124
HISTORY OF WAYNE COUNTY
towns on either side of the Waterpocket Fold." The open country east of Capitol Reef attracted homesteaders hoping to establish ranches. Fruita appealed to a different group. An early settler of upper Wayne County, Franklin W Young, ventured into the area about 1884, but his stay was short. The first documented homesteader was Nels (or Neils) Johnson, a "Scandinavian bachelor [who] built the first known house in 1886" in what is now the park's Chesnut picnic area. Before long, Leo Holt, Elijah Cutler Behunin, and his son Hyrum Behunin had "filed claims to all the other farm land available in the small valley." Others coming to the area had to buy land from the original claimants. Although the soil and climate allowed a wide range of crops, especially fruit, to be grown, there was not enough arable land to sustain a sizable population. Moreover, the town's remote location made the marketing of the perishable fruits difficult.81 Because the name Junction was already in use by the county seat of Piute County, settlers had to choose another name when they received postal service, sometime between 1900 and 1903. Fruita was certainly descriptive of the town. One resident of Fruita remembered peddling fruit as a child. Fauntella Adams Bjarnson moved from Teasdale to Fruita when she was nine years old. Her father bought a large orchard from an earlier settler. The children "helped father peddle our fruit each fall to the surrounding small towns" in exchange for grain and chickens when they could not get cash. At age twelve, Fauntella and her brother Neldon, age thirteen, "picked all the fruit and peddled i t . . . [on their own] while our Dad hired out for herding sheep."82 Elijah Cutler Behunin has been given credit for initiating the most significant achievement by the first white residents of lower Wayne County. Before his arrival in Fruita, while he was still living in Caineville, he deplored the difficulty of getting supplies. At that time, everything the settlers could not raise or make had to come from the west, across the Waterpocket Fold. In 1883 Behunin led a work party to build a wagon road t h r o u g h the fold south from Fruita, along Capitol Reef's imposing cliff line. According to one account, "Passing by Grand Wash, the route continued over steep hills and rough, usually dry wash crossings into Capitol Gorge. Once through the gorge and past the little farming and ranching settlement of Notom, the
