Socially prominent Salt Lake City Jews Simon Bamberger, Samuel Newhouse, and attorney Daniel Alexander pledged support to the initiative with advocacy among area business and political leaders.

Brown was convinced of the soil's fertility, and with the state's assurances of available water, the association agreed to purchase the land at auction on August 7, 1911.

[2] After purchasing the territory in Clarion, Benjamin Brown and twelve original colonists "chosen for their mechanical skills, experience with horses, and ‘seriousness,’”[3] arrived at the settlement on September 10, 1911.

But, the colonists nonetheless dug irrigation channels from the nearby canal and began to plant their crops such as wheat, oats, and alfalfa.

Utah had been advertising nationally to receive more settlers, and Governor William Spry was so pleased with the experiment that he journeyed the 135 miles (217 km) from the capital in order to celebrate the community's first harvest.

However, the colonists were simultaneously plagued by dust storms, heat, strong winds, flies and mosquitoes, which, when combined with a scarcity of water, doomed their harvest: six-hundred acres produced only half of their expected yield.

More than 1,000 people attended including Governor William Spry, then State Senator Simon Bamberger, representatives of Salt Lake City's established German Jewish community, local residents of Sanpete and Sevier counties, and Rabbi Isaac Landman who was traveling that summer through the American west, and spoke at the festival.

Combined with the construction of a well to make water more accessible, the population of Clarion continued to grow, and the colony as a whole started to show signs of stability.

However, through the Summer and Fall, severe weather frequently challenged living and planting conditions, as well as the stamina of the colonists, which, combined with a water shortage, devastated the 1914 harvest.

[8] By 1915, the population of Clarion had decreased by almost two-thirds,[9] and a second consecutive poor harvest during the year led to even more residents leaving in the pursuit of industrial labor opportunities in major cities such as New York and Chicago.

The Kalispell, Montana Daily Inter Lake noted the passing in 1983 of Jean Stroud, born to Oscar and Matilda Jensen Keele in Clarion in 1923.

[17] In 2008, the Salt Lake Tribune observed that fences had been reconstructed around the Jewish graves and noted the foundations of buildings and the walls of the broken cistern that burst the first day colonists used it.

[19] University of Utah Logan professor Everett Cooly read about Clarion in Watters' book and advertised in American Jewish newspapers seeking correspondence with those who had participated.

A subsequent interview in Los Angeles with a descendant of one of the Clarion families led to Goldberg's writing the Jewish colony's history, Back to the Soil.