The founding of Maughan's Fort
September 1856 A log stockade The valley's first town
On September 15, 1856, Peter Maughan led a company of twenty-five people into the south end of Cache Valley and threw up a log stockade against the coming winter. They called it Maughan's Fort. The party was small and mostly one extended circle: the families of Peter, John and William H. Maughan, of Zial Riggs and of Francis Gunnell, plus two single men. The oldest was forty-five, the youngest six weeks. No permanent town had ever stood in the valley before them, and that is the whole claim behind Wellsville being its oldest.
The first child born in the valley
Less than two weeks after the wagons stopped, on September 27, 1856, Mary Ann Weston Maughan gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, the first child born to the valley's settlers. The little fort held through a hard first winter on the strength of what the families had hauled in with them, and by the next spring more settlers were arriving and Cache County itself was being organized around the fort, with Maughan's Fort as its seat.
Who was Peter Maughan
Peter Maughan, an English convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was the figure the young valley turned on. He was made the presiding bishop over the wards that soon spread up the valley and the first probate judge of Cache County, and he ran much of its early civic and church business out of Wellsville. Long before any of that, the Northwestern Shoshone had wintered in this valley for generations, a fact worth stating plainly rather than stepping past.
From Maughan's Fort to Wellsville
Renamed 1859 Daniel H. Wells Incorporated 1866
The town kept the name Maughan's Fort for only a few years. In 1859, the same season settlers were fanning out to found Logan, Providence, Mendon and the rest of the valley, visiting church leaders renamed it Wellsville in honor of Daniel H. Wells, second counselor to Brigham Young. The name has held ever since, and the three-year head start is why Wellsville can say it was there before any of them.
Wellsville was incorporated as a city on January 19, 1866, with William H. Maughan, who would serve as the town's bishop for forty years, as its first mayor. By then the stockade was gone and the town had spread onto the wide pioneer grid that still orders it: long blocks, deep lots with room for a garden and an orchard, and streets counted out from a central square. The valley's other towns were laid out the same way, but Wellsville was laid out first.
The Wellsville Tabernacle
Ground broken 1902 Dedicated 1908 Gothic Revival
The building most people drive to Wellsville to see is the Tabernacle on the town square, a Gothic Revival meetinghouse of red brick and grey stone at 75 South 100 East. Bishop William H. Maughan broke ground for it in 1902, near the end of his forty years leading the ward, and the cornerstones were laid the following year. Nearly the whole town had a hand in the work. The stone was hand-quarried up Sardine Canyon and hauled down by team, and the building took six years to finish.
It was dedicated on June 28, 1908, by Anthon H. Lund of the Church's First Presidency, and it has held the square for more than a century since. The design, by architect C. T. Barrett, does something you rarely see in a pioneer meetinghouse: the pulpit sits in the northwest corner rather than at one end, and the semicircular pews fan out along a diagonal center aisle to face it. Above the hall a wooden dome rises about sixty feet, framed so carefully that the acoustics are still the first thing visitors mention, and two-story stained-glass windows carry color the length of the room.
The Tabernacle went onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Wellsville City took ownership the next year, and in 1995 residents formed the Wellsville Foundation to look after it. The Foundation now runs the building as a community center for arts and education, with a Daughters of Utah Pioneers museum inside.
The details
The Tabernacle is not on fixed daily hours. The Wellsville Foundation runs the building as a community arts and education center and keeps a pioneer museum inside, but access to the interior is generally arranged rather than posted. If you want to see the dome and the stained glass, contact the Wellsville Foundation or Wellsville City ahead of your visit to confirm current hours or an event.
The historic homes near Main Street
1865 to 1903 Three on the register Seen from the street
Wellsville kept more than its Tabernacle. Three of its early houses are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, all within a short walk of Main Street, and together they read as a small record of how a pioneer town built as it grew steadier.
The oldest is the Samuel Crowthers Mitton House at 242 East Main, from 1865, put up by an English carpenter and cabinetmaker who had joined the church and crossed to the valley. A few years newer is the Howell-Theurer House at 30 South 100 East, an 1869 brick I-house, that tall, one-room-deep pioneer form, and the boyhood home of Joseph Howell, who went from Wellsville to the United States House of Representatives. The George Albert Bradshaw House is the latecomer and the surprise: a Second Empire house with a mansard roof, a style you almost never find in rural Utah.
All three are private homes. You can see them from the street on the same loop that takes in the square, and the walking side of that, plus what is open to visitors now, sits on the town's things to do in Wellsville page.
The three on the register
The square, and the wall of the mountains
The 1856 grid A central square Below the Wellsvilles
The last thing the pioneers left is the shape of the place. Wellsville was laid out on the wide, square grid the settlers used across the territory, and because the town never had to be squeezed the old streets are still broad and the lots still deep. Civic life and the Tabernacle gathered on a central square, the pattern the church repeated in town after town but planted here first.
Wellsville sits right against the base of the Wellsville Mountains, one of the steepest short ranges in the country, which rise straight off the valley floor on the west. That wall is the backdrop to everything in town and the reason the light goes early on a winter afternoon. How the modern town lives against it, the newer streets, the schools and what a house runs, sits on the Wellsville city guide rather than here, and the range itself has its own region page.
For the rest of the valley's founding story, the Logan page carries the temple and the fur-trade history that gave Cache Valley its name, and the companion pages below set Wellsville in the wider valley.
