, Utah
context_page_description: Clarion is a ghost town in Sanpete County, Utah 5 miles southwest of Gunnison. Clarion was the site of an early-twentieth century experiment in Jewish rural living. The Clarion site totaled 6,085 acres, and was 5 miles north-south along the Sevier River and 3 miles wide. The area today is in the Centerfield, Utah postal district.
context_section_description: University of Utah Professor Robert Goldberg chanced upon the Clarion remnants in 1980. A subsequent interview in Los Angeles with a descendant of one of the Clarion families led to Goldberg's writing the Jewish colony's history, Back to the Soil. Goldberg placed advertisements for contacts in the Salt Lake Jewish community newsletter. He tracked down 53 families with ties to Clarion, and reconstructed the story from interviews and records. Goldberg's papers are archived and accessible through the University of Utah in the Robert Alan Goldberg papers which include diaries, monographs, and news articles by or regarding the Clarion participants, as well as interviews, research questionnaires, and correspondence with their descendants.
  Clarion was featured in the play "Life, More Sweet Than Bitter" which tells the story of a Jewish family from Dubossar, Russia which came through Philadelphia to Clarion. Beth Hatefutsoth in Tel Aviv included Clarion in the 1983 exhibit, "Diaspora Farmers of the 19th and 20th Century". You can also read the book the play was based on, Life More Sweet than Bitter, Maurice Warshaw with Rhoda Kelsch as author, recently republished in a Second Edition and edited by Ronald Kelsch of Vision Impact Publishing. The community was also featured in a segment in the 2007 play Impossible Cities: A Utopian Experiment. The settlement was the subject of a presentation in June 2013 at Congregation  Yeshuron-Ezras Israel in the South Philadelphia neighborhood from which many of the Clarion colonists originated as part of the "Hidden City Philadelphia Festival 2013".
  In September 2011 a celebration to mark the 100th anniversary of the settlement was celebrated in Salt Lake City. Tours of the site were featured.
  The Mormon Pioneer National Heritage Area moved forward in 2014 with placing plaques on key sites in Clarion and developing an interpretive display on Gunnison's Main in coordination with the Gunnison City Council. The Mormon Pioneer National Heritage Area provided a grant for which it sought a fifty-percent match  which was provided by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation. The Mormon Pioneer National Heritage Area dedicated three interpretive panels about Clarion in Gunnison on September 25, 2015.
caption: Clarion Kiosk - Gunnison, Utah (July 10, 2016)
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