American Fork spent seven years being called something else, and the reason it stopped is one of the more ordinary problems in Utah history: the mail kept going to the wrong place.
That is a small story, but it points at a larger one. American Fork is among the oldest cities in Utah County and for a long stretch it was among the more commercially significant, and yet almost everything it is known for now — the canyon, the cave, the hospital, the freeway exit — attaches to it rather than originating in it. It is a town whose history is mostly about being the practical gateway to somewhere else, and which built a genuinely distinctive civic culture anyway.
The creek had the name first
Before there was a settlement there was a stream, and before the stream had settlers on it, it had a name. Fur trappers worked the Rocky Mountain region hard in the early nineteenth century, and Utah Lake and the rivers feeding it were known to them. Those rivers were called forks: Timpanogos for what is now the Provo River, then Spanish Fork, then American Fork.
Why that particular fork was the American one is not settled and the honest answer is that nobody knows. The most commonly given explanation is that American trappers claimed and worked the creek in the fur era and the name distinguished them from the Spanish-associated drainage to the south. A competing local account says gold-seekers bound for California named it in 1849, meaning to come back if things did not work out. A third simply holds that it needed a name that was not Spanish Fork. The Utah History Encyclopedia treats the trapper explanation as most likely and leaves it there, which is about the right level of confidence.
What is certain is the direction of the naming. The first settlers took the name of the stream for their settlement, not the other way round.
1850: four men on their way somewhere else
In the summer of 1850, Arza Adams and his son Nathan, along with Stephen Chipman and his son William Henry, were headed to Fort Provo to trade and camped overnight near American Fork Creek. The cottonwoods along the water and the meadows running down toward Utah Lake looked like good ground for cattle and sheep. They spent some time looking around, and Nathan Adams said he thought he would like to live there.
Heber C. Kimball was present at the meeting where the survey was arranged and asked for a tract adjoining theirs to be surveyed for him. Ira Eldredge ran the first survey.
Through the late months of 1850 and into the spring of 1851, more settlers came. Among them was Leonard E. Harrington, who arrived as Kimball's agent and became the most consequential figure in the town's first half-century. Matthew Caldwell, a veteran of the Mormon Battalion, arrived in the fall of 1850 with his wife, three children and a herd of cattle, having been directed to American Fork by Brigham Young. Caldwell is believed to have built the first house, cutting the logs near Fort Provo, and other log houses went up quickly before winter.
For a time the place was known as McArthursville — the spellings vary, and Arthursville turns up too. The name almost certainly came from Duncan McArthur, who farmed between American Fork and Pleasant Grove and whose name also attached to the McArthur irrigation ditch.
Lake City, 1852 to 1860
The first settlers had scattered along the creek rather than clustering, and when the townsite was finally surveyed only a few of them moved onto the town lots. That changed in stages.
At a conference held in the settlement on September 18, 1852, it was decided to lay out a proper city on American Fork Creek and to call it Lake City. Incorporation followed by legislative act on June 4, 1853.
The fort came the same year and for a specific reason. In 1853 General Daniel H. Wells of the Nauvoo Legion ordered that forts be built to protect settlers if trouble broke out with the Ute. On July 23 a meeting was held in the schoolhouse, with Parley P. Pratt and Lorenzo Snow present to counsel the residents, and the people agreed unanimously to begin work immediately. That decision is what finally consolidated a strung-out creekside settlement into a town, and the walled compact laid the grid that downtown American Fork still uses.
Lake City lasted until 1860, when the charter was amended and the name went back to American Fork. Two reasons are given and they are not in conflict: the residents wanted it, and mail addressed to Lake City kept getting tangled with Salt Lake City. Utah in the 1850s had a lot of new place names and a thin postal system, and a town that shared three syllables with the territorial capital was going to lose that argument eventually.
The school
American Fork's proudest claim is that it opened the first free public school in Utah — free meaning supported by a tax levy rather than by subscription, donation and produce, which is how territorial schools had generally been paid for. Teachers before this were often paid in goods, and classes were commonly held in ward buildings.
