|

Photo Gallery
Request Form
Kids
Cities:
Bear River
Beaver Dam
Blue Creek
Bothwell
Brigham City
Collinston
Corinne
Deweyville
Elwood
Fielding
Garland
Grouse Creek
Harper Ward
Honeyville
Howell
Mantua
Park Valley
Penrose
Perry City
Plymouth
Portage
Promontory
Riverside
Snowville
Standrod
Thatcher
Tremonton
Willard
Yost
|
Rabbits, thousands of them, were the chief troublemakers
in early Snowville history. Other localities in the pioneer West had their
cricket invasions, as did Snowville in 1877. Rabbits, however, were the chief
pest both in 1877 and 1879. Crop destruction during these years caused such a
crisis that there were some who advocated breaking up the settlement in 1880
on the grounds that people could not make a living there. Had the movement to
give up the town succeeded, Snowville’s ten-year history of difficult
frontier problems and sacrifices on the part of its settlers may never have
reached further attention. But there were many who had faith in
Snowville’s future. They stuck to their lands, undaunted by nature and
rabbits, and they finally began to harvest some sizable crops. Their town,
though still not large, has farms and homes that are secure because of the
land’s productiveness.
About three miles south of the Idaho
border in Box Elder
County, Snowville is the center
of farming and dairy activities in the Curlew
Valley. This valley extends
approximately forty-two miles from southern Idaho
to the Great Salt Lake on the south. Snowville is on
the east side of Curlew Valley
and is separated from Park Valley
on the west by a low spur of mountains extending from the Clear
Creek Mountains
in a southeasterly direction toward the Great Salt Lake.
Deep Creek, which occupies an important place in the
history of Snowville and Curlew Valley,
rises from springs twelve miles north of Snowville and sinks near Houtz Ranch
seven miles to the southwest. Lorenzo Snow, then a member of the Quorum of
the Twelve of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and later the
Church’s fifth president, prophesied that Deep Creek would be “an
everlasting stream whose water should never diminish, and one from which many
should come to drink.” Even in parched years, Deep Creek never lowered.
In 1870, the first settlers came to the Curlew
Valley from Malad,
Idaho, and settled near the present site
of Snowville on Deep Creek. The settlement got a shot in the arm on May 12, 1876, when Arnold Goodliffe
arrived to “take charge” of the few families there, under
instruction from Lorenzo Snow. The history of the next thirty years was
pretty well built around Goodliffe who seemed to be a first-rate colonizer.
Upon arrival, he promptly took over the spiritual and temporal direction of
his small flock.
Many people have wondered, and still do, if the community
received its name because of its climate, since temperatures have dropped to
40 degrees below zero in the winter. But the brethren wanted to honor Lorenzo
Snow who had been almost like a godfather to the community. They probably had
no thought of winter when they selected a name.
A log house, 26 x 20 feet, was dedicated on April 22, 1877, as a combination
school and meeting house. Logs for the building had been hauled in from the Black
Pine Mountains,
thirty miles to the northwest. The town changed its location on October 24, 1934 when a series of
earthquakes centered around the north end of Great Salt Lake
caused considerable damage in Snowville. The meeting house, the public school
building, and a number of homes were damaged.
The town was incorporated November 6, 1933. Hard surfaced roads came to the
community on November 15 of that same year. The community now had a telephone
system, electric power, a culinary water system, a post office, service
station and convenience store, eating establishments, R. V. campground,
motel, park, an international fish food-processing-manufacturing company, and
a beautiful all-brick LDS church house.
Students from grades six through twelve are transported 40
miles by bus to school in Tremonton. The last population census taken in 1989
reports 251 people living in Snowville. Many of them now have employment
elsewhere, such as the Black Pine Mine ten miles west, and Thiokol
Corporation, thirty miles to the east.
|