Alpine has a stone watchtower in a city park that was built to protect one family. John Rowe Moyle put it up near his house in the 1860s to watch for trouble during the Black Hawk War, and the attack it was meant for never came. Its National Register nomination calls it the only known structure of its kind in Utah. That tower, and the stone meetinghouse a mile away on Main Street, are most of what survives of a town that stayed under a thousand people for more than a hundred years after it was founded, and then filled with large houses on the bench in a single generation.
Mountainville, 1850
The ground under Alpine was Ute hunting country before it was anyone's farm, as the Moyle House nomination notes. Settlers sent by Brigham Young first came into the area in 1849. They settled the next year.
In September 1850, the family of William Wordsworth and six others built on the northwest side of a knoll at the far north end of Utah Valley, according to a history published in Alpine's city newsletter in 2022. They started six homes, but it was late in the season, and they spent the winter in wagons and dugouts. The 1850 census, taken that year, counted 29 people at the place they called Mountainville, fourteen male and fifteen female, aged one to sixty. The name came from the mountains that rise on the north and east sides of the site.
The first winter thinned them out. The Moyle House nomination says ten families came through it and six left by spring 1851. History To Go, the state's history site, says the first harvest was poor, and that crickets and grasshoppers then damaged crops for about a decade starting in 1854. Families moved in and out, and the fear of conflict with the Utes kept others away. Still, the ones who stayed built a one-room log schoolhouse and organized a church branch within a year, and by 1857 about forty families lived there.
Three forts in three years
The Walker War broke out near Springville in July 1853, and Brigham Young told settlers across central Utah to gather behind walls. Mountainville built walls, then bigger walls.
A Daughters of Utah Pioneers marker in Legacy Park, near City Hall, lists the sequence. In 1853 came Fort Wordsworth, named for the founding family, an 8-foot mud wall around a square 33 rods on a side. In 1854 came Fort Mountainville, with a 12-foot wall enclosing homes for 25 families. In 1855 came the main fort, a 10-acre square with walls 14 feet high, a ditch running inside them, and north and south gates spanning what is now Main Street. The Moyle House nomination tells the same story more briefly: after the Walker War, Brigham Young advised a fort of about ten acres, and a mud wall was added the following year.
The fort shaped the town the way forts shaped most early Utah settlements. Main Street runs through what were its gates.
Alpine, 1855
In 1855 the settlement received a city charter, and with it a new name. History To Go dates both to that year.
The usual explanation for the name is that Brigham Young visited and remarked that the setting reminded him of the Swiss Alps. That is how an Alpine City staff member told it to BYU's student newspaper in 2000, and it is the story the town repeats. We did not find a contemporary record of the remark, so it is best understood as tradition. The fit is obvious either way: Alpine sits higher on the bench and deeper into the mountains than any other town in the valley.
The meetinghouse on Main Street
In 1857 the settlers started the building that still anchors the town. Local builders James R. Moyle and Thomas J. McCullough directed the masons, and the limestone came from quarries in Box Elder and Wordsworth canyons. According to its National Register nomination, written in 1990 by Thomas Carter of the Utah State Historical Society, most residents paid for it with their labor rather than money. It took six years. Brigham Young dedicated it in 1863, and in 1867 the outside was plastered and scored to look like cut stone.
It is a small building, 21 by 32 feet, and it did a little of everything. It was the church, the dance hall, the social center and the school, until a state-funded school was built around 1900. From 1872 to 1936 it was Alpine City Hall. The nomination counts it among about twenty first-phase Latter-day Saint meetinghouses still standing in Utah, and notes that stone was unusual for these early buildings, most of which were log or adobe. Since 1936 it has belonged to the Mountainville Camp of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, who keep it as a relic hall.
John Moyle's tower
John Rowe Moyle was an English stonemason who joined the church in Millbrook, England, in 1851, and five years later crossed the plains to Utah with a handcart company, according to a 2017 Deseret News history. His National Register nomination says he worked on the Salt Lake Temple for nearly two years, married a second wife, Mary Ann Williams, in 1858, and moved to Alpine that year. He started with a dugout, then built a stone hall-and-parlor house within about two years.
The Deseret News account adds the detail that made him famous in Latter-day Saint storytelling. Called as a stonecutter on the temple, he walked the 22 miles from Alpine to Salt Lake City each week because his only horse was needed on the farm. After an accident cost him the lower part of a leg, he carved himself a wooden one with a movable ankle and went back to walking. He carved "Holiness to the Lord" on the temple's center east tower and died in 1889, before it was finished.
