Dewey Gifford woke up most mornings in the same farmhouse on the same stretch of the Fremont River for forty-one years. By the time he sold it to the National Park Service in 1969, he wasn't just selling a house. He was the last private resident of Fruita, the end of a Mormon farming settlement that had been shrinking around him for decades.
The house is still there. So is the orchard. What used to be a family kitchen now sells pie to visitors who mostly have no idea a real family lived out an entire working life inside these walls.
Built in 1908, Sold in 1916
Calvin Pendleton built the farmhouse in 1908, on a plot of the fertile flood plain along the Fremont River that had drawn Mormon settlers to what was then called Junction, later renamed Fruita for the orchards that became the settlement's defining feature. Pendleton sold the property to the Jorgensen family in 1916. It was the Jorgensens' daughter, Nell, who would end up connecting the house to the name it carries today: in 1923 she married Dewey Gifford, and the young couple's future ran through the same farmhouse her family already owned.
Building a Life, One Room at a Time
The Giffords bought the farmhouse outright in 1928 and settled into the kind of gradual, practical home-building that marked most of Fruita's small farming households. They added a kitchen in 1946, then a bathroom, utility room, and carport in 1954, each addition arriving exactly when the family needed it rather than as part of any grand plan. By 1920, the broader Fruita area supported no more than about ten families at any given time, a small enough number that the Giffords' decades there made them one of the settlement's defining households, farming and living off the same orchard land that had drawn settlers to the valley in the first place.
- Built 1908, BY CALVIN PENDLETON
- Giffords bought outright 1928
- Years in the house 41
- Sold to NPS 1969
Pick Your Own Fruit in Fruita
The historic orchards are still harvestable by the public, March through October, for a small fee. The trip planner can time your visit to what's actually ripe.
Open the Trip PlannerEveryone Else Had Already Left
Fruita never supported more than a handful of families even at its peak, and that number kept shrinking through the twentieth century as the difficulty of farming an isolated flood plain wore down household after household. Dewey Gifford held on longer than any of them. When he finally sold the homestead to the National Park Service in 1969, he wasn't one of several remaining residents negotiating a group buyout. He was the last one left, the final private landowner in a settlement that had been quietly emptying out around him for years.
From Farmhouse to Pie Shop
After nearly three decades in Park Service hands, the Gifford Homestead was restored and reopened by the Capitol Reef Natural History Association in 1996, this time as a small store selling pie, bread, and jam made from the same orchards Fruita's families once relied on to survive. The building still looks like a working 1908 farmhouse from the outside, additions and all. Inside, it now serves visitors who mostly walk through without registering that this was, for forty-one years, someone's actual kitchen, someone's actual home, the last one standing before Fruita became a historic district instead of a town.
Facts and figures checked against NPS.gov's Gifford Homestead history materials and its published account of Fruita's settlement and decline.
Dewey Gifford spent forty-one years waking up in a house someone else built, in a settlement that had been quietly emptying out around him the entire time he lived there. He was the one who turned off the lights, so to speak, on private life in Fruita. What replaced it wasn't abandonment. It was pie, sold out of his old kitchen, to visitors standing in the same rooms his family once called home.