Pond Town, and the century before the name changed

Because the pond came first and the settlement grew around it. In 1851 David Fairbanks, who had been Payson's first bishop, and David Crockett located land at a spring fed stream and dammed it, raising the water enough to run into irrigation ditches. The pool that formed was the reason to be there and it gave the place its working name for the next fourteen years. The name recorded for the site in the Ute language is Summer Spring.

In 1865, when the townsite was surveyed. The settler Lyman Curtis proposed Salem after his Massachusetts hometown, and the town has used the City of Peace epithet ever since. Accounts differ on whether that hometown was Salem or New Salem, both in Massachusetts, so Massachusetts is as precise as it gets. One thing Salem was never called is Summit Creek: that is the original name of Santaquin, further along the valley, and the two are regularly confused.

A defensive enclosure built around the settlement's first dozen or so families. Construction began in 1856 after raiding in this part of the valley had already pushed nearby settlers behind walls, it was enclosed by the autumn of 1858, and it measured roughly 160 feet north to south by 150 feet east to west. It stayed in regular use until about 1870, after which families moved out into ordinary houses. The Daughters of Utah Pioneers marked the site on 16 July 1938.

Near the pond, at roughly 99 South 300 West, in the park ground a visitor has probably already parked beside. The Daughters of Utah Pioneers erected it on 16 July 1938 and a marker recording the town's first post office stands alongside it. Together they take about ten minutes to read and they carry the names of the men who located the land in 1851 and of the families who built the fort five years later, plus the fort's dimensions and the renaming.

In two steps, and compressing them into one date is a common error. Salem was incorporated as a town in 1886 and was run by fourteen town boards over the following thirty four years. It became a city on 10 May 1920, the day its first mayor took office. So a summary that gives 1920 as the incorporation date has quietly skipped a third of a century of local government, which for a settlement founded in 1851 is a substantial omission.

The channel that brought Spanish Fork River water to the Pond Town farms. Lyman Curtis and his brothers surveyed the line in the autumn of 1865 using a length of two by four with a cup of water on it for a level, and water first ran in the summer of 1869. Strawberry Valley Project water later supplemented what the local system could deliver. The canal is also the ancestor of the pressurized irrigation network the city built in 2008 and metered from 2023.

A mine and a white concrete mill on the mountainside east of the town, begun in September 1894 after John Hyrum Koyle said he had been shown an ore body in a dream. The enterprise was incorporated in 1909, the mill was built in 1932 by shareholders raising money in the middle of a depression, and it went into operation in 1936. In all that time it processed a single load of ore, netting the company one hundred and three dollars and three cents.

No. The Relief Mine Company, which the enterprise was reorganized as in 1961, owns the mine, the mill and the buildings around them on the mountainside, and the road up is part of that holding. It is not a ghost town, an abandoned site or an urban exploration destination; it is a working corporate landholding whose shareholders still hold annual meetings drawing hundreds of people. The view from the valley floor is the best one available in any case, and it is the only one that is lawful.

Yes. The Orem Interurban line ran through the town from 1916, which for a farming community of that period meant the outside world arriving on a timetable rather than on a horse. That matters more to the town's shape than it might sound: an electric interurban is what turns a settlement people were born and buried in into a place people can commute from, and Salem's transition from a pond and canal farming town toward a valley address begins around there.