Mormon Grid-Patterned Villages
Typical of Mormon villages and towns, the city blocks in St. George are uniformly square! St. George, the largest town in southern Utah, was named after the Mormon
Apostle George A. Smith, first cousin of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon
church.
For an electronic version, go to TopoZone.com.
How many ward
chapels can you count in this Mormon
settlement?
Shortly after Brigham Young arrived, the Saints began to lay out Salt Lake City, using a pattern that they would follow in subsequent settlements. Commencing at the southeast corner of Temple Square – currently South Temple and Main Street – where Orson Pratt established the base line and principal meridian for subsequent surveys in most of Utah, the pioneers marked out the city in ten-acre blocks. Brigham Young said that he wanted to be able to turn a span of oxen around without backing them up, so they left room for streets to be forty-four yards wide.
Since they planned a community for Saints rather than a subdivision for speculators, they subdivided the blocks into one-and-a-quarter-acre town lots. The leaders followed Joseph Smith's plat of the City of Zion rather loosely and invested Salt Lake City with a suburban character. Each resident owned a town lot, and using the New England and European pattern, they situated the large farms outside the city. On their lots in the city, the people built barns, sheds, wallows, and coops for domestic animals, and they planted vegetable, fruit, and flower gardens. They dug ditches to coax the mountain streams down each side of the street so the people could divert water for irrigation and household use (Source: historytogo.utah.gov/settlement.html).
After arriving in Salt Lake City, many Latter-day Saints were sent by Brigham Young to settle parts of Arizona, California, Idaho, Nevada, Wyoming and Utah. Brigham Young, sometimes referred to as an "American Moses," directed the establishment of an estimated 350 to 400 communities throughout the American West (Source: www.lds.org).