By Jacob Terry
As residents of Spanish Fork celebrate the 150th anniversary of the town, Marie Huff reflects on the town?s changes.
?When we were growing up, there were only two telephones in Spanish Fork,? said Huff, 91, longtime Spanish Fork resident. ?There was maybe only a call a night, but if there was, one of our family would get on an old horse and go wherever to call somebody to the telephone. We got 50 cents for going, and that was a lot of money.?
But, an increase in telephones isn?t the only change that has taken place in the town. Huff has noticed a change in lifestyle and recreation among residents also.
Today, most young people go to the mall and movie theater for entertainment, Huff said, but when she was young, she and her friends created their own entertainment, such as dancing.
?People loved to dance, and we had a big dance hall that they called the Pavilion,? Huff said. ?It was the place to gather for everything, and it had springs in its floor so that if you did have two right feet, you could dance. It was well-known all over the county for its floor and how nice it was to dance.?
However, the dance hall came many years after the town was settled. Europeans first saw the site of the town when Spanish explorers came through in 1776, said BYU history professor Richard Holzapfel. Enoch Reece, the first resident, established a 400-acre farm in the area in 1850. After several other families moved into the area, the Territorial Legislature granted a charter in 1855.
The settlers named the area Spanish Fork in honor of the Spaniards who initially discovered the land, but residents over the years have called it by other names, including Gopher Town, Huff said. The name Gopher Town came about during the more difficult times when many people lived in dugouts, but by the time Huff was born, the town?s situation improved.
?We had three rooms and a bathroom, and was by the gooseberry bushes outside,? Huff said. ?But we were fancy, we had three holes. We used Montgomery Ward catalogs, and the harness department had the softest paper.?
Huff was the only one of five children in her family to graduate from high school. Huff remembers even getting to school was difficult, since large covered wagons served as buses.
?The mothers would heat the rocks warm in the winter that they could put in them, and that?s the way they brought the kids from Palmyra and Lake Shore,? Huff said.
Those that dropped out of school to work often found employment on the farm.
?We worked hard: we thinned beats, we tromped hay, everybody, no different, we all worked hard in the field,? Huff said.
Holzapfel credits the desire of early settlers to rely on agriculture and the emphasis Latter-day Saint leaders put on self-sufficiency as the keys to the community?s survival, something rare for a western town established in the mid-19th century.
?If you compare all the communities found in the western United States in the 1850s and 60s, most of them are gone,? Holzapfel said. ?I think 90 percent of the towns founded in Utah County survived.?