Elmo, UT

Elmo began with homesteads and irrigation on the Washboard Flat north of Huntington. Families filed on land between 1904 and 1907, then platted the town in 1908 on two sections of school land. The local name tradition comes from the first letters of the Erickson, Larsen, Mortensen, and Oviatt families. Water still shapes the town's agricultural form: settlers dug extensions of the Cleveland Canal to bring the desert land into production, and farms remain the main working landscape around the town.

Elmo's most memorable community building was moved into place. In 1911 residents bought the old Cleveland schoolhouse, sawed it in two, and dragged it by horse teams on log skids to Elmo. It served as a school until the four-room brick school opened in 1917, then as a church and community center until the 1950s. The old tithing granary, built around 1912 and later moved beside the town park, is still used by the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers. Today the town's library, post office, fire department, Town Hall, and nearby Cleveland Elementary and Emery County schools keep services within a small agricultural community south of Price.