# Vineyard History

> The complete history of Vineyard City, Utah (Vineyard, Utah County, Utah, United States), on the east shore of Utah Lake. Free, independent and sourced. Covers Lake Bonneville and Utah Lake, the Timpanogos people, the 1776 Domínguez and Escalante expedition, Fort Utah and the Latter-day Saint pioneers of Lake View, the grapevines that named Vineyard, the dairies and farms, the Geneva resort (1888), Geneva Steel (built 1941 to 1944, closed 2001), the town of 151 people incorporated in 1989, and the city today.

Key facts: Vineyard is in Utah County, Utah, on the east shore of Utah Lake between Orem and Lindon. It was named for grapevines planted by settlers including John Gillies and Shadrach Holdaway. Geneva Steel was built on Vineyard farmland during World War II and was one of the largest steel mills west of the Mississippi. Vineyard incorporated as a town on May 11, 1989. Utah City, the downtown district of Vineyard, stands on the former Geneva Steel site; its land's history (farms, the Geneva resort, Geneva Steel) is told here.

## The eight eras
- [The Ancient Lake (Before 1776)](https://vineyardhistory.org/eras/the-ancient-lake/): Before there was a Vineyard, there was the water.
- [The Friars and the Valley (1776 to 1846)](https://vineyardhistory.org/eras/the-friars-and-the-valley/): The same summer America was born, two friars found the lake.
- [The Pioneers (1847 to 1877)](https://vineyardhistory.org/eras/the-pioneers/): Wagons, a fort, a flood, and a hard first winter.
- [Dairy Country (1878 to 1940)](https://vineyardhistory.org/eras/vines-and-dairies/): Thirty-two dairies, a dance floor on springs, and milk on the morning train.
- [Geneva Steel and the War (1941 to 1945)](https://vineyardhistory.org/eras/geneva-steel-and-the-war/): The world went to war, and America needed steel.
- [Steel Country (1946 to 1988)](https://vineyardhistory.org/eras/steel-country/): Four decades as the heartbeat of the valley.
- [A Town of 151 (1989 to 2012)](https://vineyardhistory.org/eras/a-town-of-151/): Dairy farmers decide to run their own town.
- [A City on the Lake (2013 to today)](https://vineyardhistory.org/eras/a-city-on-the-lake/): From grapevines to steel to a city on the lake.

