Brigham City, Utah
Near Ogden, Utah
Brigham City sits at the northern bend of the Wasatch Front, where the mountains crowd the edge of the Great Salt Lake. Mormons settled the area in eighteen fifty-one, many of them recent immigrants. For its first sixteen years the community was known as Box Elder, named for the trees lining the creek.
In eighteen sixty-seven, ten years before Brigham Young died, the town was renamed in his honor. Young had organized Utah settlements the way a general deploys battalions, calling families from the pulpit to leave homes and build new towns in strategic valleys. Box Elder was one of those assignments.
The county retained its old name, Box Elder County, but the city became Brigham City, a permanent tribute inscribed on every postmark in the valley.
