This collection spans five generations of sketches, letters, maps, and field notes, all meticulously labeled. Some fact, some fiction. Through its creation, we drew the character of this place into the open — and used the characters to guide what we brought back to life.
Albert Petty was real. He arrived in the 1860s, settled by the spring that would give Springdale its name, and started planting. That quiet beginning—no monument, no myth—became the root of this project. His name led us down the trail that shaped the story of this family and this place.
LDS settlers arrive at the mouth of Zion Canyon. Albert and his wife settle near the springs.
Springdale is named (by his wife, according to local lore). The town forms quietly around orchard rows and irrigation ditches.
Settlers regroup in Springdale during regional conflicts. Temporary evacuations solidify the town’s community bonds.
A shared schoolhouse and meetinghouse are built. Social structure starts to form.
Springdale gets its first post office — no more riding to Rockville for mail.
The surrounding canyon becomes Mukuntuweap, then Zion National Park. Springdale’s story widens beyond its farms.
Albert came south in the early 1860s — part of the LDS Church’s Cotton Mission. He’d already moved more times than he cared to count, following callings, tending mills, losing crops. When he reached the mouth of the canyon, he didn’t write much. Just noted: “Good springs.
Strong light.”That spring ran clear all year. His wife named the place Springdale, and it stuck. Albert cleared the first rows by hand, planted corn, then peaches. A few families followed. They dug ditches, shared lumber, held meetings outside until someone built walls.
He filed the land. Taught his son Matthew how to draw straight lines with a carpenter’s pencil. Watched the orchard hold its roots through storms and sun. He didn’t know about the park. But he knew the cliffs mattered. That the valley could feed people.Albert died in 1869. But the things he planted stayed. Some of them still do.
We imagined Matthew as the family’s first real architect — a kid raised on ditch-digging and orchard rows who found form and order in the shapes around him. He likely learned carpentry from his father, Albert. But his designs stretched beyond the valley. By the time the Inn took shape, his influence had returned home: adobe softened with curves, sandstone set with purpose, blueprints thick with margin notes and telegram creases. He built quietly, but he built with care — and he left us the bones to prove it.
Matthew learned carpentry early — he had to. His father, Albert, built everything by hand. Fences, rafters, orchard ladders. Straight lines were survival.
But Matthew saw more in it. Around the turn of the century, architectural movements were starting to ripple through the Southwest — Mission Revival in California, Territorial hybrids in New Mexico, stone-and-adobe lodges rising near the early national parks. Somewhere in the middle of that, we imagine Matthew finding his way to school — maybe in Santa Fe, or Tucson — one of the first to formalize design training in this part of the country.
He wasn’t just building cabins. He was absorbing ideas — Pueblo forms, Spanish arches, Anglo brickwork, the balance of shelter and style. He sent sketches home by telegram. Jotted field notes in the margins. Everything still carried the logic of where he’d come from: orchard light, canyon heat, stone that held its shade.
Eventually, we think he left the region — maybe for a stretch. The railroads were running. New buildings were going up in Colorado, Arizona, even the Midwest. You can picture him bringing Southwest forms into those places, adapting them, blending them. But he came back.
And when he did, the world was changing again — tourists trickling into Zion, talk of a national park, the first visitors needing places to stay. Matthew likely helped shape some of that early vision. A trail lodge here, a ranger station there. Nothing grand. Just practical, beautiful buildings meant to last.
If the original Petty Ranch Inn had a blueprint, odds are it started with his pencil.
Albert Petty was real. He arrived in the 1860s, settled by the spring that would give Springdale its name, and started planting. That quiet beginning—no monument, no myth—became the root of this project. His name led us down the trail that shaped the story of this family and this place.
Sarah came of age in an era when women were rarely credited in science — but that didn’t stop them from working. Like Alice Eastwood, Ynés Mexía, and Florence Merriam Bailey, Sarah likely taught herself: collecting, pressing, labeling. No grants. No lab. Just curiosity, precision, and a willingness to return from a canyon hike with a plant press full and her notes stained with dirt.
She married Joseph Petty — and while he mapped trails and marked ridgelines, Sarah turned her attention to the life that ran alongside them. The animals that nested near seasonal pools. The wildflowers that only bloomed after two good rains. The insects that clung to bark in the shaded folds of the canyon.
We picture her field kits built from scraps: an old army satchel for her paper, tape salvaged from ranger supplies, reused index cards with pinholes and faint ink. She probably sent samples to Salt Lake or Moab. Maybe even helped advise the CCC when they landscaped near the park lodges in the 1930s. But we doubt she ever called herself a scientist.
Her legacy isn’t in titles. It’s in the accuracy of her bloom calendar. In the handwriting on the labels we still use. In the gentle reminders throughout her notes — to look closer.
We imagine Joseph as the one who carved paths before there were trail signs. A quiet figure who spent more time out in the canyon than under a roof. While his father, Matthew, left behind floorplans and foundations, Joseph gave us routes — mapped, sketched, and noted in red pencil. The guides he left are still the backbone of how we explore Zion. Every trail write-up in our archive begins with something he once charted: a line on a map, a weather note, a margin sketch of a mule or a ridge.
