The Town That Got Its Name from a Stranger's Library

Blanding is not named for anyone who ever lived here, farmed here, or set foot in this corner of Utah. The name came from a bargain struck in nineteen fourteen with a wealthy easterner named Thomas Bicknell, who offered a gift of one thousand books to any Utah town willing to adopt his last name. Two towns accepted the challenge, and the situation required creative diplomacy.

Thurber, a town to the northwest, agreed to become Bicknell. Grayson, which is what Blanding was called at the time, agreed instead to take Bicknell's wife's maiden name. That name was Blanding.

Grayson had been named for Nellie Grayson Lyman, wife of an early settler, and the community had grown from the arrival of Latter-day Saint families who came to farm the high desert beginning in nineteen oh five. What the town lacked was a library. The Bicknell deal solved that.

The town got five hundred books, and the town got a name with no particular local meaning but with a certain quiet dignity. The original name Grayson is still remembered in local histories, and the story of the library exchange has become a piece of Utah lore, repeated in histories of the state and used to explain why two Utah towns bear the name of one man and his wife. Books changed the name of this place. That is not the usual way a frontier town picks its identity.