This town in Utah's southeastern corner this weekend celebrates its 100th anniversary, and hotel managers may find themselves calling local families to ask whether anyone can spare a bed for a stranger as thousands pour in for the celebration.

From building floats to firing up barbecues to wrapping bunting on buildings, nearly everyone in town is helping out with the festivities.

The Grayson Country Quilters made a quilt depicting city buildings, farming, deer and mountains.

Children drew posters depicting scenes from Blanding's past and present.

In the days leading up to the holiday weekend, the Edge of the Seaters theater company (a play on the Edge of the Cedars state park in town) rehearsed a musical that incorporates not only the past 100 years but the hundreds before that, when generations of American Indians lived here.

From the beginning, people have lived here because they chose to live here - and they fought difficulties to stay.

Blanding, originally called Grayson, was founded in 1905 by Walter and Albert Lyman and their families. They came from Bluff, where Mormons had settled after making the arduous trek through the Hole in the Rock to cross an area now mostly covered by Lake Powell.

Ever since then, the two biggest issues facing the town have been how whites co-exist with nearby Navajos and Utes and how everyone copes with a chronic water shortage.

Blanding has no major industry. A few raise cattle or alfalfa and some paint pottery, but most residents work for the government in some way, and most town improvements come from government grants.

But, "it's an excellent place. We've had choices, too, opportunities in other areas, but we chose to stay," resident Charlie Bayles said while watching baseball in Blanding's new sports complex. "You're willing to take a cut in pay for the security . . . of being able to raise kids in an environment like this."

To buy clothes or big-ticket items, residents have to drive for hours, as do kids who compete in sports. But long rides make for "some of their best memories," Pam Lyman said as she watched her son play baseball.

In a way, Blanding epitomizes small-town America. Its 4,000 residents love the place they call home. They know each other, and how could they not? Generations of the same families live on the same streets.

But in other ways, Blanding is not a typical American town.

It's dry in more than one sense of the word: No one can sell alcohol.

About 75 percent of the town's residents are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so large families are the norm.

Many residents are American Indians, some coming from two nearby reservations.

Descendants of pioneers play baseball with descendants of the Indians whose ancestors they fought.

Lori Billsie is of Navajo, Hopi and Zuni descent and has lived in Blanding for 15 years. She helps teach Navajo language and culture to 150 American Indian and white children in schools. Like her white counterparts in Blanding, much of her pride comes from knowing her ancestors.

She occasionally senses some discrimination, but tends to ignore it.

"Some people are still the same and carry that old grudge," Billsie said. "But I think if you get educated and know where you're coming from, you don't feel it as much."

Brian Schott, head of the English department at the College of Eastern Utah's Blanding branch, has lived in New York and Los Angeles, but chose to stay in Blanding.

"There's not a place on earth that has a better quality of people," he said, noting that when his car was stolen (after he left the keys in it, as he had every night for 30 years), the community pooled money to buy him a new one.

In a town this small, it's easy to make a difference, adds Cleal Bradford, a former mayor whose family's entry in Monday's parade will incorporate seven generations.

"If I had another life to live, I'd live it here."

Bradford's father was the force behind construction of the tunnel that provides Blanding much of its badly needed water.

With picks and hammers, workers chopped through Blue Mountain as part of a project that took about 30 years - and more money than the town had - to complete in 1951.

The next year, a uranium hit paid back the town's loans.

"They all figured that was the Lord's blessing for all their hard work," Bradshaw said.

He, like fellow Blanding resident Harold Lyman, believes the townspeople are special.

"They dream big dreams," said Lyman, a descendent of the town's founders who now works in the visitor center.

"They're always thinking about how they can make things better."

Blanding history

l 1920s: Blanding was the site of the 1923 Posey war, the last "Indian battle" fought in the United States. Calling it a war, however, is a bit of a misnomer: After a young Indian was convicted of murdering a sheepherder, friends helped him escape. Whites formed a posse and chased after the Indians, fatally wounding their leader, Posey.

l 1950s: Blanding blossomed during the uranium boom; the uranium mining industry afterward continued on a smaller scale.

l 1970s: Blanding became home to a campus of the College of Eastern Utah, which brought jobs and educational opportunities to the town.

Your last name didn't change when you got married.

l You don't use your turn signal lights because you figure everyone knows where you're going, anyway.

l You were taught, while growing up, to love and respect the land and wildlife, but you were told that "environmentalist" meant something entirely different.

l Not until you were grown did you realize that "Damndemocrats" was actually two words.

l You have a huge collection of pottery or arrowheads mounted on velvet.

l You've hit sandstone while tilling your yard.

l You remember your mother standing in the rain and crying as muddy water ran in the little ditch after a long dry spell.