A Short History of Saratoga Springs and Eagle Mountain: Utah County's Youngest Cities

JoAnn Giordano Editor-in-Chief, Provo.com How we make Provo.com

Saratoga Springs and Eagle Mountain are the two youngest cities in Utah County. (The only younger municipality is the town of Fairfield, population 160 in 2020, which does not appear as an incorporated place in the 2000 census.) Eagle Mountain incorporated in December 1996 with about 250 residents; Saratoga Springs followed in December 1997. By 2020 the census counted more than 80,000 people between them. It is tempting to say they have no history, and for the cities as governments that is nearly true.

The ground is another matter. Saratoga Springs is named for a resort that ran on the shore of Utah Lake for more than a hundred years. Eagle Mountain's main road is named for the Pony Express, which crossed its valley in 1860 and 1861, and its newest subdivisions are built around rock art far older than either.

Saratoga Springs: a hot spring and a German immigrant

Long before the resort, the warm water at the north end of Utah Lake near the mouth of the Jordan River was known to everyone who passed. A 2001 Deseret News history says locals called it Sulphur Springs or Snow's Spring, and that Native people, trappers and soldiers all used it.

In 1860 John Conrad Naile, a Mormon Battalion veteran, bought the land and springs for $3,000 in gold, according to the same account, and planted apples, ran cattle and grew flax. In 1884 John Beck leased the land from Naile and later bought the springs and more than 1,000 acres around them. Beck was a German immigrant who had joined the church and settled in Lehi in the mid-1860s, and he had become, in the Deseret News's words, Lehi's wealthiest resident. He named his resort Beck's Saratoga Springs, after the famous spa town in New York, and the city's history says it doubled as his family's home for many years.

The resort was built to impress. The Deseret News lists two plunge baths, six hot tubs at 25 cents, rowboats and sailboats, a baseball ground, shooting galleries and a racetrack. The waters were advertised as a cure for rheumatism and skin disease. Beck's rules barred drunkenness, profanity and splashing near the ladies, and his notice was blunt: "If you cannot obey our rules, we do not want your money!" A dance floor and picnic tables followed in 1894 and a large plunge and bathhouses in 1895. The Lehi Historical Society, which unveiled a marker on the site of Beck's Lehi home in August 2025, says the resort was about five miles from town, reached by wagon over the Jordan River bridge.

A century of owners

Beck sold the resort to the Utah Sugar Company in 1900. The company's plan for a lakeside housing development called Lake Front was dropped in 1902, but the resort kept going. In 1914, the Lehi Historical Society says, the Austin brothers and their sheep companies bought the property for $60,000, and their own plans for a resort town stalled after the First World War. The Deseret News records a lessee in 1918 to 1923 who drew repeated complaints about sanitation, and two attempts, in 1897 and 1922, to turn the place into a chicken farm.

The family that ran it longest arrived around 1930. Frank H. Eastmond, who already operated the Geneva Resort on the east shore, bought an interest and took over management, remodeling the grounds and drilling new hot-water wells. The Lehi Historical Society dates his purchase to 1930; the Deseret News places it in the 1920s or 1930s. After Eastmond's stroke in 1953 his sons took over, and Mick Eastmond became sole manager in 1962 or 1963, depending on the source, and added 35 amusement rides and a children's wading pool.

The resort also survived a near miss. In 1938 the state proposed building its prison on 700 acres at Saratoga. Lehi residents fought it, and the state chose the Point of the Mountain instead.

Fire, a riot and the rising lake

The resort's last decades were rough. In 1968 a fire destroyed the main building, including the indoor pool, dressing rooms, office and historic arcade; the Lehi Historical Society puts the damage at about $100,000. The resort reopened that spring, the Deseret News says on Easter Sunday and the historical society says on Memorial Day, but the old buildings were never replaced. A waterslide called the Kamikaze arrived in the late 1970s. In 1980, when a rock band canceled a show because of a power outage, a riot broke out that took more than 100 police officers to end. Then Utah Lake rose in the wet years of the 1980s and swallowed the shoreline, and rumors that the whole resort was underwater kept visitors away.

The Deseret News says Mick Eastmond eventually sold the land to developer Mike Dortsch, who built a residential community around it. By 2001 the old resort was a private amenity open only to residents. Our history of Utah Lake covers the resort era on the lake more broadly.

Saratoga Springs, 1997

In the early 1990s, according to the city's history, landowners around the hot springs and up in the foothills of the Lake Mountains began planning development. Utah County's land-use rules were not urban enough for what they had in mind, so they sought to incorporate. Saratoga Springs became a town in December 1997. (Our things to do in Saratoga Springs guide notes that both December 30 and December 31 appear in print.)

The city has annexed several hundred acres since, and its history describes it now as a strip more than 21 square miles long, from Pelican Point on the lake's west shore north to Camp Williams. The census counted 1,003 residents in 2000, 17,781 in 2010 and 37,696 in 2020.

