in Malad, in 2004, the annual Malad Valley Welsh Festival was established. In the summer of 1843 John C. Fremont and his party of 39 men passed the spot where Malad City now stands. LDS prophet Brigham Young came through the Malad Valley in 1855. In 1856, at his request, Utahn members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints migrated to the region. This party of 15 families led by Ezra Barnard traveled to the Malad Valley and established a community by the name of Fort Stuart. The following year in 1857, Fort Stuart was renamed Malad City. A U.S. post office was established in 1865. By 1886 Malad City was the fastest growing village in eastern Idaho. The city was an important commercial center between Salt Lake and Butte, Montana. In 1906, the railroad reached Malad City, allowing travel to Salt Lake City in only a four-hour ride by rail. The population of the city would double over the next 15 years as a result. On June 19, 1910 Malad experienced a flood when the earthen Deep Creek Dam, northeast of the city, broke. On March 27, 1975 a magnitude 6.1 earthquake shook the Pocatello Valley near the Idaho-Utah border. The epicenter was only southwest of Malad City which was hit hardest by the quake. Nearly two-thirds of its homes and businesses had some sort of damage. Malad City received national news coverage when a corporate jet carrying eight people including four Coca-Cola executives crashed January 15, 1996 killing all on board. The large twin-engine turbo-prop was flying from Salt Lake City, Utah to Pocatello, Idaho for a Coca-Cola sales meeting. The Mitsubishi MU-2 aircraft crashed and burned at the base of a canyon northwest of Malad. According to the National Transportation Safety Board in its published SEA96MA043 Accident Report, the cause of the accident was listed as ice on the wings. Towards the end of 2003, a nationwide influenza outbreak occurred. Malad was, appropriately, likely the hardest hit community in the nation. So many people became ill during the first part of December, 2003 that the city was virtually shut down. The entire school district in Malad was closed for three days in an effort to keep students from spreading the ailment. Roughly a third of the students became ill. Church services and Christmas festivities were also cancelled. Malad City once had the oldest department store