For most of the twentieth century, Vineyard was the town you drove past on the way to the steel mill. It was a strip of dairy farms along the shore of Utah Lake, home to a few dozen families who were mostly related to each other, and it did not become a town until 1989. The census counted 139 people there in 2010. Ten years later it counted 12,543.
That jump is the story most people know, and our pages on the Geneva site's redevelopment and Utah City tell it. This is the story of the place before the boom: the lakeshore farm community that held out against its neighbors for a century and then, for a few years, was one of the smallest towns in Utah with one of the largest industrial tax bases.
Farming the edge of the lake
Vineyard sits on the flat ground between Orem and Utah Lake, and for its first settlers the lake was both the reason to be there and the main obstacle. The ground was wet. According to a 2000 Deseret News account of the town's centennial history, Shadrach Holdaway and a few others began farming the area in the late 1860s and spent years fighting a high water table, pushing the swamps back toward the lake. The drains, pipes and clay tiles they laid are still in the ground. "Nothing quite so defines Vineyard as its proximity to Utah Lake," the town's history begins.
The lakeshore was Timpanogos land long before that, and the settlers who came to this shore in the late 1860s arrived as two decades of conflict were ending and the Utes were being moved out of the valley to the Uinta Basin. Our page on the Timpanogos people of Utah Valley tells that part of the story, and our history of Utah Lake covers the lake itself.
The community was once called Lakeview. Its official birthdate, as the town reckons it, is 1899, when its first Latter-day Saint congregation was organized, which is why Vineyard held a "belated centennial" reunion in August 2000, eleven years after it incorporated.
The grapes
The name is a small mystery with two answers. A 1991 Deseret News profile credits John Gillies, who planted the first grapevines in the area. The 2000 Deseret News article says the name came from a sand hill, now inside Orem's boundaries, that was good ground for grapes. Neither source gives a date for the name, and they do not contradict each other: there were grapes on the sandy rise at the edge of the farms, and the community was named for them. Whatever vines there were are long gone; by 1991, the profile says, most residents were dairy farmers.
Geneva arrives
In 1941, a 2010 Deseret News history says, the federal government decided to build a steel mill on the lakeshore next to the farms. Geneva began operating in 1943, making plate steel and structural shapes for wartime shipbuilding. (The name Geneva was already local: a lakeshore resort of that name, founded in 1890 by Captain John Dallin, stood to the north, according to Lindon City's historic sites brochure.) Our history of Geneva Steel covers the mill itself.
For the farmers, the plant changed the neighborhood without changing the farms. Dairies still lined Geneva Road, and Vineyard stayed agricultural and unincorporated. Orem tried to bring the land into its city more than once; the 2000 Deseret News article says Vineyard's residents resisted Orem's annexation attempts for decades.
1989: a town with a steel mill
The idea of incorporating came up in the early 1970s, according to a 2023 Daily Herald article, but Geneva Steel would not support it then. In January 1989 that changed: Bud Patten, the company's chief executive, asked J. Rulon Gammon, a Vineyard dairy farmer, to study incorporating the town. Orem and the Mountainland Association of Governments both presented studies arguing against it; the Herald says Gammon answered them in about seven minutes.
Vineyard incorporated that spring. The 1991 Deseret News profile gives the date as April 24, 1989, and the Herald says the paperwork was filed with the lieutenant governor on May 11, 1989, which made Vineyard the newest town in Utah. It had 156 residents, by the Herald's count, and its tax base was what the Herald calls the largest integrated steel mill west of the Mississippi.
The new town was a family affair. The 1991 profile counted 151 people, most of them dairy farmers, and said about 75 percent were related to each other. Gammon became mayor and would be the only one the town had for fifteen years. "We're dealing in many cases with our relatives and neighbors we know well," he told the Deseret News in 2000. The council built a government from scratch and ran it for far less than the $80,000 a year the county had predicted. Geneva, with about 2,800 workers, paid $984,566 in property taxes in the year before the 1991 profile, and that money paid for a $400,000 park beside the new town hall.
A tax base that disappeared
By 2000 Geneva's taxes supplied about 90 percent of Vineyard's $300,000 annual budget, the Deseret News reported, and the company was in bankruptcy. About 35 families lived in town, most named Holdaway or Gammon. That August the town held its belated centennial and published a 450-page history with about 1,000 photographs, written with help from BYU English professor Don Norton and his students. "Many of the young people would like to stay here but interest in agriculture is low," Gammon said.
Geneva had filed for bankruptcy in 1999. In 2001 most work stopped and most of its roughly 1,200 workers were laid off, and after a second bankruptcy in 2002, the 2010 Deseret News history says, steelmaking at the plant ended. In 2004 the Deseret News described Gammon's efforts to find a new tax base, including a natural-gas power plant PacifiCorp planned for part of the old Geneva site. It also reported that he planned to resign after selling his 94-acre farm to Anderson Development, which would then own more than 300 acres in town. Gammon said he opposed sprawl and was committed to agriculture, but he expected developers to come: "Developers go find land outside great municipalities where the land is cheaper," he said.
They did. The census counted 150 people in Vineyard in 2000 and 139 in 2010. Then the farms became subdivisions and the mill site was cleared for development. In 2020 the census counted 12,543 residents. The Herald, in 2023, quoted Mayor Julie Fullmer saying the town now had the lowest per-person daily water use in the state.
The time capsule
In February 2023, Vineyard gathered beside the old Geneva smelting cauldron in The Yard, the shopping area built on the mill site, to seal a time capsule meant to be opened in 2048. An earlier capsule, opened in 2022, had held a handwritten letter from Gammon about the town's incorporation. His advice to his successor, the Herald reported, was to "keep moving forward."
For the city that resulted, see living in Vineyard and things to do in Vineyard.
See it today
Vineyard has almost no surviving buildings from its farm century, so the history is in the setting.
The Geneva cauldron, in The Yard on the former mill site. A piece of the steelworks kept as a monument, where the 2023 time capsule ceremony was held.
The Utah Lake shore. The land early farmers drained, and the reason the town exists. In 2023 the city expected to begin building a boardwalk, beach and trails on the shore; check the city's current maps for what is open.
Geneva Road. The old road past the dairies, where the farm town once lined up along the mill's edge.
For the town Vineyard spent a century resisting, read a short history of Orem.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Vineyard called Vineyard?
How old is Vineyard?
When did Vineyard incorporate, and why?
How small was Vineyard before the boom?
What did Geneva Steel mean to the town of Vineyard?
Who was Vineyard's first mayor?
How fast did Vineyard grow?
Is there anything historic left to see in Vineyard?
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 (Geneva Resort), Lindon City. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Community profile: Vineyard, Deseret News. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Vineyard is only 11 but hails 100th, Deseret News. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Vineyard losing an icon: 151, its mayor, Deseret News. Checked October 20, 2026.
- Vineyard mayor connects present and future with time capsule, Daily Herald. Checked October 20, 2026.
- For decades Geneva Steel ruled Utah County economy, Deseret News. Checked October 20, 2026.
- 2020, 2010 and 2000 Decennial Census redistricting data (P1), U.S. Census Bureau via USAFacts connector. Checked October 20, 2026.
