Manti

Manti is where Sanpete Valley began. In late November of 1849, a party of about two hundred and twenty-five Mormon settlers, led by Isaac Morley and George Washington Bradley, reached this spot and dug into the south face of a low hill to survive their first winter — the first community the Latter-day Saints established south of Provo, and the seed from which every other town in central Utah grew. They came at the invitation of the Ute chief Walkara, who had asked Brigham Young to send people to teach his band to farm; the two men are jointly remembered as the town's founders. So many Danish converts followed that Manti went by the nickname Copenhagen in its early years.

The hill the first settlers burrowed into for shelter became, a generation later, the site of their masterpiece. The Manti Temple — the fifth temple built by the Latter-day Saints, completed in 1888 — rises from that same ground, now called Temple Hill, built of the cream-colored oolite limestone quarried from the hill itself. Its interior hides two ninety-five-foot spiral staircases that climb to the upper floors with no central support, the work of Scandinavian craftsmen who built across the whole valley. For fifty-three summers the temple's south lawn was the stage for the Mormon Miracle Pageant, an outdoor production with a cast of hundreds, until it ended its run in 2019; the temple itself was carefully restored and rededicated in 2024. You can read its full story on the Manti Temple page. The grounds are open to all; the interior is reserved for members of the church.

As the county seat and the valley's first settlement, Manti is the historic heart of the US-89 Heritage Highway, which runs south from Fairview and carries on past town toward Sterling, the Palisade State Park turnoff, and Gunnison at the valley's south end. It is a town that still feels its age in the best way — a quiet grid of pioneer houses under the pale bulk of the temple, in the heart of Central Utah.