The Geneva resort

Picture a summer Saturday night in the 1890s, a little north of where Vineyard sits now. A band is playing. Under the pavilion the dance floor gives gently underfoot, because it rests on big springs. The walls stop about five feet short of the roof, so the breeze off Utah Lake drifts right through. This was the Geneva resort.

Geneva by the Lake

It started with Captain John Dallin. In March 1888 he bought a ten acre strip of lakeshore, drilled an artesian well, planted poplars and built a small house. He named the place for his daughter, Geneva, and he dreamed big: "Geneva by the Lake," a resort for every family in the valley.

When the lumber arrived, the Denver and Rio Grande railroad set up a stop to unload it. People later guessed the resort was named for the train stop. A local columnist set the record straight. The stop was named for the resort.

Dallin built everything a lake crowd could want: a boat harbor, bath houses, a hotel two and a half stories tall, a saloon and the pavilion, called perhaps the largest dance hall in the county.

Dallin built a two and a half story hotel with a kitchen, a dining room and a veranda on the second floor. A saloon stood just east of it. Water came from flowing artesian wells, so cold and so full of minerals that a later owner installed a boiler to heat the pools. Visitors remembered the lake as so clear that they could see white shells on the bottom, and trout, suckers, mullet and chubs swimming among them.

The excursion trains

Then the trains came. Special excursions rolled in from Salt Lake City, Ogden, Provo, Eureka, Manti and Nephi. On Sundays and holidays the Salt Lake trains arrived around ten in the morning and waited on the siding until the trip home near midnight. Old timers remembered days with three or four special trains.

There was no shortage of things to do. Horse races, ball games, shooting matches, boating, fishing and sailboat races filled the days, and sometimes a free barbecue. Two pools were filled by flowing wells, one cold and one heated by a big boiler. A sled slide on tracks shot riders into the cold pool, and in the 1920s a giant toboggan slide sent them skimming across the water.

Swimming cost twenty cents. A hamburger was a dime and a root beer a nickel. On Saturday afternoons teams from nearby towns played ball, and on Saturday nights the dancing began. Children fell asleep on the benches while their parents danced. Some families vacationed at Geneva even though they lived just a few miles away.

Old Bruin

For years the star attraction was Old Bruin, a brown bear brought to the resort as a cub and tethered to a stake in the park. People threw popcorn, food and even rocks to get his attention, and he grew mean. Later he was kept in a pen, and only Agnes Taylor, one of the owners, could feed him. One year after the resort had closed for the season, Bruin got loose, broke into the hotel and tore apart the beds and mattresses in every room. He had to be put down, and the family made a rug of his hide. A daughter of the owners remembered lying on the floor with her head on the bear's head. At one time, she said, they had been friends.

The Indians of the valley still came to the lake each year to gather fish, and some joined the horse races at the resort. Old timers blamed the carp, introduced in the 1890s, for starting the long decline of the clear water they remembered.

Changing hands

Owners came and went. Dallin left in 1907, and a group of Provo businessmen, the Utah Lake Club, brought back the summer dances and added picnic grounds and ball diamonds. In 1917 an electric plant lit the grounds for the first time. In 1920 the Hebertson brothers took over and made band dances the main draw. Cars, trucks and buses were replacing the special trains.

Prohibition brought its own guests. In 1921 the manager complained that bootleggers from Salt Lake turned up at every summer dance with liquor to sell.

Family resort

In 1923 Frank H. Eastmond and Walter G. Taylor took over and made Geneva a family resort again. They planted more trees, added a flower bed and fountain and new playground equipment, and hired popular bands for dances that lasted until midnight. Under the Eastmonds no alcohol or smoking was allowed. Frank Eastmond took guests on motor launch tours of the lake, and the fifty foot water slide sent riders on wheeled sleds zipping down the track and skimming across the pool. A stock company, the Vineyard Amusement Company, held shares in the resort.

Families who ran the place lived in the hotel all summer. Hundreds of bats roosted in its rafters, and at the end of each season the Eastmond children climbed into the attic to sweep up the droppings, which were sold as fertilizer for the lawns at ten cents a sack.

The resort lasted into the 1930s and closed around 1935. Utah Power and Light bought the land for a possible power plant, then dropped the idea when the lake fell. Around 1939 Dallin's buildings came down.

In the 1960s a private company began building a boat harbor, picnic area and restrooms on the old grounds, but the full plans were never finished. The land was eventually sold to Lindon, and today the Lindon Marina sits beside the place where the resort stood. Rows of tall Carolina poplars, planted by Dallin, still mark the spot, and water still flows from the old artesian wells.

What remains

The name survived. When the government built a steel mill nearby in the 1940s, it was called Geneva too, after the old resort at the edge of the lake. The dance floor, the pools and the toboggan slide are long gone. It lives on in Geneva Road and in the story of the mill.