History of Utah, 1540-1886 - Brigham Young University

FOUNDING OF OGDEN CITY. 307
surveyed in the autumn of 1849, and the place was
named Centreville.
Near Centreville, in what was afterward Davis
county, a settlement was begun in the spring of 1848
by Peregrine Sessions, the place being called Bountiful.
2
As early as 1841 the country round where the city
of Ogden was laid out was held as a Spanish grant by
Miles M. Goodyear, who built a fort, consisting of a
stockade and a "few log houses, near the confluence
of the Weber and Ogden rivers. 3 On the 6th of a
June, 1848, James Brown, of the battalion, coining
from California with $5,000, mostly in gold-dust, purchased
the tract from Goodyear. 4 As it was one of
the most fertile spots in all that region, grain and
vegetables being raised in abundance, not only numbers
of the brethren from Salt Lake City, but after
a while gentiles from the western states, settled
there. In August 1850 Brigham Young, Heber C.
Kimball, Orson Hyde, and others laid out the city of
O^den, so called from the name of the river. 5 The
2 A little to the south of Centreville was a small settlement which at first
went by the name of Call's settlement, afterward taking the name Bountiful.
Utah Early Records, MS., 132. In Sloan's Utah Gazetteer, 130-1, it is stated
that there were three settlements of this name—East, West, and South Bountiful—West
Bountiful being settled in 1848 by James Fackrell and his family,
South Bountiful by George Meeyers and Edwin Page. All are now on
the line of the Utah Central railroad. In January of this year Sessions also
founded a settlement which bore his name, about 15 miles north of S. L. City.
Harrison's Crit. Notes on Utah, MS., 45.
3 The tract is described as commencing at the mouth of Weber Canon,
following the base of the mountains north to the hot springs, thence westward
to the Great Salt Lake, along the southern shore of the lake to a point opposite
Weber Canon, and thence to the point of beginning. Stanford's Ogden City,
MS., 1; Richards' Narr., MS., passim.
i Some say for $1,950; others place the amount at $3,000. See Richards'
Narr., MS.; Stanford's Ogden City, MS.
'Utah Early Records, MS., 112. See also S. L. C. Contributor, li. 240;
and Deseret News, Sept. 7, 1850. Stanford's Ogden City, MS., 1-2. The
sibe was selected as early as Sept. 1849, on the south side of the Ogden River,
at the point of bench-land between the forks of the Ogden and Weber rivers,
so that water from both streams might be used for irrigation. Utah Early
Records, MS., 94. North Ogden, formerly called Ogden Hole, once the resort
of a noted desperado, was laid out in 1851. Amos Maycock, in Utah Sketches,
MS., 114. 'Heber C. Kimball, Willard Richards, J. M. Grant, Brigham
Young, and several others ascended a sand hill, Sept. 3d, to discover the l-esfc
location for a town, which we finally decided should be on the south sid. «f