Ephraim

Ephraim is the beating heart of what the federal government officially calls the Little Denmark District, and the nickname is earned: by 1880 the town was roughly ninety percent Scandinavian, settled so heavily by Danish converts that half the residents shared one of eight surnames — Anderson, Christensen, Hansen, Jensen, Larson, Nielsen, Olsen, Peterson. Founded in 1854 as a fort, Ephraim was the most important defensive settlement in the valley through the end of the Black Hawk War in 1868, and it grew from there into the county's largest and most cosmopolitan town.

What made the difference was the college. In 1888 local Latter-day Saints founded the Sanpete Stake Academy, holding the first classes on the upper floor of the Ephraim Co-op on Main Street. The school nearly went under around 1900, until a two-thousand-dollar gift from church president Lorenzo Snow saved it — and was repaid in the only currency the town had to spare, by renaming the academy in his honor. Snow College is now one of the oldest two-year colleges west of the Mississippi, and the legend persists that part of its founding was financed by Sunday eggs, the proceeds of every egg the town's hens laid on the Sabbath. The college made Ephraim a college town, and college towns keep their lights on; this is the place on the drive to find lunch, gas, and a decent cup of coffee.

The Scandinavian past is not just remembered here but performed. Every spring, on the weekend before Memorial Day, the Ephraim Scandinavian Festival fills the streets and the Snow College campus with folk dancing, Danish pastry, Viking games, and — in a detail that says a great deal about the town's sense of humor — a wife-carrying race. Ephraim sits midway down the US-89 Heritage Highway, between historic Spring City and the county seat at Manti.