Snowville: Named for an Apostle

Snowville sits at the edge of the Curlew Valley in Box Elder County, close to where Interstate Eighty-Four enters Utah from Idaho. The first settlers came from Malad, Idaho in eighteen seventy and built along Deep Creek. Brigham Young directed the formal settlement in eighteen seventy-one, and the community named itself after Lorenzo Snow, then an Apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and later its fifth president.

Snow had been closely involved with the surrounding region's colonization and the settlers wanted to honor him. The old pioneer trail and a stage line once ran through the valley before rail made them obsolete. Today Snowville is a tiny crossroads town of a few hundred people, but its name is a direct record of the church-directed settlement pattern that shaped every valley in this corner of the Great Basin.