They came because they had been pushed. In the 1830s and 1840s members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often called Mormons, were forced out of their homes in Missouri and then in Illinois. Their leader, Brigham Young, decided to take them so far west that no town could turn them away again.
The first wagon company rolled into the Salt Lake Valley in July 1847. Thousands followed over the next years, in covered wagons behind oxen, many walking beside the wagons for hundreds of miles, some pulling handcarts. Families carried everything they owned, and the trip took months.
Fort Utah
A short ride south lay a valley that looked like promise: a big freshwater lake, rivers running out of the mountains and green bottomland between them. In March 1849 Brigham Young sent about 150 people under John Higbee to the Provo River. They built a log fort and named it Fort Utah. Provo grew from it, a few miles from Vineyard's shore.
The valley already had its people. The Timpanogos Utes had lived around the lake for a very long time, and the mouth of the Provo River was one of their fishing grounds. Both peoples wanted the same land and the same water, and in the early 1850s the conflict turned violent.
Everything depended on water, and the water did not always cooperate.
Lake View
Floods soon drove the settlers to rebuild on higher ground, and families spread out wherever they could get water onto a field. In 1855 a group settled at the mouth of the Provo River, right next to what is now Vineyard, and called the place Lake View. Among them were Mads Jorgensen, Lars Jacobsen, Stephen Bunnell, Peter Johnson, Peter Madsen and Thomas Gammon.
They cleared brush, dug ditches to lead river water to their fields and built plain houses. Everything depended on water, and the water did not always cooperate. When the Provo River and Utah Lake flooded in 1861 and 1862, the families picked up and moved their homes to higher ground.
A ward of their own
The river also cut them off from church in Provo. So on July 17, 1877, they started their own Sunday School, with Peter Madsen in charge. Within months it became a ward of its own. For these families the ward was the heart of community life.
By then most of the Utes of Utah Valley had moved to a reservation in northeastern Utah, and the families of Lake View farmed the shore. They built the ditches, the fields, the congregations and the dairy country Vineyard would be known for. Many of their families stayed for generations. The Gammon name is still on a Vineyard park.
