Orderville sits on US-89 in the upper Virgin River Valley, twenty miles north of Kanab and twenty-one miles east of Zion's east entrance. The town is small, rural, and most known to outsiders for two things: the United Order communal experiment of the late 1870s, and the slot-canyon route that bears its name and drops into Zion's Narrows.
A town built on shared property
In 1875 a group of Mormon settlers organized Orderville under Brigham Young's "United Order of Enoch" — a communal economic system in which all property was held in common, all labor was directed by elected leadership, and all consumption was distributed by need rather than by individual earning. Orderville was the most thoroughly committed of the United Order experiments: the town built a single dining hall, a single tannery, a single blacksmith shop, and shared the proceeds of all agriculture and craft production. The experiment ran for ten years before federal anti-polygamy legislation, internal economic strain, and demographic shifts caused the town to disband the order in 1885 and revert to private property. The structures from the United Order period — most notably the original communal dining hall — were lost or demolished, but the town's social memory of the experiment is the central historical fact about Orderville and is preserved in the small Daughters of Utah Pioneers museum.
Orderville Canyon and the Zion connection
Orderville Canyon is a slot-canyon tributary of the Narrows that joins the main Virgin River about two miles below Mystery Canyon inside Zion. The canyon is one of the more popular technical canyoneering routes in Zion — typically rated 3B III, with multiple rappels — and is run on a top-down permit issued through Zion National Park. The canyon's east-side approach starts on private land on the upper East Fork of the Virgin River drainage near the town. Orderville Canyon and the Narrows top-down are two of the headline canyoneering experiences in the southwestern U.S.
A US-89 corridor town
The town's working economy now is small agriculture (cattle, hay, alfalfa), local services, and some tourism on the Zion-east-entrance corridor. Mt. Carmel Junction, three miles south, is the commercial cluster where US-89 meets UT-9 — the highway that runs through Zion to Springdale. Orderville is the closest civic center to the junction. The Maynard Dixon Living History Site, in nearby Mt. Carmel, preserves the artist's homestead and is a short drive away.
What the town is structured around
US-89 runs north–south through the East Fork of the Virgin River valley; Orderville sits on the highway with the LDS chapel, the elementary school, and the small commercial cluster on Main Street. The valley's working ranches sit on the surrounding ground, and the East Fork of the Virgin River runs through the bottom of the valley. The town is one of the smaller in Kane County and the only one in the 435 where a 19th-century communal-economy experiment, a slot-canyon route inside a national park, and a Western painter's studio museum are all part of the same local geography.