PARK VALLEY -- Out in the desert, a few miles south of Park Valley, a white picket fence rises from the sagebrush.
Only the very observant or those who know it's there will see it. That weather-beaten fence enclosing two headstones inscribed in Russian is one of the few remnants of a short-lived Russian colony, founded in 1914 in the Box Elder desert.
The road isn't well-traveled and visitors are often left getting pulled out of the mud by a Park Valley resident.
But on dry, clear days, those with a sense of adventure can travel the dusty roads to a long-forgotten village.
One of those adventurers was Marshall Bowen, a retired geography professor from the University of Mary Washington, in Fredricksburg, Va., who heard about the place when he was doing research at Utah State University.
More than 25 years later, Bowen is one of the few people to study the tiny village of Russians who decided to make the Utah desert their home, but left a couple years after they arrived, unable to live in the harsh climate.
Two closely related religious groups made their homes in Utah, the Molokans and Jumpers. The groups left Russia's Caucasus region in the early 1900s when the government military service exemption expired and some of the pacifistic Christian religions chose to move rather than fight.
"It's really a story of what happened to this family and what happened to that family and seeing if you can make some sort of pattern out of it," said Andrei Conovaloff, a Jumper currently living in Arizona who maintains a Web site about Molokans and Jumpers, http://molokane.org/
Thousands made their way to California, with the Molokans staying mostly in San Francisco and Jumpers in Los Angeles.
"They settled in the city because that's where there were job opportunities, and they had to survive. It was a chain migration," Bowen said. "They really were a peasant group, and the elders really didn't think the city was the right place for them. There was too much worldliness and too much opportunity for their children to observe worldliness."
The leaders pushed the congregations to live a godly life and felt it would be easier in an isolated rural area.
So when an advertisement from the Pacific Land and Water Company promised rich land and good weather for $17.50 an acre, about 20 families, 100 people in all, left California for four square miles in Utah, becoming one of several groups setting out to re- create their rural Russian life in remote parts of the U.S.
"This is one of a dozen attempts that failed, but the fact that they stayed there for a couple of years shows they tried hard, said Conovaloff.
The 20 Jumper families made their own settlement near what is now called Russian Knoll. A few miles north, four Molokan families had their own group.
The people were duped, said Conovaloff. He said their land was dry and getting enough water to live on was nearly impossible.
Finding out their new home was not all that was promised did not stop them from building a village like they had in Russia. Long, thin plots lined a central street. The houses were close to the street, the school was on the west end of the street and the cemetery on the east, Bowen said.
Tragedy struck a month after arriving, when Anna Kalpakoff was accidentally shot by her husband, Andrew.
"Andrew was cleaning a gun and Anna said, 'Andrew, you shouldn't clean that in the house.' He said, 'Look, it's not loaded.' But it was," Bowen said, noting that Andrew Kalpakoff later considered suicide.
Anna was first buried in an LDS graveyard in Park Valley, Bowen said, but when her sister-in-law, Mary Kalpakoff, died less than a year later during childbirth, Mary and Anna were buried together in a new cemetery near the village.
Faded silk flowers sit at both graves, which had the current headstones placed by Mary's grandson, Ed Kalpakoff, in 1966, Bowen said.
Although there were good things, many births and a county school in 1915, life was just too hard, and repeated crop failure forced them out.
The Jumpers completely abandoned Utah by 1917, Bowen said.
"They were disillusioned," he said. "They were glad to get out of there. ... They felt the land company had duped them. I think they turned their back and I don't think they looked back on it."
Bowen did find one woman, now dead, who was a very young girl when her family lived near Park Valley.
Anna Potapoff Reibin was part of the smaller Molokan group, and she told Bowen they would occasionally go watch the Jumpers leaping around in religious ecstasy.
The two groups rarely socialized. Conovaloff compares them to FLDS and LDS.
"Neither group wants to admit they have something to do with the other, and everyone on the outside calls them Mormons," he said.
But Bowen said Reibin brought the community to life.
"She provided a lot of warmth and empathy for the Molokan faith and Molokan people and the effort they went through to do what they did, unsuccessful though they might have been."
Though some may remember the time through old stories of Park Valley, the only witness now to the hopes and failures of 100 people are a few empty cellars and two lonely headstones.
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