The history of Lindon

A couple lived in a tent while building their house

Alfred William Harper was born around 1843 in England. He joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints there. In 1868 he crossed the ocean with his parents. They came west to Utah, part of a wave of converts.

Seven years later, on September 18, 1875, he married Melissa Walker.

The couple wanted land of their own. In 1877 they bought more than five acres. The land lay in the open basin below Lindon Hill. It was then just a stretch of country south of Pleasant Grove. It had no city name yet. The lot held nothing but sagebrush and dirt.

So they pitched a tent and started building. The house rose in soft rock. This local stone was used because nothing better was at hand. It was laid up into a two-story hall-parlor house with three bays facing east.

Harper and his wife lived in the tent through the whole job. They watched their permanent home take shape wall by wall. The canvas walls rose around them. When it was finished, they had a house facing a street that did not yet exist. The land would not have a name for almost fifty more years.

An addition gave the house two fronts, two streets

By 1889 the Harper family had grown into the house and outgrown it. Alfred added a full two-story wing on the west side. The house was now twice as large. The addition did more than add rooms. It changed which way the house faced.

The original 1877 front had looked east. The new wing gave the house a second front looking west. Harper moved the main entrance. It now faced north instead, toward what is now Alfred William Harper House on its corner lot. A house built to face one direction now showed two fronts to two streets. This dual-facade arrangement was unusual enough. The National Register nomination points to it first.

The stone walls were covered in stucco sometime in the 1930s or 1940s. In 1972 they were stripped back to bare rock. New mortar was pressed into the joints between the stones. Harper had laid these stones by hand. The soft rock has been visible ever since. It is plain evidence of the walls a couple raised. They lived in a tent while building on empty ground a few hundred feet from where you stand.

A working farm predated any house on this ground

Before the Harpers ever pitched a tent, the basin already had a working farm on it. Wadley Farms began working this ground in 1869. Alfred William Harper and Melissa Walker bought their five acres nearby eight years later. There was no house here yet. No fence line. No name for the district at all. There was only a farm, already turning open range into cropland about 530 feet from where the Harper house would rise.

The farm outlasted the tent. It outlasted the stone walls and the couple who built them. It kept working the same soil while Harper laid stone by hand. The basin waited decades for a name.

The basin's dead waited decades for a cemetery

The basin's dead had nowhere fixed to rest for most of a century. Lindon City Cemetery was not laid out until 1948. That was more than seventy years after Harper broke ground on his house. The settlers who built this stretch of country had no cemetery of their own. The families who farmed it and raised children in soft-rock houses had no cemetery of their own for most of that time.

When the ground finally opened, it did the same work the house and the farm had already done. It turned open land into something fixed and permanent. It became a place with a name that would not move again.

A developer platted the old basin into house lots

Green Valley Estates arrived long after the sagebrush was gone. In 1992, Joyner Development Inc platted a new subdivision across this same basin land. It divided the land into lots for houses. These houses were far smaller than Harper's five acres. Where Harper had claimed open ground with a fence and a hand-built wall, a developer now claimed it with a survey and a plat map.

The impulse was the same one that had shaped this basin since Harper's day. Raw land kept getting turned into something owned. It got drawn on a map. It got an address.

Lindon finally claimed ground it had long surrounded

The land itself waited the longest of all. Lindon existed as a settlement from 1850. The basin below Lindon Hill sat outside it for decades. No city's name claimed it. Harper built his house there in 1877 anyway, on ground that belonged to no incorporated place at all.

Not until 1924 did Lindon finally take the basin in. By then Harper's stone walls had stood for close to fifty years. They first stood as a hall-parlor house facing east. Then they stood as a house with two fronts facing two streets. The city arrived last. It closed a stretch of ground that a couple in a tent had already claimed for themselves.