A History of Duck Creek Village

Duck Creek takes its name from the water itself. The creek rises in the lava fields north of Navajo Lake, where Sage Valley Creek and Deer Hollow Creek meet, then flows east and vanishes into the Duck Creek Sinks — porous volcanic ground that swallows the stream underground. Ducks gather on its quiet stretches, and the name stuck. The naming is documented by John W. Van Cott in Utah Place Names.

Long before any of that was written down, this was Southern Paiute country. The whole high tableland is the Markagunt Plateau — a Paiute word meaning “highland of trees” — and the Paiute name for nearby Navajo Lake was Pa-cu-ay, “Cloud Lake.” The Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah is headquartered today in Cedar City, at the foot of the mountain.

Cedar City was settled in 1851, and Cedar Mountain quickly became its summer larder. Families drove dairy cattle up to the high meadows each summer — women and children often ran the mountain dairies while the men farmed in the valley below, hauling butter and cheese back to town every week or two. The McConnell family is credited with one of the first mountain dairies, around 1869.

Duck Creek in particular became a gathering place for sheepherders, who grazed the open meadows and aspen parks. The timber drew loggers too: as early as 1852 a Parowan party had noted the plateau’s stands of high-quality pine, and small mills worked the mountain in the decades that followed — one lumber cut on Cedar Mountain supplied beams for Old Main, the landmark building at what is now Southern Utah University.

Honest gap: we have not found a confirmed record of a specific sawmill or “founding family” at Duck Creek itself. Cedar Mountain’s milling and grazing history is well documented; Duck Creek’s own earliest settlement is thinner in the record, and we would rather say so than repeat an unsourced founding story.

The Duck Creek you drive through today was largely shaped in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. In 1933 the Forest Service brought in CCC Camp F-16, and the enrollees — most of them young men from back east, led by locally hired foremen — went to work building a ranger work center and, just to the north, the Duck Creek Campground.

The Duck Creek Recreation Camp was dedicated on June 25, 1933, with Governor Henry Blood giving the keynote, a men’s chorus up from Kanab, and a band from Parowan. Over the following years the corps cut roads, did range and wildlife work, and built the earthen dike that still holds Navajo Lake against its sinkholes. The camp ran until the early 1940s, when the CCC was disbanded nationwide.

One building from that era outlasted all the rest. The 1933 “Plan 51” office at the work center was converted for public use in 1994, and a 1996 restoration exposed its original 1930s construction. It serves today as the Duck Creek Visitor Center — a rare chance to stand inside the CCC’s work rather than just beside it.

Navajo Lake Lodge opened in 1927 and is remembered as one of the original fishing lodges in the country. Local histories credit its founding to a “Dr. Aiken,” described as the only doctor across three counties, and its cluster of rustic 1927-era log cabins still rents to summer visitors on a short May-to-October season. The lodge anchors the lake that the Paiute called Cloud Lake, a fifteen-minute drive from the village.