The claim is well founded. The problem is the year, and it is worth laying out plainly rather than picking one.
The historical marker text is the most specific: the Territorial Legislature authorized a school tax in February 1866; Mayor Leonard E. Harrington called a meeting at which a majority of American Fork citizens approved the plan; and the school opened in November 1867 with Joseph B. Forbes, E. A. Henroid, Editha Anderson and Elizabeth G. Griffith teaching, and William Greenwood, William Paxman and James W. Preston as trustees. The city's own historic walking tour, describing a Daughters of Utah Pioneers marker at Robinson Park, gives the year as 1868. A Deseret News roundup of Utah firsts says the first free public school opened in American Fork in 1866. An article in the Utah Historical Quarterly says 1869.
Four sources, four years, and two of the four are American Fork's own materials disagreeing with each other. The likeliest reconciliation is that people are dating different events in the same sequence — the enabling legislation, the vote, the opening, and the first fully tax-funded year are all separate moments and any of them could reasonably be called the beginning. The substance is not in doubt.
Harrington's role went beyond calling the meeting. As a territorial legislator he sponsored the bill that gave Utah communities the right to fund free public schools by taxation, which is why the school later built on North Center Street carries his name. Joseph B. Forbes, who had been born in Bangor, Maine, educated in Boston and had sailed as far as Calcutta before he ended up teaching in Utah, was asked by Harrington to organize the schools and did — including separating students into grades, which was not then standard. Forbes taught in American Fork for forty-six years.
The story did not end tidily. The same Utah Historical Quarterly account notes that within a few years a separate school was raised in American Fork by residents outside the dominant faith, because the new public school was still effectively under Latter-day Saint control. Territory-wide free public schooling remained contested until 1890. American Fork was first, and being first did not settle the underlying argument.
Harrington School itself, at 50 North Center Street, was built in 1903 with a matching addition in 1934 — the original probably by Richard C. Watkins, then State Architect of Schools, and the addition by the Provo architect Joseph Nelson. It went on the National Register in 1993 and survives as the best example of early educational architecture in the city.
Silver, and a railroad that lasted six years
After silver was found in Little Cottonwood Canyon in the late 1860s, prospectors crossed the ridge south and staked claims in American Fork Canyon. The American Fork Mining District was organized in July 1870. The largest operation, the Miller Hill mine, developed fast enough that in 1871 it was bought for $120,000 by the Aspinwall Steamship Company of New York.
Getting ore out of a narrow canyon by wagon was the bottleneck, so the mine's officers organized the American Fork Railroad on April 3, 1872 — a narrow-gauge line intended to run from a connection with the Utah Southern at American Fork City up into the canyon. Ground was broken in May.
Everything about the build was awkward. The first six miles across the flat were easy; the canyon was narrow, crooked and prone to flooding, and the river had to be bridged sixteen times in the first five miles. The line climbed about 1,900 feet at a ruling grade near six percent, which is severe. And the locomotive arrived in Salt Lake City in July 1872 to find that the Utah Southern had barely got past Sandy, so the engine was moved by leapfrogging: three sections of temporary track laid ahead, three teams of oxen hauling the engine to the end of them, then the rearmost sections pulled up and relaid in front. It took seven days to get from Draper to American Fork.
The first test run was on August 20, 1872. The line was finished on November 26 at an end-of-track called Deer Creek, also known as Silver Lake City, which is roughly where Tibble Fork Reservoir sits today. The final four miles up to the Sultana smelter were graded but never tracked, having been judged too steep, so ore came down to the railhead by wagon. Because the standard gauge did not reach American Fork City until 1873, the connection was made temporarily at Lehi — which is how the neighboring town briefly became the junction for American Fork's mining boom.
Then the winter closed in. Operations shut down for the season, and a diphtheria epidemic swept through, killing a number of people including eleven children, who were buried in a small cemetery that became known as Graveyard Flat.
