World War II reached Vineyard twice. Its young men left to fight, and the government built a huge steel mill in the fields they left behind. Vineyard was a small farm community then, with its own church ward and its own column of neighborhood news in the local paper. Most of what we know comes from that column.
George Blake felt it coming. He had served a church mission in Germany and came home in 1939, worried for the friends he left there. When Pearl Harbor was bombed in December 1941, he knew America could no longer stay out.
The boys of Vineyard ward
Some of Vineyard's sons were already in uniform, and the ward was looking after them. In early December 1941 the Sunday School sent books to "the boys of Vineyard ward who are serving in the army or navy." Four of them, Keith Herbertson, Wilson Madsen, Jack Shumway and Earl Sorensen Jr., were with the Utah National Guard. The paper said they were last heard from at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay, where soldiers waited for ships across the Pacific.
Jesse Allen was in the Navy. Days after Pearl Harbor the paper placed him near the Philippine Islands, where Japan was attacking. It would be more than four years before he came home.
A mill in the fields
At home, the war was remaking Vineyard just as fast. The government picked the quiet farmland on the east shore for a steel mill, approved it in November 1941 and bought the land by March 1942. Traffic grew so heavy that in April 1942 American Fork asked the county to widen the road north from Geneva.
Families came from far away to work there. In April 1946 the paper mentioned one: a family from Alexandria, North Dakota, who had lived in Vineyard three years while the father worked at the plant. The mill was always short of hands. On February 25, 1945, three American airmen who had been held in a German prison camp wrote asking for jobs.
In about three years the fields had become a steel mill.
Through it all the neighbors kept track of each other in print: who was stationed where, who was on leave, who was coming home. In February 1942 Elden Rawlings was with the Navy in San Diego, and his family traveled from Vineyard to see him.
Coming home
Then the sons began to come home, and the column printed that too. Sgt. Aaron Stoddard, after two years in Europe. Arlo Shumway, home on leave to his wife and two small sons. Lt. Keith Hebertson, landing in Boston on his way to discharge. Sgt. Wayne Gammon, back from Italy. Clyde Wilkinson, back from Japan. Dean Olson, after three years in the Navy that took him to the Aleutian Islands off Alaska. Ellis Bilboa, discharged after service at Amarillo, Texas.
Some had been gone a very long time. Jesse Allen, the sailor near the Philippines in December 1941, came home on leave in January 1946 as a gunner's mate with more than five years in the Navy. Boyd Harding came home in July 1946 after more than two years in the Navy, the last of them in Japan.
Carols at Gate Number 2
For the mill, peace brought worry. In August 1945 county leaders met to keep it from closing, and the next June it was sold to U.S. Steel. It kept running. At Christmas 1946 carols played from a loudspeaker at the mill's Number 2 gate, and the paper reported that members of Vineyard ward greatly appreciated them.
In about three years the fields had become a steel mill, and the sons who came home found it running next door. The two stories had become one.
