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.
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.
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.
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.
What remains
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.
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.
