Some names keep turning up in Vineyard's history. Gammon is one of them, and it first appears in 1855.
That year a handful of families settled Lake View, a farming district at the mouth of the Provo River right next to Vineyard. Thomas Gammon was among them, along with Mads Jorgensen, Lars Jacobsen, Stephen Bunnell, Peter Johnson and Peter Madsen. They dug ditches, cleared fields and built homes, and when the river and the lake flooded in 1861 and 1862 they moved those homes to higher ground and kept going.
Dairy country
For the next century this was dairy country. Thirty-two dairies lined Geneva Road, and the Gammons were one of the families who milked before sunrise and knew every neighbor by name. When World War II came, Sgt. Wayne Gammon went with the Army, and in February 1946 the local paper reported that he was home from Italy and discharged.
A town of its own
In 1989 the farm families decided to govern themselves. Their spokesman was Rulon Gammon, who told reporters the residents strongly supported incorporating. The plan covered 2,805 acres of farms and industry wrapped around the Geneva Steel plant. A regional planner urged caution. Vineyard's only steady income, he warned, was about $80,000 a year in property taxes from Geneva, and he suggested they study joining Orem instead.
They went ahead. On May 11, 1989, Vineyard became a town, and Rulon Gammon became its first mayor. Two years later the town's costs were running far below the county's prediction, and Geneva's tax money was building a city park.
A lot of history there.State Representative Margaret Dayton, 2004
Farm Field Days
The Gammon dairy became a classroom too. Every spring schoolchildren came for Farm Field Days. In 2000, the sixth year, about 3,800 Utah County students came over three days. They learned that it takes about 800 years to build one inch of topsoil in Utah, and a giant talking tomato puppet taught them that tomatoes need water about once a week.
The last milking
Fifteen years after incorporation, Rulon Gammon was still the only mayor Vineyard had known. In August 2004, on a bus tour of Utah Lake for the county's mayors, he announced he was selling his 94 acre dairy farm, the farm where he had been born 64 years earlier in the same farmhouse. He planned to resign when the sale closed so he and his wife could serve a church mission.
He called the changes in town dramatic. He worried about sprawl and said he was still committed to agriculture. With the steel mill closed, he had been working to bring a gas fired power plant to the old mill ground so the town could pay its bills. A state representative, Margaret Dayton, said she was happy for him and sad at the same time, because there was "a lot of history there."
From a pioneer at the river mouth to a mayor on a lake tour, the family and the town grew up side by side. Today a Vineyard park carries the name: the J. Rulon Gammon Vineyard Heritage Park.
