Drive west out of Utah Valley over the low ridge at the north end of Utah Lake and the landscape changes character completely. The benches and the canyon mouths drop away behind you, the mountains step back, and you come out into the Cedar Valley — a wide, dry, sagebrush basin that looks and feels like the Great Basin rather than the Wasatch Front, because that is essentially what it is.
Two incorporated towns sit out here at the western edge of Utah County. Between them they hold fewer than six hundred people. And one of them, for about three years, was attached to the largest military installation in the United States.
The two smallest towns in the county
Fairfield had 160 residents at the 2020 census. Cedar Fort, four and a half miles up State Route 73, had 427. Those are the two smallest incorporated communities in Utah County, and it is worth saying plainly because the claim is very widely made about somewhere else.
Goshen, down at the southern end of the county, is frequently described as Utah County's smallest town on the strength of its 978 residents. It is not; it is roughly six times the size of Fairfield. The confusion is understandable — Goshen appears on lists of the county's small farming communities and Fairfield and Cedar Fort usually do not appear on any list at all, because they sit on the wrong side of the lake from everything the county is known for.
A word of warning about the population figures themselves, because they are a trap in towns this small. Search for Cedar Fort's population and you will find numbers ranging from about 150 to about 430, all of them presented with equal confidence. They are measuring different things. The 427 is a decennial census count — an attempted full enumeration. The much lower figures come from the American Community Survey, which is a rolling sample, and in a town of a few hundred people a sample-based estimate carries a margin of error wide enough to swallow the answer. For places this small, the decennial count is the number worth quoting and the survey estimates are close to noise.
Cedar Fort was settled in 1852 and takes its name from the juniper trees that early settlers, like most Americans of the period, called cedars. It was incorporated on 17 May 1965, unusually late, and it is geographically enormous for its population — about 21.4 square miles, which makes it one of the largest municipalities in Utah County by land area and one of the smallest by any other measure. Elevation runs around 5,351 feet, noticeably higher than the Utah Valley floor.
Fairfield was founded in 1855 by John Carson, his four brothers and a handful of others, and for its first few years it went by the distinctly less dignified name of Frogtown. The change to Fairfield came in 1861. Exactly why is contested: Wikipedia and most historical summaries attribute it straightforwardly to Amos Fielding, one of the settlers, while Utah's own History To Go site offers a hybrid explanation — "fair" for the view, "field" for Fielding. Both readings are in circulation and neither is provably wrong, so we note both rather than pick.
Fairfield incorporated far later still, in 2004, and did so defensively: the stated motivation was concern about growth spilling over from surrounding communities and a wish to keep the town's rural, farming character. Given what Eagle Mountain and Saratoga Springs have done to the Cedar Valley since, that looks like a well-timed decision.
The county that disappeared
Here is a fact almost nobody in Utah County knows: Cedar Fort used to be a county seat.
On 5 January 1856 the Utah Territorial Legislature carved Cedar County out of the western portion of Utah County, named it for the same juniper trees, and made Cedar Fort — then a settlement four years old — its seat of government. Allen Weeks, one of the town's first settlers and its bishop, served as the first probate judge from 1857, followed by Zerubbabel Snow from 1859.
Cedar County lasted six years. On 17 January 1862 the legislature dissolved it and folded the land back into Utah County, and the practical reasons were the ones you would guess: too few people, too little administrative capacity, and a much better-established county government within reach on the other side of the lake.
The afterlife of that decision is the interesting part. The land that made up Cedar County is now home to Lehi, Eagle Mountain, Saratoga Springs and Fairfield — which is to say that a jurisdiction dissolved in 1862 for lack of population now contains several of the fastest-growing cities in the United States. Cedar Fort, its former capital, has 427 people.
Camp Floyd: a third of the U.S. Army, in a valley nobody visits
In 1857 President James Buchanan, acting on reports that the Latter-day Saints in Utah Territory were in open rebellion against federal authority, dispatched an expedition to put it down. There was no rebellion. No battle was fought in Utah, and the confrontation now known as the Utah War ended in negotiation.
The army arrived anyway, and in July 1858 it built Camp Floyd in the Cedar Valley near Fairfield, under the command of Brigadier General Albert Sidney Johnston. The numbers are what make this remarkable. Utah State Parks puts the force at 3,500 troops — nearly one-third of the entire United States Army at the time — housed in roughly 400 buildings. At its height, Camp Floyd was the largest military installation in the United States, and it was in a sagebrush basin west of Utah Lake.
