Spanish Fork, Utah

The city of Spanish Fork takes its name from a creek that runs through Utah Valley, and that creek takes its name from two Spanish priests. In seventeen seventy-six, Franciscan friars Silvestre Vélez de Escalante and Francisco Atanasio Domínguez set out from Santa Fe, New Mexico, hoping to find an overland route to the Spanish missions in California. They never made it, turning back after crossing Utah. But the creek they followed down Spanish Fork Canyon carried the memory of their passage.

Mormon settlers arrived in eighteen fifty-one, first in scattered farms called the Upper Settlement, then consolidating into the Lower Settlement. Stephen Markham, who had been wounded defending Joseph Smith at Carthage Jail in eighteen forty-four, became president of the first congregation here in December of eighteen fifty-one. Today Spanish Fork is a city of over forty-two thousand, one of the larger communities in Utah County, its Spanish name one of the oldest traces of European exploration still marking the map.