In January 1894 three school trustees from Vineyard, named Gillis, Lewis and Sorensen, drove into Provo to talk with architects and builders. The Provo Dispatch reported that the Vineyard school district would soon begin a new schoolhouse costing $2,000 or more. For weeks afterward the paper carried the trustees' notice asking for sealed bids, to be opened at the existing Vineyard schoolhouse on March 31.
More than twenty bids came in, some from Salt Lake City but most from Utah County, and the trustees took two weeks to weigh them. By April they had advertised again, with bids due on May 14. In the fall of 1895 they were back in the paper asking for proposals to build three outhouses.
The schoolhouse was more than a classroom. It served as a landmark: in 1895 a Mrs. Holdaway of Lake View, selling seasoned lumber, gave her address as one mile north of the Vineyard schoolhouse. It also served as a chapel. In July 1900 a funeral was held there, and in March 1903 the Tribune announced that services for Mrs. Conrad Maag Jr. of Vineyard, a 25 year old daughter of a Lake View bishop who had died in childbirth, would be held at the Vineyard schoolhouse.
Its teachers often came from far away. In January 1899 Miss Emily Davis, principal of the Vineyard school district, returned to Provo after Christmas at her home in Idaho. In 1914 and 1915 the Eureka Reporter followed Ruby Fields, a young woman from that mining town who spent the school year teaching at Vineyard, near Provo.
Into the district
Then the district itself began to disappear into larger ones. At the end of 1902 the Utah County commissioners passed a resolution merging the Provo Bench, Pleasant View, Lake View and Vineyard school districts into one, called Lincoln No. 16. Lake View did not go quietly. In January 1903 two of its residents, George C. Scott and James Madsen, came before the board to protest. They were told nothing could change without a petition from a majority of Lake View's taxpayers.
In 1915 a bigger merger created the Alpine School District, which began with 92 teachers, 4,906 students, 21 grade schools and four secondary schools across northern Utah County. The Vineyard school became one of its grade schools. In 1921 it had four teachers, each taking two of the eight grades. In 1929 the district's annual report listed Loie Miner as principal at a salary of $875, with two other teachers, for a payroll of $2,300 a year.
Through the Depression the principal was Thorit C. Hebertson, who in 1936 was elected president of the Alpine teachers' association. In 1939 the district finished two new rooms at Vineyard, and a new principal, Earl A. Beck, arrived. By then the papers had started calling it the Union school at Vineyard.
The Union school band
Beck was a music man, and a traveler. In March 1940 he and his faculty drove his Mercury to see Boulder Dam. That July, 52 children of the Union school band, under his direction, marched in the opening parade of Covered Wagon Days in Salt Lake City and were then entertained by the Salt Lake chamber of commerce and the Saltair beach company. That August the band mothers threw him a potluck supper at Canyon Glen in Provo Canyon to thank him. The next June the Vineyard school band was on the program for the Pleasant Grove strawberry festival parade.
The schoolhouse was more than a classroom.
Within a year the school was standing next to the biggest construction job in Utah. When Geneva Steel took the farms in 1942, officials said the Vineyard ward's chapel would likely become a company hospital. On March 20, 1942, the Salt Lake Telegram reported that the ward would hold its last services in the chapel that Sunday, with Thorit C. Hebertson, the onetime principal, now a major and a former bishop, as speaker. For the next few weeks, the bishop said, meetings would move to the Lake View chapel or to the Union school building.
The school stayed next to the mill for decades. In 1948 fifty children from Antimony, a small town in southern Utah, toured the steel plant, and the whole student body of the Vineyard school came out to wave hello and goodbye. In the 1950s the Union School served as the polling place for Vineyard and Lake View in school bond elections. In 1959 the Alpine board ordered fire escapes for five two story schools, the Union School at Vineyard among them.
An old building, a new school
By the late 1970s the area's school was Vineyard Elementary, and its address, 950 West 800 South, read Orem. It was a big school. In the fall of 1983 it had 851 students, second only to Bonneville Elementary among the district's grade schools. Its PTA ran a Christmas craft fair every November, and a family counseling institute held evening parenting classes in its rooms.
That building eventually outlived its name. In August 2004 Alpine School District finished a new Vineyard Elementary at 620 East Holdaway Road in Vineyard. Sandstrom Architecture designed it in a V to fit a corner lot, with 27 daylit classrooms, room for 810 students and a library with a skylight and an enclosed reading room built like a Native American kiva. It cost about $7.4 million. The old school across from Utah Valley State College was sold to the college. In 2005 the main building was remodeled for the college's School of Education, and its annex became the first home of the Utah County Academy of Sciences, a new charter high school whose students took college classes across the street.
Vineyard has grown far beyond one school since then. Trailside Elementary on Vineyard Loop Road now enrolls roughly a thousand children, and Franklin Discovery Academy, a charter school on Gammon Road, was built for 700.
Another split
The Alpine School District that absorbed the Vineyard school in 1915 is now coming apart. In November 2024 voters in the northern cities approved two new districts. Vineyard was not on the ballot, but it went along by default, grouped with Orem, Lindon and Pleasant Grove in what remained. In March 2025 the Utah County Commission drew the boundaries, putting all of Vineyard in board seat 3 with part of southern Orem. In January 2026 the new board voted 6 to 1 to call it the Timpanogos School District. It is set to begin operating on July 1, 2027, a little more than 130 years after three trustees went to Provo to price a $2,000 schoolhouse.
From vineyardhistory.org/stories/the-vineyard-schoolhouse/
