A Town of 151

In 1989 the farm families of Vineyard petitioned to incorporate 2,805 acres of farms and industry wrapped around Geneva Steel. A regional planner urged them to wait and study joining Orem instead. They went ahead anyway.

On May 11, 1989, Vineyard became a town. Rulon Gammon, a dairyman born in his family's farmhouse, became its first mayor. Fifteen years later he was still the only mayor the town had known.

By 1991 the town's costs were running far below what the county had predicted, and Geneva Steel's property taxes were paying for a new city park beside the town hall.

The 1990 census counted 151 people in Vineyard. About three of every four were related to each other. The median age was 24.5, and the typical household had more than four people.

At Christmas 1990 the town gave every family a card to the Orem library. The year's crime report listed one burglary. The town had one park, with a pavilion, a ball diamond and courts.

Every spring the Gammon dairy became a classroom. At Farm Field Days in 2000, about 3,800 Utah County schoolchildren came to learn where food comes from.

In 1992 steel prices fell more than 30 percent and cheap foreign steel flooded American ports. Geneva filed for bankruptcy in early 1999, owing about $325 million. In November 2001 most of its roughly 1,200 workers were laid off, and in 2002 a second bankruptcy ended steelmaking for good.

On February 4, 2004, a bankruptcy judge approved the sale of the mill's core equipment to Qingdao Iron and Steel of China for $40 million. It was taken apart and shipped across the Pacific to be rebuilt.

In the summer of 2005, at daybreak, explosives brought down two smokestacks, nine stoves and three blast furnaces that had stood for 61 years. Former workers gathered to watch. That November a developer, Anderson Geneva, bought 1,750 acres of the site for $46.8 million.

In August 2004, on a bus tour of Utah Lake for the county's mayors, Rulon Gammon announced he was selling his 94 acre dairy farm and stepping down so he and his wife could serve a church mission. "A lot of history there," a state legislator said.

A new power plant, Lake Side, began rising on 22 acres of the old mill site in 2005 and was finished in 2007. With the mill closed, the town had been looking for a new way to pay its bills. The 2010 census counted 139 people. Vineyard was about to change faster than any city in America.