Leland Historical Monument

It is a small thing, but a strange one: a Mormon farming ward in the Utah Valley bottomlands, named for a California railroad baron. When the settlers southwest of Spanish Fork organized their own ward in 1900, they chose to call it Leland — after Leland Stanford, the Central Pacific magnate whose fortune had just built a university in his dead son's name. The name stuck to the fields. Fed by ditches laid out in the 1860s, Leland became some of the most productive irrigated ground in the county: beets, alfalfa, corn, canning peas. Farmland is what it remains.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Thistle Landslide — 12 mi
  The ruins of a town destroyed by a massive landslide in 1983
• Payson Lakes — 13 mi
  Three alpine lakes in the pines, twelve miles up Payson Canyon
• Bridal Veil Falls — 17 mi
  A dramatic double waterfall cascading 607 feet into Provo Canyon
• Nebo Loop Summit — 17 mi
  The byway's 9,300-foot high point, with Utah Valley spread out below

More markers nearby

• Lake Shore Fort — 3.1 mi
• Keele Monument — 4.7 mi
• The Pioneer Mother — 5.9 mi
• The American Family — 9.4 mi