Grand Teton Mormon Row
The area is also known as Antelope Flats, situated between the towns of Moose and Kelly. It is a popular destination for tourists and photographers on account of the historic buildings, the herds of bison, and the spectacular Teton Range rising in the background. The alluvial soil to the east of Blacktail Butte was more suitable than most locations in Jackson Hole for farming, somewhat hampered by a lack of readily available water.[4] The Mormon homesteaders began to arrive in the 1890s from Idaho, creating a community called "Gros Ventre", with a total of 27 homesteads. The Mormon settlers tended to create clustered communities, in contrast to the isolated homesteads more typical of Jackson Hole.
Mormon Row
Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, sent parties from the Salt Lake Valley to establish new communities and support their expanding population. Mormon homesteaders, who settled east of Blacktail Butte near the turn of the 19-century, clustered their farms to share labor and community, a stark contrast with the isolation typical of many western homesteads. These settlers first arrived in the 1890s from Idaho establishing a community (named Grovont by the U.S. Post Office) known today as “Mormon Row.”
Homesteaders established 27 homesteads in the Grovont area because of relatively fertile soil, shelter from winds by Blacktail Butte and access to the Gros Ventre River. Despite the harsh conditions of Jackson Hole, Mormon settlers grew crops by using irrigation. These hardy settlers dug ditches by hand and with teams of horses, building an intricate network of levees and dikes to funnel water from central ditches to their fields between 1896 and 1937. Water still flows in some of these ditches.
Today, two picturesque barns highlight Mormon Row. Settlers John and Thomas Alma (T.A.) Moulton built these barns on adjacent homesteads. After nearly 30 years of working the land, John replaced his log home and barn with a new carpenter-constructed, pink stucco frame house and impressive, two-story gambrel barn north of Antelope Flats Road. South of John’s homestead, T. A. took over 30 years to build his gable-with-shed style barn. Photographers from around the world stop by T. A. Moulton’s barn to capture this iconic historic structure with the Teton Range in the background.
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