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I’m still looking for information on the Springville Fort / Hobble Creek Fort but I found a couple old renditions of it. It was apparently near 200 N 200 W.
01 Thursday Jun 2017
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I’m still looking for information on the Springville Fort / Hobble Creek Fort but I found a couple old renditions of it. It was apparently near 200 N 200 W.
Pingback: Springville, Utah (Originally “Hobble Creek”) | JacobBarlow.com
Hello, I’m wondering if you’ve ever found the modern day boundaries of springville fort. Thanks!
From what I have found it seems the corners were 200 N 200 W (Where this is https://jacobbarlow.com/2014/05/28/springvilles-first-camp-site/ ) and 200 N 200 E, 200 E 200 S, 200 S 200 W.
Where did you get those coordinates? It seems unusually large for a fort of that era. According to the Aaron John Biographical Sketch written by his clerk William Gallop, the Fr. Springville was “built around” 1.25 acres which would be about 1/4 of a current city block. The coordinates you set out would be roughly 100 acres. Such as size does not match the proportions of the fort as shown in the sketches above. Also, compare that size to other forts of that era (i.e. Fort Cove). Those coordinates would also span Hobble Creek which would make an insecure fort as the span across the creek would require some type of gap in the fort walls to allow the water to flow through.
I never thought about looking into how many acres the forts were, interesting idea.
As far as it being unbelievable that it would be the 100 acres you mentioned (technically 96) instead of the 1.25. I just calculated sizes on a handful of others and more are big than small. Not that it proves anything, but I think it’s easily possible to do a 96 acre for when others were 74, 85 or even 568 acres.
At any rate, I had a lot of fun calculating these today of them real quick.
North Ogden Fort was 6×6 blocks, 568 acres.
Parowan’s was 3×3 blocks, 85 acres
Pleasant Grove’s fort was 4×4 blocks, 74 acres
Lehi’s fort was 4×4 blocks, 70 acres
Cedar City’s was 63 acres
Payson’s fort was 4×4 blocks, 61 acres
Nephi’s was 3×3 blocks, 59 acres
Manti had a few, the first was a quarter of a block, then upgraded to a block, then upgraded to 3×3 blocks, 58 acres
Bingham Fort in Ogden was 45 acres
Utah’s first fort (in SLC) was 42 acres
American Fork’s was 37 acres
Heber’s fort was 33 acres
Moroni’s Fort was 13 acres
Union Fort (Midvale) was 10 acres.
Fort Deseret is still standing, at 6.3 acres
Kamas had a fort that was 5.625 acres
Mt Pleasant was 5.5 acres
Fort Utah (Provo) was 5 acres.
Draper’s fort was 4.29 acres
Big Cottonwood Creek Fort was 4 acres.
Wallburg Fort was 3.67 acres
Ephraim’s fort was 1.5 acres
Salina Fort was 1.05 acres
Lake Shore’s fort was 1 acre
Box Elder was 0.68 acres
Johnson Fort (Enoch) was 0.625 acres
Las Vegas Fort was 0.51 acres
Paragonah Fort was 0.25 acres.
Cove Fort is about 0.25 acres.
As far as it going over the river, I can remember several that had that. Many built on a spring and had it run under the wall to go out.
Rell Francis of Springville passed away several years ago. He had a treasure trove of historical photos of Springville. I am not sure what happened to them, maybe he donated them to the DUP museum.