By the 1910s, Zion Canyon had started to show up in guidebooks, but it was still wild terrain. The name “Zion” had only just replaced “Mukuntuweap,” and the trails — if they could be called that — were a mix of livestock paths, riverbeds, and rock cairns.
We imagined Joseph stepping into that space. Maybe he grew up hearing stories from his father Matthew about land, form, and structure. But Joseph wasn’t interested in buildings. He cared about the terrain itself — where the sun hit first, which gullies held snow through spring, how to cross the river without soaking your boots.
He likely worked alongside the early park crews. Walter Ruesch, the first superintendent, was out cutting trails in the 1920s — carving Walter’s Wiggles into the canyon wall, mapping the early switchbacks to Scout Lookout. Joseph could’ve been on that crew. Or leading his own — building bridges that washed out each spring, packing tools up with mules, marking safe turnarounds in the sandstone with a pocketknife.
He wasn’t a uniformed ranger at first. That came later. In the early years, roles blurred — guide, builder, rescuer, caretaker. He filled all of them. By the 1930s, as the CCC rolled into Zion, Joseph might have become their local advisor: the man who knew the old routes before the maps were official. The one who remembered which rock faces froze over first and which ledges to avoid after rain.
We imagine him fading into the background by the 1950s — the way old rangers do. Trails bearing marks he left. Quiet notations in old field books. A name penciled onto the margin of an early park survey.
He drew constantly. Mountains, switchbacks, mule trains. Always in red pencil, usually on the back of something else. He passed that habit on to his daughter, Maggie — the eye for how a place is framed, and the instinct to capture it.
We don’t know how many of the current trails follow his original notes. But it’s more than a few.
We imagine Maggie as the family’s memory keeper. The one who remembered who built what, which neon sign used to hang where, and how Springdale used to feel before it got crowded. While Sarah documented the land and Joseph the trails, Maggie turned her attention to the people — tourists, locals, guests at the inn. What she left us is the warm, weird, living record of mid-century Springdale: full of porch snapshots, hand-scrawled captions, and motel postcards no one else thought to save.
“Springdale, 1962 · Porch”Family snapshot. Station wagon. Peach boxes.
Pioneer Lodge PostcardPrinted 2-color with hand stamp.
Western Days Program · 1971Main Street Parade, live band at dusk.
Weekly Column Clip · Zion Gazette“Cash McCall sings again — loud, late, and in boots.”
Maggie came of age in the Springdale of neon motel signs and dusty July parades. The orchards were still here, but they’d been joined by motor courts and gas pumps. Tourism was no longer a trickle — it was a rhythm. And Maggie didn’t resent it. She documented it.
We imagine her running the front desk at the family lodge, camera on the counter, shoebox of postcards in the back. She started clipping local stories, saving festival flyers, taking polaroids of every guest who passed through. Not because she planned to archive it. Just because she didn’t want it to disappear.
She probably knew every business owner on Zion Park Boulevard by first name. Probably dated a singer from one of the saloon bands. Probably wrote under a pseudonym for the Zion Gazette. Some of it’s guesswork. But her handwriting’s everywhere — especially on the back of photographs.
Maggie wasn’t the first to document Springdale, but she was the first to make it feel personal. She captured a town in between eras — still slow, still strange, still rooted — but finally on the map.
We imagine Emma as the one who found the box in the attic. Or the basement. Or behind a loose panel in the hallway closet. A quiet collector of the family's chaos — documents, sketches, receipts, pressed flowers — and the first to treat it all like something worth preserving. She didn’t create the archive. She curated it. Carefully, intentionally, and with the understanding that history doesn’t need to be complete to be meaningful.
By the mid-1980s, Springdale had fully shifted. The tourists weren’t just stopping through — they were arriving in droves, checking in, staying put. The neon got brighter. The signs got louder. And the town, piece by piece, leaned into the western theme it thought people wanted.
The Petty Ranch — then operating as the Pioneer Lodge — had once been a local fixture. But after the passing of its longtime owner, Cash McCall, in 1983, it started to fade. The porch shows stopped. The pool sat cold. And the stories, the real ones, started slipping.
We imagine Emma coming back around that time. Not to rescue the past, but to understand it. She wasn’t trained. She wasn’t hired. She just started opening drawers. Sliding old room keys into boxes. Taping labels to envelopes. Picking through Maggie’s Kodachrome slides, Sarah’s bloom cards, Joseph’s trail maps. And then, slowly, she began to rebuild something — not from nostalgia, but from curiosity.
She didn’t correct the record. She layered it. Stacked truths and maybes side by side. Treated the real history with care, and the imagined family with respect. And in doing so, she gave us something that felt more grounded than the saloon signs and cowboy fonts that had taken over the town.
This whole project — the brand, the rooms, the story you’re walking through — follows her lead. Emma didn’t invent this place. She curated what was already here. So did we.