The camp took its name from John B. Floyd, then Secretary of War. When Floyd resigned in December 1860 the post was hurriedly renamed Fort Crittenden, which is why older sources use both names for the same place.
What the state park says about why it happened
Most accounts of the Utah War treat it as a straightforward federal-versus-territory dispute. The interpretation offered by Utah State Parks on its own Camp Floyd page is considerably more pointed, and it is worth knowing that this is the state's own reading rather than a revisionist one: the expedition is presented as a political diversion, an attempt by both northern and southern interests to turn national attention away from states' rights and slavery and toward the "Mormon problem" and polygamy. The park's text notes that Buchanan believed the two parties could unite over Utah, and that southern Democrats — Floyd among them — saw the additional benefit of routing enormous government contracts to southern businessmen and draining the Treasury.
It is unusual for a state park to editorialize that hard about the government that built the site it interprets. Whether or not you find the argument persuasive, the money involved is a matter of record.
The money
The army spent nearly $200,000 building Camp Floyd, in 1858 dollars, in a valley whose economy to that point had been subsistence farming. Then in 1861 the troops were recalled east for the Civil War, and the army sold roughly $4,000,000 of surplus for a few cents on the dollar before leaving. Nearly every building the army had put up was dismantled, sold or destroyed.
That fire sale is the single largest economic event in the history of this corner of the state, and its beneficiaries were the local settlers who turned up with wagons.
The men who were there
The roster of officers who passed through the Utah campaign reads, in the state park's own phrase, like a who's-who of Civil War generals — Johnston, Buford, Reynolds, Bee and others. Within a few years of sharing a camp in the Cedar Valley, those men were killing each other: Albert Sidney Johnston died commanding Confederate forces at Shiloh, Barnard Bee was killed at First Bull Run shortly after coining the nickname "Stonewall," and John Reynolds was shot dead on the first day of Gettysburg while John Buford's cavalry held the ground that made the Union position there possible.
They were all, briefly, stationed in a valley you can drive to from Provo in about an hour.
What actually survives, and what to see
Camp Floyd State Park Museum is at 69 West Main Street, Fairfield, and the park opened to the public in 1964. Park elevation is 4,877 feet. Four things are worth your time.
The Commissary Building is the only Camp Floyd structure still standing. Soldiers built it in 1858 to hold military equipment and provisions; it was sold at auction to the Beardshall family in 1861 when the army pulled out, moved to its present site, and lived in as a family home. It now houses the museum.
The Stagecoach Inn sits across the street — a two-story adobe and frame hotel built by John Carson in 1858, the same man who founded the town. It was the first stop south of Salt Lake City on the Overland Stage Route and a stop on the Pony Express route, and it was restored from near-ruin in June 1959. The state park's own description of it is drier than any tourist copy would dare: the furnishings indicate hospitality that was "not elegant, but comfortable."
It also supplies the detail that tells you what Fairfield was actually like during the boom. The inn was one of the few respectable establishments in town, against seventeen saloons serving the military population. Latter-day Saints in Utah County took to calling the place the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Great Basin, and by the state historical society's account soldiers themselves thought it prudent to go armed there.
The Fairfield District Schoolhouse was built in 1898 with federal money that came to Utah on statehood in 1896, and it is the sleeper attraction here — see below. It closed in 1937, when local students began being bused to Lehi, and it is now fully restored, used for park programs and open at special events.
The Camp Floyd Cemetery was established in 1858 and abandoned three years later. A War Department monument went up in 1913, and in 1960 the American Legion installed a metal fence and placed granite markers. Then, in 2009, ground-penetrating radar established where the burials actually are — and it turned out the markers were not over them. New headstones were placed in 2011 to match the real locations, and they read simply "Unknown," because moving the stones to the right places did not recover the identities that went with them. Forty-nine years of visitors had been standing in the wrong spots.
The architect who connects Fairfield to Payson and Provo
The Fairfield schoolhouse is the best building in either town, and the reason is a name that turns up all over Utah Valley without most people noticing: Richard C. Watkins.
Watkins was born in Bristol, England in 1858, trained under Richard K.A. Kletting in Salt Lake City, came to Provo in 1890 as a construction supervisor and opened his own firm in 1892. Over the following decades he designed more than 240 schools across the intermountain west and served as architect for Utah State Schools from 1912 to 1920, becoming — in the standard assessment — the most prominent architect south of Salt Lake City.
