The chapels of the lake bottom

For its first years, the Latter-day Saint congregation on the lake bottom west of Provo had no chapel at all. When the Utah Stake of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was reorganized in 1877, the scattered farm and fishing families near the mouth of the Provo River became a ward of their own, with the Danish fisherman Peter Madsen as bishop. A Sunday School had been organized that July with Madsen as superintendent. The new ward, with Mads Jorgensen and Franklin Scott as his counselors, met in the Madsen home. Records of the day call it the Provo Fifth Ward. It later took the name Lake View, and its territory ran north over the land that is now Vineyard.

Before that, the district had belonged to the Provo Third Ward, and with the river to cross and no bridges, the settlers had already learned to run much of their own religious and social life. Their first meetinghouse was a single room, 24 by 40 feet, on land secured from Peter Madsen. Some members hauled rock from the canyon while others made brick. Homemade school desks and split logs served as seats, and the floor was native red pine. The room doubled as schoolhouse and dance hall, and a ward history written in 1938 remembered the old violin, the dulcimer and the organ playing for community dances there.

In 1892 Madsen was released after about fifteen years, and John Johnson became bishop, with James H. Clinger and George M. Smoot as counselors. By 1893 the ward was large enough to divide into South Lake View and North Lake View, and Johnson conducted meetings in both. In December 1899, under the direction of Edward Partridge of the Utah Stake presidency, the northern district was organized as the Vineyard Ward, with William D. Lewis as bishop, George M. Smoot and Niels Larsen as counselors, and Joseph O. Stone as clerk. John Gillies, who grew grapes on the slopes of the bench, is credited with the name.

A buggy wheel and a brick chapel

Lake View built next. At a ward conference on May 18, 1902, members decided they needed a new meetinghouse, and they laid the cornerstone one week later. Nobody could agree on the site, so Stephen Bunnell tied a handkerchief to the wheel of his buggy, counted its turns from the south end of the ward to the Vineyard boundary, drove back half the distance and marked the spot. The building was finished for the October 1903 conference and dedicated on May 8, 1904, by Apostles Reed Smoot and Francis M. Lyman. It cost $11 for every man, woman and child in the ward.

Vineyard's first gatherings were held in a lumber schoolhouse, remembered as the little blue school, built in 1883 and bought by the church in 1890. Members then met in a brick school building until 1906, when they raised a white brick meetinghouse on the west side of the lower county road, about seven miles northwest of Provo. Apostle Reed Smoot dedicated it on September 20 of that year. Andrew Jenson's encyclopedic history of the church gives its cost as $4,000. An amusement hall followed in 1915. For some thirty years the white church held the ward's parties, banquets, concerts, political rallies and missionary farewells.

Milk checks and a Christmas dedication

By the 1930s both wards had outgrown their buildings. Vineyard's bishop, Victor M. Anderson, set up a budget in 1934 for a $36,000 chapel, half of it to be raised by members through a ward assessment. Bids were opened on August 15, 1936, the old white church was razed, and the first concrete was poured on September 29. Members gave their share in cash, labor and materials, and the ward's forestry boys landscaped the grounds under their club leader, Joseph H. Clegg. A Provo Herald retrospective later recalled that the cows were praised too, since their milk had been turned into cash for the chapel. Dairying was the community's main source of income.

The finished chapel seated 184, with overflow room for 250 more, plus a recreation hall 44 by 66 feet and a basement with a banquet hall, a kitchen and classrooms. The final cost was $37,447.18 for a ward of about 130 families. President Heber J. Grant dedicated it in December 1939, forty years after the ward was organized, and the stake newspaper, the Voice of Sharon, devoted a special issue to it. Lake View had already finished its own $20,000 chapel, built by the local contractors Snyder and Johnson under Bishop August J. Johnson, and President Grant had dedicated that building on August 14, 1938.

Sold to the steel mill

Vineyard had its new chapel for barely two years. In February 1942 the Voice of Sharon reported that negotiations were all but concluded to sell it to the federal Defense Plant Corporation, which was buying farms for the Geneva steel plant. Efforts to move the plant site far enough north to save the building failed. By April the Deseret News was publishing a photograph of the Vineyard Ward chapel in use as the administration building for the Geneva Steel Works. About 40 percent of the community's homes and farms went with it.

The ward rebuilt. On August 20, 1950, Elder Ezra Taft Benson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles dedicated a new $125,000 Vineyard Ward chapel, the second the ward had completed in eleven years. Bishop J. Taylor Allen conducted. The speakers included Walter R. Holdaway, president of the Orem Stake, to which Vineyard then belonged, and Delia Stone, the ward Relief Society president. From the 1960s on, notices of farewells and Eagle Scout courts of honor place the Vineyard Ward chapel at 800 South on Geneva Road. Lake View lost its chapel to fire in June 1955 and dedicated a replacement on June 1, 1958.

From one ward to many stakes

In 1973, when some Vineyard residents first tried to incorporate a town, they used the boundaries of the Vineyard Ward to describe it. A generation later the old ward had become a city. The church organized the Orem Utah Vineyard Stake on June 16, 2013, from the Orem Utah Sunset Heights Stake, with seven Vineyard wards and a branch at the Geneva care center. The Vineyard Utah Grove Park Stake followed on August 26, 2018. On May 22, 2022, the Vineyard Utah Springwater Stake was created from the Vineyard stake with nine Springwater wards and the care center branch, and the Vineyard Utah Springs Park Stake was organized that December 11.

By then the original stake was known as the Vineyard Utah Stake, and in May 2023 Nathan Winston Riley was called as its president, succeeding Aaron W. Johnston. On October 19, 2025, a stake for young single adults took the Vineyard name as well. The ground those stakes cover once held a single ward that met in a fisherman's front room.