Lindon's story has no fort, no town square and no founding company of its own. It began as a line of farmhouses along the road south of Pleasant Grove, so strung out that people called it Stringtown. It took its name from a tree where the mail was left. And when it finally became a town in 1924, the reason on paper was not pride or independence but a bond for drinking water.
That makes Lindon's history quieter than its neighbors', and more about ordinary rural life. It also makes it one of the better-documented small towns in the valley, because the city has put real work into recording its own houses.
A road before a town
The road came first. The wagon route between the Pleasant Grove fort and the settlements to the south ran along the bench below Mount Timpanogos, on the line State Street follows today. The country around it was Timpanogos land, and the conflicts of 1849 to 1854 between the Timpanogos and the settlers, described on our Timpanogos people of Utah Valley page, were fought over this part of the valley.
Lindon City's historic sites brochure says the area was settled in 1861, by families who built along the wagon route between Pleasant Grove and Orem. A 1992 Deseret News profile dates Lindon to 1850 as an outgrowth of Pleasant Grove, which is when the Pleasant Grove fort itself was founded. The two dates describe the same process from different ends: Lindon began as Pleasant Grove's southern farmland and became a separate place only gradually.
The houses went up one after another along the road rather than in a planned grid, and the settlement picked up the name Stringtown. A National Register nomination for one of those houses describes the land around it as "the basin area south of Pleasant Grove, below Lindon Hill," and notes that it was part of Pleasant Grove until 1924.
The linden tree, and the letter o
Every account agrees that Lindon is named for a linden tree. They disagree about almost everything else.
The city's own brochure says mail for Pleasant Grove and Stringtown was left under a linden tree in the area, and that when the settlement applied for a post office in 1889 it was approved as "Lindon," probably because of a spelling error on the application. The current spelling was adopted when the town incorporated. A 2000 article in BYU's student newspaper told the same story of the tree marking the spot where the stagecoach mail was delivered, the 1889 application and the uncorrected misspelling, and added that a local postmaster suspected the name might honor a man named Linbeck, though she had no record to prove it.
The 1992 Deseret News profile has a different version: an old linden tree growing there in 1901, and a first town board, elected in 1924, that chose "Lindon" over "Linden." Our living in Lindon guide gives the 1901 date.
No source we found settles it. The safest summary is that the tree is real, the mail story is the city's own, the 1889 post office application is the earliest date anyone gives, and whether the o was an accident or a choice depends on whom you ask.
Stringtown's houses
What Lindon does have is a remarkable record of individual farmhouses, kept by the city's Historic Preservation Commission in a self-guided brochure of 18 historic sites. Read together, the entries are a portrait of a farm settlement built by converts, many of them English, who paid for things with what they grew.
The oldest houses lined the road. The Harris home at 310 North State Street was one of the original Stringtown houses, built around 1865 and later owned for much of the twentieth century by Harriet and Joseph Harris, who used its small rooms for dances. Henry and Rachel Dittmore settled at 325 North State Street in 1868 in a log cabin with a dirt floor and roof that sheltered travelers on the road south from Pleasant Grove. In 1876 they dug a cellar, moved the cabin onto it and added adobe rooms.
The settlers bartered for their building stone. Alfred Harper, an English convert, reportedly traded vegetables and flowers for the rock to build his house at 125 West 400 North, then left on a three-year mission to New Zealand before it was finished and came home with vines that eventually covered it. Neighbors called it the Big House. Its National Register nomination dates the original section to 1877, with a west wing in 1888 and 1889, and describes it as soft rock, the porous tufa quarried around Pleasant Grove between about 1865 and 1900; the city's brochure calls it limestone and dates it 1876. Joseph Wadley, another English convert and a horticulturist, got title to 32 acres in 1869, planted trees brought from England, and in 1881 quarried tufa from Pleasant Grove for a house modeled on an English country manor, finished in 1882, at 67 East 400 North.
The economy ran on goods. At 395 North State Street, Lewis Seth Robison ran a horse-powered cider mill beside his house, pressing apples for families who drank the cider in winter and used it as vinegar in summer. The brochure repeats the local story that it was strong enough to get a cow drunk on the leftover pulp. Across the road at 398 North State, the Cobbleys' butcher shop became Lindon's first post office, and around 1900 Albert L. Cullimore built the larger Cullimore Mercantile, where customers often traded farm goods for machinery, medicine and groceries. After the Lindon Ward was organized in 1890, the church built a bishop's office, hay barn and granaries at 319 North 135 West where farmers paid their tithing in produce, and some of that produce paid the teachers.
Social life had its own buildings. Reed Smoot dedicated an adobe chapel at 400 North and Main in 1891; it was torn down in 1941, but its iron fence and some of its pines remain. An Amusement Hall built in 1900 at 150 North State Street staged three-act plays, silent films and dances that drew people from across the county, and around 1940 it became a tomato cannery.
The lake resort
West of the farms, on the shore of Utah Lake, Lindon had a resort. The brochure says Captain John Dallin began building it in 1890 and named it the Geneva Resort after his daughter. It had a boat harbor, a hotel, a dance pavilion, concession stands and, later, picnic grounds and ballfields. Cold and heated swimming pools were fed by flowing wells, and on Saturday nights there were ferry rides and dances. The brochure gives its location as 2130 West 600 South. None of the buildings survive.
The name outlasted the resort by a long way. When the federal government built a steel plant on the lakeshore nearby during the Second World War, it was called Geneva. Our history of Utah Lake covers the era when resorts lined the shore.