Eagle Mountain: rock art, soldiers and riders

Cedar Valley, the basin west of the Lake Mountains, has a much older human record than its towns. In 2024 the Deseret News reported on petroglyphs scattered across land near the Oquirrh Mountain Ranch neighborhood, off Pony Express Parkway. A Native community advocate quoted in the story said the area had been used by members of the Skull Valley Band of Goshute, the Paiute and the Fremont people; a 2020 Daily Herald article attributes the rock art to the Fremont, about 1,800 years ago. The meanings of the carvings are uncertain.

The valley entered the written record in the 1850s. During the Utah War, the U.S. Army force under Albert Sidney Johnston marched past what is now Eagle Mountain and in November 1858 established Camp Floyd near Fairfield, a few miles south. A Bureau of Land Management study of Utah's Pony Express stations says Fairfield, with about 7,000 people, 3,000 of them soldiers, was briefly the third-largest city in the territory. When Johnston left to join the Confederacy in 1861, the post was renamed Fort Crittenden, then abandoned and ordered destroyed. Our Cedar Fort and Fairfield guide covers those towns.

The Pony Express came through in the same years. A 2020 marker at the Point of the Mountain says Orrin Porter Rockwell's station there operated from April 3, 1860, to November 20, 1861, and was the only Pony Express station between Salt Lake City and Camp Floyd. The Bureau of Land Management study lists a second station at Joe Dorton's dugout, about 11 miles from Rockwell's and 8¼ miles from Camp Floyd, where Dorton sold groceries to soldiers and water hauled from Utah Lake at a quarter a bucket; the Rockwell marker says Dorton's place served the stage route from July 1861, when near-daily stagecoach service began. The two sources do not agree on whether it was a Pony Express station. The Daily Herald describes the Eagle Mountain area as one of the route's exchange points.

After that, for more than a century, Cedar Valley was ranch country. The Herald says the land was used mostly for sheep and dry farming, and quotes Finn Kofoed, whose family was among Eagle Mountain's first: "Cedar Valley was a place where people came to shoot rabbits."

Eagle Mountain, 1996

Eagle Mountain incorporated as a town on December 3, 1996, the date in the city's own financial reports, with about 250 residents. (The Herald gives 240; a 2026 news report on a dispute involving the founding Walden family says John Walden helped incorporate it in 1997.) The Walden family donated land for the city's first elementary school, for the ground under City Hall, and for its ballfields, cemetery and rodeo grounds, which were deeded to the city in 2002. Eagle Mountain became a city on May 31, 2001.

Its early politics were famously unsettled. Utah's History To Go notes that the city had thirteen mayors in its first twenty-one years, and only one served a full term. Pony Express Days started about five years after incorporation with what Kofoed called "a very small parade down Eagle Mountain Boulevard"; today Pony Express Days is the city's summer celebration.

The census counted 2,157 residents in 2000, 21,415 in 2010 and 43,623 in 2020, and by the city's own estimate from building permits, more than 71,000 by its 2024 financial report. It is the largest city in Utah County by land area, about 50 square miles.

For how the two cities compare as places to live now, see Saratoga Springs vs. Eagle Mountain, living in Saratoga Springs and living in Eagle Mountain.

See it today

Saratoga Hot Springs, listed at 625 South Saratoga Drive, Saratoga Springs. The public hot springs near the lakeshore that gave the resort and the city their name. Our hot springs near Provo guide explains access.

The old resort site. The pool, clubhouse and pavilions of the private Saratoga Springs community now occupy Beck's resort grounds. They are for residents only; the public springs are the way to see the water.

Beck marker, Lehi. The Lehi Historical Society's 2025 marker on the resort stands at 791 North 100 East in Lehi, on the site of John Beck's home. Our short history of Lehi covers the town he lived in.

Camp Floyd State Park Museum and Stagecoach Inn, 69 West Main Street, Fairfield. The adobe inn from 1858 that served as a Pony Express and stage stop, with a museum on the army post. Google's listing showed it open Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., in October 2026.

Rockwell's station markers, 14647 Porter Rockwell Boulevard, Bluffdale. Two markers in a parking lot at the Point of the Mountain show where the last Pony Express station before Cedar Valley stood.

The Eagle Mountain petroglyphs. A 2022 agreement between Eagle Mountain and a homebuilder calls for the main cluster, near Pony Express Parkway and East Oquirrh Ranch Parkway, to become Petroglyph Park. In 2024 some panels sat inside fenced enclosures. Look without touching, and stay off any that are on private land.

JoAnn Giordano

Editor-in-Chief

JoAnn Giordano is the editor-in-chief of Provo.com. Having lived in and around Utah Valley for years, she leads the site's editorial direction with a focus on the comprehensive, honest local coverage that helps residents, students, and newcomers feel at home. When she's not shaping Provo.com's restaurant and neighborhood coverage, she's exploring the valley's trails and tracking down the best new spots on Center Street.

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