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.