Farmington, Utah
Near Salt Lake City, Utah
Farmington started as a single herder looking for winter grass. In the fall of eighteen forty-seven, Hector C. Haight drove his cattle into a broad creek valley at the base of the Wasatch, roughly twelve miles north of the new Salt Lake settlement, and decided to stay.
Five other families wintered with him. They called the stream North Cottonwood Creek and the place grew quietly into a farming community: orchards, grist mills, and fieldstone homes rising through the eighteen fifties. In eighteen fifty-two, the territorial government chose it as the county seat of Davis County and renamed it Farmington, for obvious reasons.
The town built Utah's first courthouse a couple of years later, a two-story adobe structure that doubled as a church meeting hall. Farmington remained an agricultural village for most of its first century. Today it is best known as the home of Lagoon, Utah's century-old amusement park, though the old fieldstone homes along the main street still mark where the herder wintered.
