The city of Mapleton started out as an agricultural extension of the small Hobble Creek community that is now called Springville, Utah. Mapleton is located to the south and east of its parent community, on the Provo level of what was once Lake Bonneville. The area was partially covered by an extensive stand of junipers which started near the mouth of Hobble Creek Canyon and extended around its western edge to the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon. On the eastern side it is flanked by one of the most beautiful of the Wasatch Mountains--the official maps now call it Mount Flonette, but earlier inhabitants of the area called it Sierra Bonita.

According to the testimony of Cyrus Sanford and Richard Bird, two early settlers of Springville and Mapleton, land on the bench was surveyed for farming purposes less than a year after the original settlement was founded in 1850. By 1856, a group of men including Sanford and Bird, Henry Claucus, Buck Atchison, Sanford Fuller, John Deal, John Maycock, Myron Crandall, Spicer Crandall, Henry Roylance, Thomas Avery, Walter Bird, Stephen C. Perry, and John Solomon Fuller were busily engaged in leveling the land and digging a ditch to bring water from Hobble Creek. The ditch was five miles in length and cost over one hundred dollars with its added improvements.