The interurban stop
Stringtown's road also carried the valley's electric railroad. The Salt Lake & Utah Railroad, known to everyone as the Orem, had a Lindon depot at 265 North State Street. The city's brochure remembers it for clean wooden floors, more than 20 trains a day between Payson and Salt Lake City, and cheap fares that let Lindon students ride to BYU. The line closed in 1946; our Orem interurban history has the full story.
1924: a town for a water bond
By the 1920s Stringtown was a settled farming community with a store, a school, a chapel and a depot, but it was still governed as part of Pleasant Grove. That changed in 1924.
The city's brochure says Lindon incorporated "apparently" to be able to issue a bond to pay for a culinary water system. The articles of incorporation listed a population of "458 souls" and 169 electors, and the new town covered about 3.5 square miles. Lindon marked its centennial on March 24, 2024, and the Daily Herald gives March 24, 1924 as the date; the 1992 Deseret News profile says March 5. From Pleasant Grove's point of view, the Utah History Encyclopedia notes simply that Lindon's incorporation took a large farming area out of the older city.
Ten years later, in 1934, in the depths of the Depression, residents of a town of fewer than 300 people, by the Daily Herald's count, gathered lights and decorations for a Christmas tree near 400 North and Main to lift spirits. The city has lit a tree every year since. (The Herald's figure is lower than the 458 in the incorporation papers; we report both as given.)
Steel and the end of Stringtown
The Second World War brought Geneva Steel to the lakeshore southwest of Lindon. The plant's workers needed somewhere to live and their children needed schools. The brochure says Geneva's arrival in 1943 crowded Lindon Elementary until some teachers had as many as 58 pupils; the school, built as four rooms in 1900 for $5,200 without indoor plumbing, had been expanded several times already. A 1948 fire did serious damage, and the rebuilt school finally got restrooms and a cafeteria. Our Geneva Steel history covers the plant itself.
Even so, Lindon grew slowly. The brochure gives 801 residents in 1950 and 1,150 in 1960, and the 1992 Deseret News profile counted 3,818 in the 1990 census. At that point Lindon's largest employer was a software company with 700 workers, its largest taxpayer was Mountain States Steel, and fruit stands still lined the highway in summer. The federal census then counted 8,363 people in 2000, 10,070 in 2010 and 11,397 in 2020.
Some of Stringtown survived the change and some did not. The Harris home was slated for demolition, and the brochure says a school bus driver named Pam Dain stopped the bulldozers by parking her bus between them and the house while she made phone calls. The house was dismantled anyway, but its stones were used to build the pioneer home that now stands in Pioneer Park. The Gillman farm on Gillman Lane, established in 1863 and run by four generations of one family, has been recognized as a Utah Century Farm. In 1941 the family moved the old tithing barn there and rebuilt it.
On May 3, 2026, Henry B. Eyring dedicated the Lindon Utah Temple at 850 East Center Street. It was announced in October 2020 and the ground was broken in April 2022.
See it today
Lindon's history is mostly private houses seen from the sidewalk, so treat this as a drive or walk past rather than a series of tours.
The historic sites brochure. Lindon City publishes a free self-guided tour of 18 sites, available as a PDF on the city's Historic Preservation Commission page and in print at the Community Development office in the Lindon City Center, 100 North State Street. The city's history line is 801-785-7687.
State Street between about 260 and 400 North. The old Stringtown core: the depot site at 265 North, the Dittmore home at 325 North, the Robison home at 395 North, the Cullimore Mercantile at 398 North, and Walker's Service Station at 370 North, Lindon's first service station.
400 North, west of State. The Alfred Harper house at 125 West 400 North (private; a small marker stands outside the fence), and the William Kirk home at 291 West 400 North, an 1880s Victorian that a later owner cut down by a story and that has been a restaurant since 1996. The old chapel's iron fence and pines are at 400 North and Main.
Pioneer Park, 150 South 500 East. The pioneer home built from the Harris house stones. The city opens it for tours on the Tuesday evening of Lindon Days in August and arranges tours at other times through Community Development.
The Lindon Community Center museum. The red brick former church on Main Street, which the city bought when the congregation outgrew it, holds a small historic museum remodeled and reopened in December 2024. According to the Herald, the displays can be viewed whenever the center is open.
For the city today, see things to do in Lindon. Lindon's neighbor to the south has its own history in a short history of Orem.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Lindon called Lindon?
What was Stringtown?
When was Lindon settled?
When did Lindon become a city?
Why did Lindon separate from Pleasant Grove?
How did Geneva Steel affect Lindon?
Was there a resort at Utah Lake in Lindon?
What historic places can I see in Lindon?
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.
- Lindon Historic Sites Tour Brochure, Lindon City. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Historic Preservation Commission, Lindon City. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Alfred William Harper House, National Register nomination (Pleasant Grove Soft-rock Buildings TR), National Park Service. Checked October 20, 2026.
- President Eyring dedicates the Lindon Utah Temple, Newsroom of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Checked October 20, 2026.
- History of Pleasant Grove Train Station (interurban closing date), Historical Marker Database. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Pleasant Grove (Utah History Encyclopedia), University of Utah Press / Utah Education Network. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Community profile: Lindon, 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.
- Lindon Days reaches back to the city's origin to celebrate 100 years, Daily Herald. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Lindon looks to cap off celebratory centennial year with remodeled museum, city mosaic display, Daily Herald. Checked October 20, 2026.
- 2020, 2010 and 2000 Decennial Census redistricting data (P1), U.S. Census Bureau via USAFacts connector. Checked October 20, 2026.
