Historic Spring City

Spring City sits in the Sanpete Valley at the foot of the Wasatch Plateau, about 100 miles south of Salt Lake City and roughly an hour from Provo. It was founded in March 1852 by James Allred and his family, part of the Mormon pioneer colonization of the valley approved by Brigham Young. Early conflict with the region's Ute inhabitants forced settlers to abandon the site more than once in its first years, and Spring City was later a site of fighting during the Black Hawk War of the 1860s. The town was permanently reestablished by the late 1850s and formally incorporated in 1870.

Starting in 1853, LDS Church leaders encouraged Danish and other Scandinavian immigrants to settle in Sanpete County, and by the mid-1860s the north side of Spring City was known locally as "Little Copenhagen." By 1870, roughly 80% of the valley's population was first- or second-generation Scandinavian - and their building traditions, alongside American folk and pattern-book styles, are why Spring City's streets still look the way they do.

The Rio Grande Western Railroad reached town in 1890, and Spring City prospered on agriculture, wool, and locally quarried oolite limestone. Then, through most of the 20th century, the population quietly declined as economic life shifted elsewhere in the valley. Nobody had the money - or the reason - to tear down the old adobe and stone homes and build something new. By the time preservation-minded buyers and artists started arriving in the 1970s, Spring City was, almost by accident, one of the best-preserved 19th-century townscapes in the American West.

The entire town - its boundaries matching the city limits - was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on October 22, 1980.