Mayfield sits a few miles east of the US-89 Heritage Highway at the mouth of Twelve Mile Canyon, tucked hard against the mountains — the most plainly alpine of the Sanpete towns, with the feel of a trailhead as much as a settlement. It is the last clutch of houses and hayfields before the road tips up into the high country.
Its name took a while to settle. The valley was first called Arropine, after a Ute leader — a brother of Chief Walkara — who wintered here and is said to have prized this spot above anywhere else in the Sanpitch country — a place the Utes knew as Aw-wan-ah-voo and revered as an old fortification. A second settlement on the south bank of Twelve Mile Creek, founded by families from Ephraim in 1875, went by New London. When the two joined under a single church ward on the Fourth of July, 1877, they settled on Mayfield, for the way the valley looked in spring. The first cabins, raised on the north bank in 1873 by Danish and Norwegian families — Sorensons, Hansens, Olsens — carried the same Scandinavian stamp as the towns to the north; Mayfield itself was incorporated in 1909.
Twelve Mile Canyon is the reason to come. The road climbs east from town up onto Skyline Drive, the high gravel route that runs the crest of the Manti division of the forest above ten thousand feet. The canyons along this front — Six Mile, Nine Mile, Twelve Mile — were named by the early settlers for their distance from the Manti Temple, a small sign of how thoroughly that one building organized the whole valley's sense of itself. Mayfield is where the farmland ends and the plateau begins.
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