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History of Monticello, Utah
Taken from the Utah History Encyclopedia (Links Added)
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The prosperity of the town ebbed and flowed. Monticello became the county seat in 1895 and in 1910 was incorporated as a city. A brick schoolhouse erected in 1897 replaced the log cabin school built nine years before. The Blue Mountain Irrigation Company accepted bids for a combined water and power system that came to fruition in 1917, supplying the 250-member community with twenty-four hour service. The town welcomed its first phone lines in 1906, tying communications in to Colorado circuits; two years later, Monticello connected with Moab. In 1915 Oscar McConkie established the San Juan Record, the county newspaper, in Monticello where it remains to this day.

World War II brought further changes. The Vanadium Corporation of America (VCA) selected Monticello as a site for a wartime vanadium processing mill. It employed 200 workers until it closed in 1946, only to reopen in 1949 as a converted vanadium and uranium plant. During the 1950s, the mill processed large amounts of ore taken from the canyons of southeastern Utah; however, in 1960, the Atomic Energy Commission closed the plant permanently. The government conducted a tailings cleanup project in the 1990s to remove any hazardous waste from the site.

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