History of Sanpete County Where in the world did Sanpete County get its name? It all started when the Ute Chief Wakara invited pioneers to settle the San Pitch valley, named after a tribe of hunter-gatherer Indians. Wakara claimed that the Great Spirit had appeared to him in a dream, telling him to welcome the white men. Later, Wakara engaged his guests in the infamous “Walker War” from 1853-54. The Black Hawk War, named for another Ute leader, also disrupted county settlement from 1865-68. Eventually, the San Pitch name was corrupted to Sanpete. Some historians now believe that more than the agricultural skills Wakara claimed to want for himself and his tribe, he was interested in the cattle that the pioneers seemed to take with them everywhere they went. The county wasn’t the only entity to undergo a name change. Most of the cities within the county have gone through changes in identity since their founding. Sanpete County is the home of several towns. How they originated and came to be can be an interesting story. The following stories are shortened versions of some of Sanpete’s best-known towns.
MT. PLEASANT
Mt. Pleasant is known for its 19th-century Main Street buildings, for being home to Wasatch Academy, and for being the largest city in the northern half of the county. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 3,260. After taking lumber out of Pleasant Creek Canyon in late 1851, a band of Mormon colonists from Manti led by Madison D. Hambleton returned in the spring of 1852 to establish the Hambleton Settlement near the present site of Mt. Pleasant. During the Wakara War, the small group of settlers relocated to Spring Town and later to Manti for protection. The old settlement was burned down by local Native Americans, so when a large colonizing party from Ephraim and Manti returned to the area in 1859, a new, permanent town site was laid out in its present location. Among the founding settlers were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints, also known as Mormon converts, from Scandinavia, the United Kingdom and the eastern United States. By 1880, Mt. Pleasant was the county’s largest city with a population of 2,000. More than 72 percent of its married adults were foreign born. This ethnic diversity had an important impact on village life during the 19th and early 20th centuries. For decades, five languages were commonly spoken in town, creating confusing and sometimes amusing communication problems. The settlement and development of Mt. Pleasant followed the typical pattern for Mormon towns of the period. A squareshaped town site was surveyed, eventually containing about 100 city blocks. Lots were drawn and the land was distributed among the population. Under the direction of James Russell Ivie (1802–1866), a fort of adobe walls and log cabins was built. Pleasant Creek ran through the fort and farming was done outside of its walls. Around the time that Ivie was killed in the Blackhawk War by Indians who had declined to participate in the settlement of the earlier Wakara War, the town had acquired its present name. By the time the final peace treaty with the Indians was signed in Bishop Seeley’s house on Mt. Pleasant Main Street in 1872, bringing to an end to this conflict, many settlers had 76 • Sanpete County Fairbook 2021 • www.sanpetecountyfair.net
already erected homesteads outside of the fort. Although the town site is large in scale, the density is relatively low due to the original layout allowing for only four lots per block. The influence of members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was felt in all religious, political, economic, educational and social aspects of life in early Mt. Pleasant. Self-sufficiency was a virtue and home-grown and home-manufactured food, clothing and furnishings were far more available than rarely found imported items. Some of the first industries included hide tanning, shoemaking, blacksmithing, basket-making and freighting. Eventual modernization brought such improvements as the Deseret Telegraph in 1869, The Pyramid newspaper in 1890 and a telephone system in 1891. Sawmills and flour mills were built, irrigation systems were dug and a municipal government was created to oversee public laws and improvements. The city was incorporated in 1868, a year after the first cooperative store was founded, starting what became a burgeoning commercial district. Upon the arrival of the Rio Grande Western Railway in 1890, both the local population and the city’s prosperity increased dramatically. By 1900, Mt. Pleasant had grown to nearly 3,000 persons, the largest size reached by any city in Sanpete County to that time, and the city had earned one of its nicknames, “Hub City.” The town’s new-found wealth became immediately apparent in a building boom which saw the replacement of small, wood-frame commercial buildings with much more impressive, architect-designed stone and brick structures such as the 1888 Sanpete County Co-op, the Gentile store that competed with the ZCMI, or Mormon, store. The resulting Main Street district is so architecturally distinctive that the two-block-long area has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Equally striking are the Victorian churches, schools, and residences which replaced the simpler adobe and log buildings of the pioneer period. Mt. Pleasant has long been considered the most diverse city in the county, in part because of the liberal Mormons and the Protestant groups that challenged the dominant Mormon population in the late 19th century. Liberal Hall, built on Main Street in 1875, and Wasatch Academy, Utah’s oldest surviving private boarding school established by Presbyterians in the same year, remain as visible and functional testaments of the city’s historic and ongoing diversity. The 20th century brought continued changes and improvements to the face of the “Queen City,” its most popular nickname. The commercial and residential districts continued to fill with fine buildings bespeaking the prosperity of the community. By 1912, the first high school, North Sanpete High School, had been completed. The year 1912 also brought the Armory Hall, while the Elite Theater was constructed as a “fireproof” building in 1913. It burned down seven decades later. In 1917, a fine Carnegie Library was built in a modern architectural style. The Marie Hotel was erected in 1920 and a large cheese factory came on the scene in 1930, the same year that bus service came to town. The completion of U.S. Highway 89 in 1936 was a boon needed to soften the impact of the Great Depression. A city hall in 1939 and hospital in 1945, together with new schools and churches, gave Mt. Pleasant a full complement of public buildings.
