Vines and Dairies

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.

In March 1888 Captain John Dallin bought ten acres on the lakeshore just north of Vineyard and named his resort for his daughter, Geneva. He built a boat harbor, bath houses, a hotel two and a half stories tall and a dance pavilion whose floor sat on springs.

Special excursion trains came from Salt Lake City, Ogden, Provo, Eureka, Manti and Nephi. Swimming cost twenty cents, a hamburger a dime and a root beer a nickel. Children slept on the benches while their parents danced.

The resort closed around 1935, and its buildings were torn down around 1939. But the name lived on. When the government built a steel mill nearby a few years later, it took the name Geneva too.

Thirty-two dairies once lined Geneva Road. The Holdaways, the Gammons and their neighbors milked before sunrise and knew every neighbor by name. In 1920 about 560 people lived in the Vineyard area, most of them on farms.

In 1928 a county newspaper wrote that no region in the United States beat Utah County as a dairy center. Local alfalfa and beet pulp from the valley's sugar factories helped make it so.

In 1924 the Pleasant Grove Canning Company announced it would take in tomatoes from farms at Provo Bench, Vineyard and Lake View. Vineyard fields were feeding people far beyond the valley.

In 1922 eight year old Rex Blake was handed the family's cows to milk. There were no milking machines, so every cow was milked by hand before school. Horses pulled the milk cans two miles to the milk house, and the train carried them to Clover Leaf Dairy in Salt Lake City, winter and summer, seven days a week.

He walked a mile and a half to the Vineyard School, bathed on Saturday night in a round tin tub and, at fourteen, learned to drive the family's first truck, a 1928 Ford Model A. "We just grew up," he said.