Bountiful, Utah
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
Bountiful holds a quiet distinction along the Wasatch Front: it was Utah's second settlement, established in September of eighteen forty-seven, just weeks after Brigham Young's company entered the Salt Lake Valley. Peregrine Sessions and his family drove their livestock north of the new Mormon encampment, looking for grass, and wintered in a dugout with animal skins for a roof. By eighteen fifty, fifty-three families had followed.
They called the place Sessions Settlement, then North Canyon Ward, before settling on Bountiful in eighteen fifty-five, a name lifted from the Book of Mormon, where Bountiful was a land of abundant fruit and timber. The early settlers built orchards and flour mills along the mountain streams, and the community never grew as fast or as loud as Salt Lake to the south. Today it is a quiet city of more than forty-five thousand, the kind of place that feels older than it looks.
