Coalville, Utah: From Chalk Creek to Coal Town

Coalville began life with a gentler name. In the spring of eighteen fifty-nine William Henderson Smith brought four families to the banks of Chalk Creek in Summit County, persuaded by spilled wheat he had seen germinate and grow to maturity while freighting through the valley the previous year. The settlers called their little community Chalk Creek.

Then coal turned up in the hills east of town, found by Thomas Rhodes and others around eighteen fifty-eight or eighteen fifty-nine, and the community took the name Coalville, which it kept when it incorporated in eighteen sixty-seven. By eighteen seventy-three a narrow-gauge railroad reached the Wasatch mine, with cars pulled up the slope by mules and lowered by gravity. The coal provided heating fuel for Salt Lake City during Utah's early territorial years, and Summit County's county seat has carried the name of that first discovery ever since.