His work is a map of this county. The Fairfield District School (1898). Maeser Elementary in Provo (1898). The Knight Block (1900) and the Hines Mansion (1895), both in Provo. And, three years after Fairfield, the Peteetneet School in Payson (1901–1902), which is now that city's museum.
So the little two-color brick schoolhouse in a town of 160 people and the grand Victorian pile on the hill in Payson are by the same hand, four years apart. Nobody puts those two buildings in the same sentence, and they belong there.
Cedar Fort has a schoolhouse of its own worth a look, too: the Cedar Fort School, built in 1909, is on the National Register and is described in its listing as the only remaining two-room schoolhouse in Utah County.
How big did Fairfield actually get? Two state sources disagree
The boom population is the most-quoted number about Fairfield, and two arms of Utah state government publish different figures.
Utah State Parks says the population of Camp Floyd and Fairfield together reached 7,000, making it the third-largest city in the territory. Utah History To Go, published by the Utah State Historical Society, says Fairfield's population reached about ten thousand.
We are not going to resolve that, and neither should anyone else without new evidence. But the mechanism behind the spread is visible, because the History To Go page lists its sources — and alongside a proper county history by Richard Neitzel Holzapfel it cites the town's own website and a travel-listicle article. A round number that passes through popular retellings tends to grow, and this is what that looks like from the inside.
Treat "over seven thousand" as the defensible floor and note that higher figures circulate. The underlying point survives either way: a settlement that had perhaps a few dozen families in 1857 became one of the largest places in Utah Territory within a year, and was gone again within four.
Two smaller cautions while we are here. The History To Go page renders the general's name as "Johnson" twice; it was Johnston, Albert Sidney. And its description of the camp as "across the river from Fairfield" is generous — the Cedar Valley has creeks, not rivers.
Practical notes for a visit
Getting there. From Provo, the usual route is north on I-15 and then west on SR-73 through Lehi and Eagle Mountain, which takes roughly an hour depending on where in Eagle Mountain the traffic decides to sit. Cedar Fort comes first; Fairfield is four and a half miles further south.
Hours matter more than usual here. Camp Floyd State Park Museum runs Monday to Saturday, 9am to 5pm, and is closed on Sundays — which puts it firmly in the category of Utah Valley destinations that a Sunday day trip cannot include, along with a good deal else in the valley. It also closes on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day. Fees change periodically; check the park's fees page rather than trusting a figure from a review.
There is nothing else out there. Neither town has meaningful commercial development — no restaurants worth driving for, no fuel you should count on. Eat and fill up in Eagle Mountain or Lehi on the way through. This is genuinely not a criticism; it is the reason the valley still looks the way it does.
Go in shoulder season if you can. The Cedar Valley is high, dry and exposed, with recorded summer highs above 100°F and winter lows below −30°F. Spring and fall are considerably more pleasant for walking a cemetery and an unshaded parade ground. As of August 2026 the park was also under Stage 2 fire restrictions, which is normal for a dry Utah summer and worth checking before any trip that involves cooking.
Time it with an event if you can. The town holds an annual Civil War encampment reenactment, and the park runs a summer concert series and school programs in the schoolhouse.
Where these two fit
Cedar Fort and Fairfield complete the map of incorporated Utah County. Every other municipality in the county has a story about growth — how fast, how much, what it cost. These two have the opposite story: a valley that boomed harder and faster than anywhere else in territorial Utah, then emptied out so completely that a hundred and sixty years later the town at the center of it has 160 people.
For the other end of the county's small-town spectrum, our guide to Utah County's small towns covers Elk Ridge, Woodland Hills, Genola and Goshen. For the two big Cedar Valley cities that now surround these towns, see Eagle Mountain and Saratoga Springs, and for how the school district split affects all four communities, our guide to the Alpine split lays out which cities go where. If you are weighing the county as a whole, the moving to Provo guide covers the fundamentals.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where are Cedar Fort and Fairfield, Utah?
What is the smallest town in Utah County?
What was Camp Floyd?
Can you visit Camp Floyd today?
Was the Stagecoach Inn a real Pony Express stop?
Was Cedar Fort ever a county seat?
Which school district are Cedar Fort and Fairfield in?
Is it worth driving out there from Provo?