The higher-grade ore was largely worked out between 1874 and 1876. To cover its costs the railroad started running sightseeing excursions up the canyon, which is an early and slightly poignant version of what the canyon does for a living now. The rails came out in 1878 and went to the Utah and Pleasant Valley line. Commenting on the removal, the Deseret Evening News judged that the canyon "is not likely to be visited in future, to any extent, by tourists."
That is one of the worst predictions in Utah history. American Fork Canyon is now among the most heavily used recreation corridors in northern Utah, with a seasonal closure on the upper road, a cave in the National Monument above it, and traffic on a summer afternoon that would astonish the man who wrote the sentence.
The long agricultural middle
Between the rails coming out in 1878 and the freeway going in, American Fork spent roughly seventy years being a farm town, and almost nothing about that period makes it into short histories because nothing about it was dramatic. It is worth a paragraph anyway, because it is when most of what the city looks like was actually built.
It had begun as a ranching community and it grew more slowly than Provo to the south. Over time the mix broadened into the standard northern Utah County pattern: fruit, vegetables, grain and poultry, traded through a Main Street that had been laid out for exactly that. The commercial buildings on that street were built to be businesses rather than converted into them later, which is why downtown American Fork still reads as a real downtown while newer cities nearby have retail without a center.
The poultry economy left a fingerprint most residents never notice. Before it settled on Steel Days, the city's summer celebration went through a stretch as Poultry Day — a town naming its biggest annual party after the thing that paid for it, exactly as Payson did with onions and Pleasant Grove with strawberries. When the name changed to Steel in the mid-1940s, that was not a whim. It was a town accurately reporting that its paychecks had moved from the coop to the mill.
The civic investment through those decades was steady rather than showy. The Forbes School went up in 1892, Harrington School in 1903 with its matching wing in 1934, and the symphony, ballet and arts institutions that still make the city's cultural footprint outsized for its population all trace to a community that had decided early, in the school fight of the 1860s, that this sort of thing was worth taxing itself for.
Steel Days, and a name that describes a region
The city's summer celebration is Steel Days, and it is the longest city celebration in Utah Valley. The name is from the mid-1940s and refers to the steel industry that defined the area's twentieth century, but the event is far older than the name — it began as Timber Day around 1865, held in a grove known as The Timbers, and passed through stints as Liberty Day and even Poultry Day before settling.
The name deserves one clarification, because reference works get it wrong in both directions. The great wartime steelworks of Utah County was Geneva, built on the west side of Orem during the Second World War and now largely within Vineyard, and it employed people from every town in the north county including this one. Some general reference sources attach Geneva to American Fork outright, which is not accurate. Steel Days names the economy that people here worked in, not a plant that stood here.
Old town, fast county
American Fork today is a settled city of roughly eleven square miles being pressed on all sides by places that are still being built from raw ground. The 2020 census counted 33,337 people. It has a historic downtown grid laid out for walking, a mature tree canopy, and a civic culture unusually dense for its size — a symphony, a regional ballet, an arts foundation, a marching band with state titles. It sits on I-15 with a FrontRunner station, which puts both the Silicon Slopes corridor and Salt Lake within a workable commute.
What it does not have is a formal neighborhood structure. Provo runs a chartered neighborhood program; American Fork has subdivision names, landmark geography and informal shorthand, and people orient by the hospital, the canyon, the station and downtown. That is a survival of the original settlement pattern — a town that grew along a creek and around a fort rather than being planned outward from a center.
The through-line, if there is one, is that American Fork keeps being the practical access point for something larger than itself: the canyon mines, then the cave and the recreation corridor, then the freeway and the rail station. The city that gave up its own name to stop confusing the post office has spent a hundred and seventy years being the door to somewhere.
For the present-day city, see our guides to living in American Fork and things to do in American Fork. For the neighbors over the same century, read a short history of Lehi, a short history of Orem and a short history of Provo.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is American Fork called American Fork?
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