motion for closure, or simply because of the longstanding rivalry, some Castle Dale residents persisted in the view that Huntington was responsible for the loss of their high school. Thus was recapitulated, but in the other direction, the resentment felt by Huntington residents at the closure of the Huntington LDS seminary forty years earlier.
The End of an Era Changing times had an impact on smaller as well as larger communities. Woodside lost its livestock shipping facilities and railroad station in the late 1920s.Much of the farm land was abandoned during the drought period of the 1930s. The 1940 population of thirty gradually dwindled away over the next two decades. The Victor precinct was absorbed into Elmo in 1940, and by the mid-1940s both Victor and nearby Desert Lake had become ghost towns. The failure of Victor and Desert Lake can be attributed in large part to continuing problems with the quantity and quality of the water supply. Lying as it does at the end of the ditch, the area suffered greatly during the devastating drought of the mid-1930s. Even in better times, it was often necessary to haul culinary water several miles. With increasing access to automobiles, it became more convenient for most landowners to live in Elmo or Cleveland and commute to the surviving farms in the area.123 In 1940, on the occasion of L. C. Moore's retirement as postmaster, the post office and community of Rochester took the name of Moore. Moore had been the most influential citizen of the community for the greater part of its existence. He owned the property on which the townsite was built and served as manager of the 8,000-acre Kenaston estate, the largest agriculture operation in the western part of the county. When the Kenaston land was placed on the market in 1940, Moore purchased the property that he had managed for so many years and resold it short time later to the LeRoy and Hessie Bunderson family of Emery.12* Another indication of the end of an era occurred in November 1944 when Helen Alfsen Larsen of Ferron, the last survivor of the three colonizing parties in the fall of 1877, died at the age of eightyeight. She had witnessed profound changes indeed since her arrival on Ferron Creek to begin a new life in a new land.125
