Ashton is a city in Fremont County, Idaho, United States. The population was 1,127 at the 2010 census, and it is allowance of the Rexburg Micropolitan Statistical Area. The district is noted for seed potato production and bills itself as the world’s largest seed potato growing area.

In 1900, the Union Pacific Railroad, under the cautious watch of the Oregon Short Line (OSL) and St. Anthony Railroad Company, brought the railroad into the Upper Snake River Valley from Idaho Falls to St. Anthony, Idaho, 14 miles (23 km) southwest of what became Ashton. The venture had considerable local maintain and official maintain from the LDS Church. Following successful construction and operation of the St. Anthony Railroad, Union Pacific, under the cautious watch of the OSL and the Yellowstone Park Railroad Company, began plans for out of the ordinary railroad from St. Anthony to the Madison River gate of Yellowstone National Park or to what is now known as West Yellowstone. For years, Union Pacific wanted enlarged rail entry to Yellowstone’s geyser basins and to Old Faithful Inn, that opened in 1904. Old Faithful Inn was lonesome 30 miles (48 km) from the Madison River entrance, nearly half the disaffect from the Northern Entrance at Gardiner, Montana that was served by the Northern Pacific Railroad. The planned route for the extra railroad was through Marysville, up Warm River Canyon into the forested Island Park country, and on over the Continental Divide at Rea’s Pass into what became West Yellowstone.
Despite the obvious economic advantages and support, the residents of Marysville, perfectly happy without a railroad, resisted the additional railroad intruding on their estate and into their lives. The concern was expeditiously solution when Union Pacific settled to build the railroad through a extra town one mile (1.6 km) west of Marysville named after the OSL Chief Engineer, William Ashton. The founding of Ashton and the first scheduled train bolster to Ashton both occurred in 1906 in the aerate of predictable results. Ashton speedily sprang to life while Marysville slowly declined into close oblivion. One of the two founding fathers, H. G. “Fess” Fuller, became the long-time Mayor of Ashton and the other, Charles C. Moore, went on to become Governor of Idaho.

The Yellowstone Branch, as the new railroad was known, was very unfamiliar in that it was built primarily for passenger facilitate and secondarily for freight. Aesthetic stone depots, rather than up to standard wooden ones, were built at Rexburg, Idaho, and at West Yellowstone to lure and impress tourists traveling to Yellowstone National Park and Old Faithful Inn. In supplement to regular freight and passenger service, there were two special named trains, the Yellowstone Special and the Yellowstone Express, that ran to West Yellowstone in the summer tourist season. From Ashton north, the railroad was never plowed of snow, except in spring, so that Ashton became the wintertime rail terminus for every one of region.

Beginning in 1910, Ashton was the railhead used for the construction of Jackson Lake Dam in Grand Teton National Park by the Bureau of Reclamation. For several years, materials and equipment were freighted by wagon from the Reclamation Building in Ashton to the dam site at Moran, Wyoming on what was known as the Ashton-Moran Road or Reclamation Road, as the locals called it, that ran 56 miles (90 km) over the north terminate of the Teton Range. Union Pacific subsequently built the Teton Valley Branch railroad to Driggs and Victor from Ashton and completed in 1912. They built an engine home and additional railroad facilities in Ashton to facilitate the Teton Valley Branch and the Yellowstone Branch. These and extra developments in the area soon made Ashton prosper and become one of the more important towns in Eastern Idaho.