Woodruff, AZ

Woodruff is a Navajo County community on the Little Colorado River, southeast of Holbrook. County history dates its settlement to the 1870s, when Mormon colonists established farms along the river; it was first called Tenney's Settlement and renamed Woodruff in 1878. Irrigation dams repeatedly washed away in the river's floods, making water management part of the town's history. Woodruff's current map still places it beside the Little Colorado and its agricultural valley. It is a river settlement whose past is written in canals, floods, and farm ground.