Opinion
OPINION: The wagon box that built a Lehi City
Rob Shelton | Lehi Free Press
Let’s get something straight before the fireworks start popping over Utah Lake this week: nobody in 1850 asked for a three-day weekend.
Thirteen families rolled into a marshy patch of ground near a sulfur-tasting spring that fall, and if you’re picturing cozy cabins and campfire singalongs, stop right there. Most of them didn’t have shoes. Their clothes were more patch than shirt. Their grocery store was whatever they could shoot, trap or haul out of Utah Lake before dark.
They called the place Sulphur Springs, which is a generous name, because nobody picks that word unless the water tastes like a chemistry experiment gone sideways. Thirteen homes went up before the snow did, built to shelter 53 people. That’s roughly a middle school homeroom’s worth of humans, except nobody had central heat or air, and there wasn’t a vending machine for 300 miles in any direction.
The scouting trip happened that July, when Brigham Young sent Canute Peterson and six other men out from the Salt Lake Valley to check the north end of Utah County. They found a creek so stingy with water they named it Dry Creek, just to keep the record honest.
Farther down the trail, they found the spring. That became the plan. Fall came. Families followed. Winter did what winter does to people with no shoes.
Here’s the part that ought to stop you cold. On Nov. 5, 1850, Daniel and Lucy Cox had a baby. Not in a hospital. Not even in a cabin. In a wagon box, out in the open, in a settlement that didn’t yet have real shelter for the grown-ups, let alone a newborn.
They named her Azubia Deseret Cox. Old accounts call her rugged and healthy. I’d call her the toughest person ever to come out of Lehi, and that includes a few college linebackers.
That same month, crews finally finished a road around the Point of the Mountain, ending years of a route so bad it basically doubled as a horse obituary generator. Joel W. White became the first settler from the south to use it, probably thinking, “Well, it’s about time.”
Winter, being winter, took someone. John Griggs White died at Sulphur Springs that February, the settlement’s first death. There was no funeral home, no casket showroom, no options. David Savage built one out of a wagon box because that’s what you did when the ground was frozen solid and the need wasn’t optional. Neighbors carried White north and buried him near what’s now the corner of Center and State, ground that served as Lehi’s cemetery for the next two decades.
Bishop David Evans showed up around the same time with another group, tried settling a patch near what’s now Margaret Wines Park, and found it too swampy to farm. So they doubled back, rejoined the Sulphur Springs crowd, regrouped, and by the following year moved for good to higher, drier ground along Dry Creek. They named the new settlement Evansville, because giving credit where it’s due mattered even when you were freezing.
Evansville didn’t stick either. Early in 1852, Evans petitioned the territorial Legislature to make the town official, and on Feb. 5 of that year, lawmakers said yes. Utah’s sixth-oldest city was born. Evans suggested the new name too: Lehi, borrowed from the Book of Mormon patriarch who packed up his family and went looking for a promised land. Considering what this crew had already survived, from Sulphur Springs to Dry Creek to Evansville, the name fit like a good pair of boots they didn’t have.
So that’s the story sitting quietly behind the celebration this week. Not a Hallmark card. A group of people who had almost nothing, lost one of their own before spring even showed up, and kept building anyway, which brings me to the point:
Pioneer Day gets treated like a day off. Fireworks, barbecue, maybe a nap in the shade. Nothing wrong with any of that. But somewhere between the third hot dog and the first sparkler, it’s worth remembering this city exists because a handful of exhausted, underdressed, half-starved people refused to quit on each other.
They didn’t have much to give, and they gave it anyway. A wagon box for a birth. A wagon box for a burial. A shovel’s worth of dirt for a neighbor’s fort. That’s the whole inheritance. Not land. Not buildings. Showing up for each other when showing up was the hardest thing on the menu.
So here’s an idea. This week, as you watch the fireworks, ponder on how you can be somebody’s Sulphur Springs. Sign up at the food bank. Check on the neighbor who’s gone quiet lately. Show up for the cleanup crew nobody wants to join. Volunteer for next year’s parade instead of just watching it roll by.
Lehi’s founders didn’t build a city so the rest of us would have a good spot to watch fireworks. They built it so somebody, generations later, would still be looking out for the person next to them. That’s the tab they left us. Fireworks are optional; paying it forward isn’t.
