Nephi, Utah

The town of Nephi sits in the wide Juab Valley where the terrain opens up between the Wasatch Plateau and the Canyon Mountains. It was founded in eighteen fifty-one as Salt Creek, named for the mineral-heavy water running through the valley. That autumn, the settlers were staking out homesteads and building their first log and adobe houses.

The town kept the Salt Creek name until eighteen eighty-two, when the town and its post office became Nephi, after a prophet from the Book of Mormon who built a ship to carry his people across an ocean. Mormon settlers often used Book of Mormon names as tools, geography as scripture, every town a verse in the settlement's long text. Nephi became the county seat of Juab County, a ranching and farming center, and eventually a small shipping point for gypsum quarried in the hills nearby.