The history of Pleasant Grove

Militia ran Timpanogos down in a freezing creek

Thirty-five men rode out under orders from Brigham Young. They found a band of Battle Creek massacre people camped near a stream a few miles northeast of here. The Timpanogos ran for the water. The creek was running with snowmelt, cold enough to slow anyone who tried to cross it. The militia caught them in the current and shot four of them dead.

The canyon where it happened kept the name Battle Creek afterward. So did the settlement that went up close by within months, on the same stretch of ground the militia had just cleared. It carried that name for only a short time before settlers renamed it Pleasant Grove, the name that stuck.

A dugout gave the Fugal family their first home

The settlement that replaced Battle Creek grew fast along the benchland below the mountains. By 1850 it was carrying the name Pleasant Grove in the territorial record. Families broke ground on farms. They dug the first shelters straight into the hillside. The Fugal Dugout House did this a few blocks from here in 1869. Thirteen years later they built a stone house over the top of it.

The town's early dead went into a plot known simply as the Pioneer Cemetery. It was used from 1851 until 1866. Then it was abandoned and left behind. Bodies never moved out of it stayed in the ground. A marker went up there in 1941. The Daughters of Utah Pioneers placed it. It was the only thing left to say the burial ground was ever there at all.

A stone house was built over a dugout's hole

The stone house went up over the dugout instead of beside it. The Fugal family kept the hole in the hillside as its foundation. They built permanent walls on top. It stands roughly 280 feet from where you are now. It is the only known example in Utah of a dugout used that way. Nobody dug a new cellar or cleared a new lot. They built straight down into what was already there.

A cemetery closed and its dead stayed put

The Pioneer Cemetery took burials for fifteen years before it was left to go quiet. No one moved the bodies out when it closed. They are still under the grass today, wherever the grass happens to be. The Daughters of Utah Pioneers came back in 1941. They put up the only marker the site has ever had. This was decades after the last funeral held there.

One forge kept hammering after two others quit

Three blacksmith shops once worked this stretch of Pleasant Grove. Two of them gave up the forge for the garage as cars replaced horses. The Fugal Blacksmith Shop did not. Built in 1903 about 800 feet from here, it kept hammering iron as the only smithy left in town from 1926 until 1962. Trade outlived its competitors by nearly forty years before it, too, closed.

A farmland lot became a platted suburban deed

A private buyer platted the lot under this house as part of Little Mike Estates in 2008. Three years later, in January 2011, he signed it over by warranty deed to a private buyer. The paperwork is ordinary: a subdivision plat, a sale, a name change on a county record. It is the newest transaction on ground that has carried a dugout, a burial plot, and a killing before it ever carried a deed.