Moyle also built a stone tower near the house, in two stages. The nomination dates it to about 1860 to 1866 and says it was meant to watch for and defend against attack during the Black Hawk War of 1865 to 1868. The attack it was built for never came. The tower was partly rebuilt in 1951 and more fully restored in 1976, and his son Joseph added a Craftsman-style stone addition to the house in 1917. A descendant later gave the farm and its buildings to Alpine, and the city made it a park.
For the wider story of the Walker and Black Hawk wars, and the Timpanogos and Ute side of them, read the Timpanogos people of Utah Valley.
A small town for a long time
After the wars, Alpine settled into a long, quiet century. History To Go says residents planted many poplar trees in the 1860s; most had died by the late 1920s and were replaced. The 2022 city newsletter describes about 500 people in the first fifty years, then a stretch of more than forty years in which the town grew by about 65 people. Farming and cattle, the reasons the founders had come, carried the economy.
The twentieth century brought a few hard years. History To Go records that older buildings fell into disrepair in the 1940s, and that a turkey farm near the town's main water supply created a health hazard after turkeys died from a mold on scrub oak and dust from the farm affected residents. The city banned poultry raising there and bought the land in 1946.
In 1965, with 904 residents, Alpine answered Lady Bird Johnson's national "Clean Up, Paint Up, Fix Up" campaign by mending fences and hauling away debris across town. It won a county award of merit and a national distinguished achievement award for the effort.
Then the bench filled in
The same History To Go account says the city council of the 1960s struggled with newcomers who had moved to Alpine partly to escape ordinances in their old towns. It was an early sign of what was coming. Alpine had about 900 people in 1962 and close to 3,000 by 1986, according to the newsletter. The federal census counted 7,146 in 2000, 9,555 in 2010 and 10,251 in 2020. Most of the houses on the bench today are from that last half century, and the old fort town around Main Street is a small core in a much larger city. Our living in Alpine guide describes the city it became.
The city's summer celebration, Alpine Days, includes relic hall tours as part of the week.
See it today
Pioneer Relic Hall, 50 North Main Street, next to Alpine City Hall. The 1857 to 1863 stone meetinghouse, now the Daughters of Utah Pioneers museum. Google's listing in October 2026 shows weekday hours with City Hall, but a recent visitor review says tours must be scheduled, so call 801-756-3676 to arrange one. It is open for tours on the final Saturday of Alpine Days in summer.
Legacy Park, near City Hall on Main Street. The DUP Fort Mountainville marker stands here; the marker places the fort's southwest corner eight rods (about 130 feet) to its west.
Moyle Park, 606 East 770 North. John Moyle's stone house, the dugout or root cellar from about 1858 to 1860, and the Indian Tower, on about two and a half acres that the city runs as a park. A historical marker on site tells the tower's story.
Alpine Cemetery. John Rowe Moyle is buried here, with a monument and bust in his honor.
The Alpine Loop. The scenic byway up American Fork Canyon is a short drive from town and the natural next stop. Our Alpine Loop guide covers the drive.
Alpine's neighbors to the south have a much younger story, told in a short history of Highland and Cedar Hills. For the older town down the hill, read a short history of American Fork.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Sources
The facts in this guide were checked against these sources. Hours, fees and rules change, so confirm anything time-sensitive with the source before you go. How we make Provo.com.
- Utah Division of State History, History To Go: Alpine, Utah Division of State History, History To Go. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Alpine Newsline, March 2022 (City Council history message), Alpine City. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Moyle House and Indian Tower, National Register nomination, National Park Service. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Alpine LDS Church Meetinghouse (Pioneer Relic Hall), National Register nomination, National Park Service. Checked October 20, 2026.
- The Walker War, Utah Division of State History, History To Go. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Historic Pioneer Relic Hall listing, Google Places. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Picturing history: Moyle Park, Alpine, Utah, Deseret News. Checked October 20, 2026.
- What's in a name? Naming the settlements in Utah County, The Daily Universe (BYU). Checked October 20, 2026.
- Fort Mountainville, DUP marker 145 (photograph and transcription), JacobBarlow.com. Checked October 20, 2026.
- 2020, 2010 and 2000 Decennial Census redistricting data (P1), U.S. Census Bureau via USAFacts connector. Checked October 20, 2026.
