The farm and its first hundred years
Founded 1903 Eight acres West Nibley
The farm starts with Ernest Morgan and a tent. In 1903 he brought his young family onto raw ground on what is now 800 West and lived under canvas while he cleared the land and framed the first room of a house. From there it grew the ordinary way a Cache Valley homestead grew, one field and one outbuilding at a time, until it was a full working farm on roughly eight acres of the valley floor.
It stayed in the family for decades. Ernest worked it until 1937, when his son Elwood took over and farmed it clear through to 1981. Dee Gibbons then bought the place and kept it going as farmland for another quarter century. By the early 2000s that was the exception rather than the rule: the fields around Nibley were filling with new streets and houses, and a hundred year old farm inside the city limits had become a rare thing worth deciding about on purpose.
Why the old farm still reads as a farm
Most farms this close to a growing city end up as cul-de-sacs. This one did not, because the land and its buildings were kept whole instead of scraped and replatted. The result is that the barn, the pasture and the fields still sit where Ernest Morgan put them, which is exactly what makes the December Nativity and the summer garden feel rooted rather than staged. The history is not a plaque here; it is the ground you stand on.
The details
The city buys the farm, and a nonprofit runs it
Purchased 2007 City-owned open space Public
In 2007 the city of Nibley bought the Morgan Farm outright. Rather than treat it as land to develop, the city designated it open space and gave it historical landmark status, which in plain terms means it is meant to stay a farm. That decision is the reason there is anything to write about here: without it, the eight acres would look like every other block that went up around them in the same years.
The city owns the land, but the day-to-day work is done by the Nibley Morgan Farm Corporation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit led by the Christensen family. Their stated aim is to preserve the site and use it for hands-on learning, and in practice that is what you see: gardens people tend, animals kids can be around, and a calendar of events that keeps the place busy instead of merely preserved. It is a farm that earns its keep by being useful to the town.
What open space status means for a visitor
Because it is public land, you do not need a ticket or an event to see it. The grounds function as a small heritage park the rest of the year, and the programming, gardens, animals, classes and the big December Nativity, sits on top of that. If you are new to Nibley, it is one of the few places in town where you can stand on ground that has been farmed continuously since the town was young.
Good to know
- The farm is city-owned open space, so the grounds are public; individual programs and events set their own times.
- The nonprofit takes volunteers of all ages for the gardens, the animals and the events.
- Program details change season to season, so check the farm's current listings before you plan around a specific class or date.
- For the rest of town, see things to do in Nibley and the parks, trails and wetlands guide.
