The farm town that sent a boy to the big leagues
Goshen, Utah was founded in 1857 by Mormon pioneers who named it after a town in Connecticut, building a farming community on the dry southern edge of Utah Lake's basin. It later became known as the birthplace of major league pitcher Kent Peterson, born there in 1925, the town's one widely named claim to fame.
Pioneers founded a farming town beside Utah Lake
Goshen, Utah began in 1857, when a company of Mormon pioneers broke ground here and named their new settlement after a town in Connecticut. The dead of that founding generation were laid in Goshen City Cemetery, opened in 1852, a little over a mile from where you stand now. It is still the town's working burial ground today. Goshen grew slowly. It stayed what it was built to be: a farming community on the edge of Utah Lake's dry southern basin. Families raised crops and livestock on land carved out of sagebrush and salt flat. The town never got big. Even in 2020 its population stood at 978.
A left-handed boy from Goshen reached the majors
In 1925, a boy named Kent Peterson (baseball) was born in Goshen. He grew up left-handed in a town built on farming and faith, a long way from any big league ballpark. He made it anyway. Peterson pitched for the Cincinnati Reds and later the Philadelphia Phillies, carrying the name of this small Utah County town onto major league rosters. He died in 1995, seventy years after he was born on this ground. Goshen still names him as its one notable person. He was the local boy who left the farm town behind for a pitcher's mound in the big leagues.
A militia killed four or five Ute people nearby
Before Goshen had a name, its ground was already a battleground. The Walker War pitted Mormon settlers against Ute bands led by Chief Walkara. A Utah County militia unit attacked a Ute camp near the site of the future town. Four or five people died. The killing was a reprisal, part of a cycle of raids and retaliation that ran through Utah Valley in 1853 and into 1854. The farms that later grew here rose on ground that had already seen one massacre before a single Mormon family broke sod.
The town moved uphill and left some graves behind
The first settlers did not build where you stand. They built two miles north, at a place called Lower Goshen. They raised a fort there. They lived in dugouts and log shelters against the cold. They buried their dead there too. Around 1868, the town moved to higher, drier ground, the site that became modern Goshen. Some burials moved with it, carried to the New Goshen Cemetery. Nobody kept a full record of whose graves were moved and whose were left behind. The town you're standing in is the second Goshen. The first one, and some of its dead, stayed where they'd been put.
An attack on Goshen was stopped before it began
Nine years after the Walker War killings, Goshen faced another attack. On June 13, 1863, a group of Indians from Salt Creek in Juab Valley came to the town. They were led by a man named Shaocook. They were armed with guns, bows and arrows. The record says only that the attempt was stopped. No battle followed, no casualties are named. It stands as the last echo of the violence that had shadowed Goshen's founding years, a threat that passed without becoming another killing.
A platted lot has stood empty for decades
A mile or so from the old cemetery ground, a 1.8-acre lot was platted in 1984 as Lot 1, Block 6 of the Whites Addition subdivision. A private buyer held it for three decades, from 1984 to 2015. A private buyer took title in 2016. Today the county lists it as vacant land, still held by a private owner. No house was ever built on it. The town's one claim to fame left the farm for a pitcher's mound seventy years before this lot was ever drawn on a plat map. The lot sits empty today.
Farmland, old graves, and one empty lot still make up the town Kent Peterson left behind.
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