Almost one family
In 1990 the census counted 151 people in Vineyard, making it the 211th largest community in Utah. A year later, a Deseret News profile of the town found something close to one big family.
About three of every four residents were related. Two or three families made up most of the town, and the Holdaways alone counted about twenty households, according to the town recorder, Cheryl Holdaway.
They were young and their families were big. The median age was 24.5, the typical household held 4.19 people and the median home was worth $83,900.
Building a town from nothing
Starting a town meant building a government from scratch, and the people doing it were mostly dairy farmers. By 1991 that inexperience had not caused a single problem. Costs were running far below the $80,000 a year the county had predicted, and the leaders wanted to keep the country feel: close neighbors and a mix of homes, farms, shops and industry.
Money was less of a worry than it might have been. Geneva Steel and twelve other companies were inside the town limits, and Geneva alone had paid nearly $1 million in property taxes the year before. That money was building a $400,000 park beside the new town hall, with a baseball diamond, a volleyball court, a sand pile for toddlers and a barbecue pavilion. By 1998 it had basketball and tennis courts too. It was still the only park in town.
Small-town Vineyard
Small town touches were everywhere. At Christmas 1990 the town gave every family a card to the Orem library. The year's crime report fit in a sentence: no murders, rapes, robberies or serious assaults, and one burglary. Vineyard had not yet existed long enough to vote in a presidential election.
About three of every four residents were related to each other.
The town barely changed for twenty years. A county history put it at about 155 people in 1998. The 2010 census counted 139. Vineyard had gotten a little smaller.
The boom
Then everything moved at once. The mill was gone, the farms were selling and the builders arrived. From 2014 to 2015 Vineyard grew 417 percent, faster than any city in America. In 2016 it passed 1,000 people and became a city. By 2020 it had 12,543. In 2022 FrontRunner trains began stopping in town.
The last farms
The boom took the farms. The Holdaways, who had a 350 acre dairy, sold all of it to developers over fifteen years; their children had gone into other work, and farming had become hard to make pay. Robert Holdaway, a lifelong resident, called the sales inevitable. His wife Cumorah says the young families in the new neighborhoods do not know what Vineyard used to be, so she tells them. Margaret Robins once ran a 40 acre poultry farm with alfalfa, wheat and corn. By 2016 just 11 acres were left, ringed by houses, and she wanted them kept open. Her son David said the arrival of Geneva Steel had been as big a change as the boom. At 350 acres, the Clegg Farm was the last working farm in town.
Today about 20,000 people live in Vineyard. In 1991 three of every four were family. Now nearly everyone is new, and the old stories belong to all of them.
