Adventure (sometimes called Aventure) was a short-lived early Mormon pioneer settlement and is now a ghost town site in Washington County, Utah, along the upper Virgin River.
It formed part of Brigham Young’s Cotton Mission (or “Utah’s Dixie”), an effort to grow cotton and other warm-climate crops for self-sufficiency amid the U.S. Civil War and limited imports. Settlements clustered along the Virgin River where flat land and water allowed farming: Virgin (1857), Grafton (1859), Adventure (1860), Duncan’s Retreat and Northup (1861), and later Shunesburg, Rockville, and Springdale (1862).
Founding and Early Settlement (1860)
In 1860, Philip Klingensmith (also spelled Phillip or related variants) and five other people from Iron County established a small farming community a couple of miles upriver from Grafton, on the south side of the Virgin River, just west of what is now the center of Rockville and east of Grafton.
The settlers aimed to cultivate cotton and support the broader Mormon colonization of the region. The name “Adventure” reflected the pioneers’ sense that attempting to tame this primitive desert area was truly an adventure.
Like neighboring communities, residents dug irrigation ditches, planted crops, and built basic structures (including a blacksmith shop noted in some accounts of flood damage). The settlement remained small and faced the same challenges as others along the river: scarce arable land, silt-heavy irrigation water, unpredictable flooding, and the need for constant maintenance of ditches and dams.
Destruction by the Great Flood of 1862
Adventure lasted only about two years. In January–February 1862, after roughly 40–44 days of rain, the Great Flood of 1862 devastated the upper Virgin River valley. The flood destroyed or heavily damaged Adventure along with much of Grafton (the original downstream site), Duncan’s Retreat, Northup, and other settlements. Homes, crops, a blacksmith shop, and other property were swept away.
Survivors relocated to higher ground with more space for growth and better protection from floods. Many moved to the area that became the center of Rockville (founded/settled in 1862 partly by people displaced from Adventure and nearby sites). Rockville’s modern legal boundaries now encompass the former sites of both Adventure and Grafton.
Aftermath and Legacy
Adventure was never substantially rebuilt as an independent community. Its brief existence is tied to the broader pattern of pioneer resilience and hardship in southern Utah: repeated floods, limited farmland, irrigation struggles, occasional tensions with Native peoples (notably during the later Black Hawk War period that temporarily emptied nearby towns), and the eventual shift of families toward more viable locations such as Rockville, Hurricane (after the canal opened), and other areas.
Today, little or nothing visible remains at the original site. It is a true ghost-town location rather than a preserved historic district with standing buildings (unlike better-known nearby Grafton, which retains several structures and a cemetery and has been used in films). The site lies just west of Rockville center on the south side of the Virgin River. Visitors exploring the area typically focus on Grafton (a few miles away), which is more accessible and photogenic, or other Washington County historic sites such as Silver Reef.
Adventure’s history is documented primarily through local and regional sources, including Washington County Historical Society materials, Daughters of Utah Pioneers publications (e.g., Under Dixie Sun), place-name references, and accounts of the Cotton Mission settlements. It exemplifies the temporary, experimental nature of many early Dixie-era outposts that were abandoned after natural disasters forced relocation to more sustainable spots.
In short, Adventure was a small, short-lived 1860–1862 cotton-mission farming settlement that vanished in the Great Flood of 1862, with its people helping found or expand Rockville. It remains a footnote in the rich but challenging pioneer history of Washington County and the Zion region.