Mount Pleasant

Mount Pleasant is the most worldly of the Sanpete towns, and it wears its history on a remarkably intact Main Street. Mormon colonists first tried to settle here in 1852, but the outpost was abandoned and burned during the Walker War, and the permanent town was not laid out until 1859, when a larger party returned from Ephraim and Manti. What followed a generation later was a building boom: as wool, cattle, and grain money flowed in and the Rio Grande Western Railroad reached town in 1890, settlers replaced their first wood-frame storefronts with architect-designed buildings of cut stone and brick. Enough of them survive — the 1888 Sanpete County Co-op among them — that the two-block commercial core is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The town's real distinction is that it was never entirely a Mormon town. Mount Pleasant became the most religiously mixed community in the county, home to liberal Mormons and to Protestant newcomers who arrived to compete for converts in the late nineteenth century. The most lasting product of that rivalry still operates today: Wasatch Academy, founded in 1875 by the Presbyterian minister Duncan McMillan, who bought a Main Street dance hall and started teaching. It is the oldest continuously operating boarding school in Utah, and it has since grown into an international prep school, drawing students from around the world to a campus of historic buildings in a town of three thousand.

Stop to walk the Main Street district and the academy grounds; together they tell the story of a frontier valley that turned out to be less monolithic, and more interesting, than its reputation suggests. Mount Pleasant sits six miles south of Fairview on the US-89 Heritage Highway, an easy first stop on the drive south.