## Stories
- [The lake before memory](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-lake-before-memory/): An inland sea nearly the size of Lake Michigan once covered this valley. Utah Lake is what it left behind.
- [The people of the lake](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-people-of-the-lake/): The Timpanogos Utes knew this shore long before any town. The lake was their pantry, and the river mouth beside Vineyard was one of its richest shelves.
- [The fish of Utah Lake](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-fish-of-utah-lake/): Giant trout, the carp that replaced them, and the comeback of a fish found nowhere else on Earth.
- [The friars at the lake](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-friars-at-the-lake/): In 1776, two Spanish priests became the first Europeans known to see Utah Lake.
- [The pioneers of the lake](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-pioneers-of-the-lake/): Driven west across a continent, the Latter-day Saints built a fort on the Provo River, then farms at its mouth beside Vineyard.
- [The winter of 1850](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/winter-of-1850/): A killing on the Provo River, and the war that followed between settlers and the Timpanogos Utes.
- [Faith on the shore](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/faith-on-the-shore/): How the Latter-day Saint pioneers and their wards shaped Vineyard's community.
- [Shadrach and Lucinda Holdaway](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/shadrach-and-lucinda-holdaway/): A Mormon Battalion teamster turned machinist and a pioneer healer built Provo's first carding mill, then a ranch on the lake bottom that their family farmed for generations.
- [Life inside Fort Utah](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/life-inside-fort-utah/): Twelve people to a log cabin, suckers for supper and a cannon on a mound: the first years of the fort that became Provo, a few miles down the shore from Vineyard.
- [The Danes of Lake View](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-danes-of-lake-view/): A Danish soldier turned fisherman, his five wives and thirty five children, and the Scandinavian neighbors who made the river mouth a little Denmark.
- [When Utah Valley forted up](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/walker-war-in-utah-valley/): A trade gone wrong in Springville, a guard shot at Payson, and a year when every town in Utah Valley pulled behind walls while the lakeshore below Provo stayed empty.
- [The Indian farm on Spanish Fork](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/spanish-fork-indian-farm/): For a dozen years a federal farm on the south end of Utah Lake was meant to be a permanent home for the valley's Utes. Then it was signed away at a council held on its own grounds.
- [Black Hawk's war and Utah Valley](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/black-hawk-war-in-utah-valley/): Utah's longest Indian war began in Sanpete, ran its raids down Spanish Fork Canyon, and ended with its leader asking forgiveness and coming home to die at the south end of Utah Valley.
- [The Geneva resort](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-geneva-resort/): A dance floor on springs, special trains from across Utah and a toboggan slide into the lake, just up the shore from Vineyard.
- [A Vineyard farm kid, 1922](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/a-vineyard-farm-kid-1922/): Milking by hand before school, milk cans on a wagon, a train every day to Salt Lake City, and the thrill of a 1928 Model A.
- [The carp fishermen of Utah Lake](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-carp-fishermen/): Seines, tithing fish, a cannery at Geneva that lost its war and a family still hauling carp from the lake after four generations.
- [The ditches and the decree](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-ditches-and-the-decree/): Every field between the Provo River and the lake depended on a ditch, a share and a court's ranking of who had come first.
- [The chapels of the lake bottom](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/chapels-of-the-lake-bottom/): A fisherman's front room, a site chosen by counting buggy wheel turns, a chapel sold to a steel mill, and the many stakes that came after.
- [Steamers and pleasure resorts of Utah Lake](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-pleasure-resorts/): Hot plunges at Saratoga, a mock naval battle at the mouth of the Provo River and a showboat that carried Depression crowds to Bird Island.
- [Sugar beet country](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/sugar-beet-country/): How a church-backed factory at Lehi turned Utah Valley's farms into beet fields, piped juice across the county and then lost its war with worms and blight.
- [The Vineyard schoolhouse](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-vineyard-schoolhouse/): A $2,000 schoolhouse on the lake road, a band that marched in Salt Lake City, an old building handed to a college, and a district about to split in three.
- [Who built Geneva](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/who-built-geneva/): Ten thousand workers, three years, two hundred million dollars, and the families who gave the mill their working lives.
- [Vineyard in the war](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/vineyard-in-the-war/): The war took Vineyard's sons away and put a steel mill in their fields. The local paper followed every step.
- [The miracle mill](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-miracle-mill/): U.S. Steel gave up on Geneva. A Utah lawyer, his brother, a senator and the steelworkers' families brought it back at midnight.
- [Missionaries from the lake bottom](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/vineyard-missionaries/): From a Danish fisherman sent back to Denmark to brothers called to Russia, Alabama and Uruguay, a farm ward that kept sending its young people around the world.
- [Ironton and the sale of Geneva](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/ironton-and-the-sale-of-geneva/): Before Geneva there was Ironton, a lone blast furnace south of Provo, and its owners ended up buying the giant war mill on the Vineyard shore for a fraction of its cost.
- [The steelworkers of Geneva](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-steelworkers-of-geneva/): Seizures, national strikes, wildcat walkouts, a six-month lockout and a last shift: six decades of work and bargaining at the mill on the Vineyard shore.
- [Geneva in the Cold War](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/geneva-in-the-cold-war/): After the war, the mill on the Vineyard shore rolled plate for oil pipelines in Arabia and Iraq, was seized by a president during the Korean War and made Orem a city.
- [The year the lake broke its compromise](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-lake-over-its-line/): In 1983 and 1984 Utah Lake rose to the highest level ever measured, drowning shoreline fields and forcing a century old water deal to be rewritten.
- [The Gammons](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-gammons/): A pioneer at the river mouth in 1855. A town's first mayor in 1989. One family runs through Vineyard's whole story.
- [The China sale](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-china-sale/): How the heart of a Utah steel mill was sold, packed and shipped across the Pacific, and how the rest came down.
- [A town of 151](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/a-town-of-151/): In 1990 nearly everyone in Vineyard was family. Twenty-five years later, almost everyone was new.
- [The winter the air cleared](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-winter-the-air-cleared/): When a strike shut Geneva Steel for a winter, a BYU economist counted sick children in Utah Valley hospitals and changed how the world regulates air pollution.
- [The power plant at the mill](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-power-plant-at-the-mill/): How a bidding contest at the Utah Public Service Commission put two gas-fired power plants on the ruins of Geneva Steel, and gave a town of a few hundred people something to tax.
- [Digging out Geneva](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/digging-out-geneva/): Slag, concrete, iron dust and tar pits: the long, unglamorous cleanup that turned a dead steel mill into ground people could live on.
- [From ruins to a downtown](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/from-ruins-to-a-downtown/): What rose on the 1,750 acres where Geneva Steel once stood.
- [The long walk to the lake](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-long-walk-to-the-lake/): Vineyard sits on Utah Lake but spent a century fenced off from it. A trail, a beach, a herd of cows and a pile of grant money are slowly opening the shore.
- [The campus that waits](https://vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-campus-that-waits/): Utah Valley University has owned more than 225 acres of old Geneva ground for over a decade. Here is how it got the land, and why it still holds on.

## Lore
- [The Utah Lake Monster](https://vineyardhistory.org/lore/the-utah-lake-monster/): For twenty years, people on the shore swore something enormous lived in the lake.
- [The Water Babies](https://vineyardhistory.org/lore/the-water-babies/): Long before the monster, the people of the lake had their own warning about the water.
- [The Fish That Swallowed Four](https://vineyardhistory.org/lore/the-fish-that-swallowed-four/): A fish so big it swallowed four swimmers, who cut their way back out.
- [The Lake of Gold](https://vineyardhistory.org/lore/the-lake-of-gold/): For two centuries, Spain hunted for a rich kingdom on a great lake to the north. It may have been ours.
- [The River to the Sea](https://vineyardhistory.org/lore/the-river-to-the-sea/): For seventy years, the maps showed a river running from our lake to the Pacific. It was never there.
- [The Legend of Timpanogos](https://vineyardhistory.org/lore/the-legend-of-timpanogos/): The mountain Vineyard looks at every morning has a love story. It is younger than it sounds.
- [Footloose at the Mill](https://vineyardhistory.org/lore/footloose-at-the-mill/): The most famous dance in the movie happened inside Geneva Steel.

## More
- [Timeline](https://vineyardhistory.org/timeline/): Every dated moment in Vineyard history
- [History Calendar](https://vineyardhistory.org/calendar/): What happened in Vineyard on each day of the year
- [Press Archive](https://vineyardhistory.org/archive/): Newspaper and magazine coverage of Geneva Steel, Utah Lake and Vineyard, summarized and linked
- [Sources](https://vineyardhistory.org/sources/): Every source behind the site