The Pioneers

Driven out of Missouri and then Illinois, the Latter-day Saints followed Brigham Young west, and the first wagon company reached the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847. Utah Valley, a short trip south, looked like good country: fresh water, rivers off the mountains and green land between them.

In March 1849 Brigham Young sent about 150 settlers, led by John S. Higbee, to the Provo River. They built Fort Utah a few miles from what is now the Vineyard shore. The city of Provo grew from it.

The settlers were not moving into empty land. The Provo River mouth was one of the Timpanogos Utes' fishing places, and both peoples wanted the same land and water. That winter, three settlers killed a Ute man known as Old Bishop over an accusation that he had stolen a shirt, and hid his body in the river.

Tension turned to war. In February 1850 a militia from Salt Lake City surrounded a Ute encampment on the Provo River led by Old Elk. Over days of fighting and the pursuit that followed, dozens of Utes were killed, among them Old Elk, and one settler died. The events fed the larger Walker War that followed.

It was a hard and painful chapter. It is part of the story of how the valley changed hands, and it is remembered today by the descendants of both peoples.

Floods soon pushed Fort Utah to higher ground, and families spread out wherever there was water for crops. In 1855 a group settled at the mouth of the Provo River, right next to what is now Vineyard, and called the place Lake View.

The first settlers included Mads Jorgensen, Lars Jacobsen, Stephen Bunnell, Peter Johnson, Peter Madsen and Thomas Gammon. They cleared land, dug ditches to carry river water to their fields and built simple homes. When the Provo River and Utah Lake flooded in 1861 and 1862, they moved their homes to higher ground and kept farming.

In the 1860s most of the Utes of Utah Valley moved to the Uintah Valley reservation in northeastern Utah, set aside in 1861, some by choice and some because they had little choice left.

Shadrach Holdaway, a pioneer of Provo, homesteaded on the east shore of the lake and planted grapes. A neighbor, John Gillies, planted vines too and is credited with the name. The grapes stuck in people's minds, and so did the name: Vineyard.

The Holdaways stayed for generations. By 1991 the Holdaway family alone counted about twenty households in town.

The river stood between the Lake View families and their church in Provo. So on July 17, 1877, they started a Sunday School of their own, with Peter Madsen in charge. Within a few months it became a ward, a congregation of its own, and Madsen served as its bishop for the next fifteen years.

For these farm families, the ward was the center of community life: worship, dances, help at harvest and news of each other. Generations later, the Vineyard ward would send books to its young men in the armed forces and listen to Christmas carols drifting from the steel mill next door.