Lehi now is a thriving settlement in bottom lands along Salt River, where
growth necessarily is limited. Its school-house is about three miles
north of Mesa, which has made by far the greater growth. First known as
Camp Utah, or Utahville, for years it was called Jonesville, but finally
the postoffice name of Lehi, suggested by Apostle Brigham Young, Jr., has
firmly attached.
The first Mormon marriage in the Salt River Valley was at Lehi, that of
Daniel P. Jones and Mary E. Merrill, August 26, 1877. The first birth was
of their son. The first permanent separate house, of adobe, at Lehi, was
built by Thomas Biggs, in the spring of 1878. There was a public school
as early as 1878, taught by Miss Zula Pomeroy. In 1880 an adobe
schoolhouse was built at a cost of $142, the ground donated by Henry C.
Rogers, with David Kimball its main supporter. The following year was
built a much better schoolhouse.
The settlement has a townsite of six blocks, each 26 rods square, with
streets four rods wide, surveyed in November, 1880, by Henry C. Rogers.
Lehi was badly damaged February 19, 1891, when Salt River reached a
height never known before or since. The stream flooded the lower parts of
Phoenix and inundated a large part of the farming land at Lehi. A second
flood, a few days later, was three feet higher than the first. Five Lehi
Indians were drowned and several hundred of them lost their possessions.