A civic history called it a century of public education, written by a Provo schoolteacher named J.C. Moffitt.
Last reviewed 12 September 2026 · A two-minute read · 1849–2018
The short answer
Provo's public school system began without a schoolhouse, trained teachers or tax base, as families who had just arrived decided their children needed to read, meeting first in cabins and meetinghouses before the town, known in booster pamphlets as the "Garden City of Utah," built a lasting institution over the following century.
Cafe Rio, a favorite former dining spot for Ken and Alicia, both separately and together. — 2007 · Ken Lund · CC BY-SA 2.0
1850s to 1900
Families met in cabins before Provo had a schoolhouse
J. C. Moffitt wrote a book called *A century of public education in Provo, Utah*. He was a teacher. He had lived through the last third of that century himself. He traced the system back to its start: no schoolhouse, no trained teachers, no tax base. Families had just arrived. They decided their children needed to read.
Early classes met in cabins and meetinghouses. Provo had no building made just for school yet. Moffitt's account followed the fights that came next. Which subjects mattered? Who would pay? Did a farm town need more than basic reading and math?
Provo started calling itself the "Garden City of Utah." It sold itself in booster pamphlets as a place of orchards and seed catalogs. Its school question did not go away. It got bigger. More families meant more classrooms. More families meant more teachers. More families meant more arguments about how a growing town should spend money on its children.
The fights Moffitt described did not end with more buildings. They changed shape instead.
1900 to 1950s
Provo reargued what it owed its children for a century
Moffitt's later chapters tracked a public school system settling into something permanent: fixed boundaries, standard grades, a bureaucracy where once there had been improvisation. The century started with parents building a schoolhouse board by board. It ended with Provo running an institution large enough to need administrators, budgets, and long-term planning.
What his book made plain was that none of it had been settled quickly. Every decade of that century, Provo reargued the same basic question its first settlers faced. What does a town owe the children growing up in it? Who decides? The answer kept changing. The arguing was the actual history.
Winter 1849 to February 1850
Militiamen killed Timpanogos families along the Provo River
Before Provo built a school, it decided who belonged inside its walls. A settler killed a Timpanogos man named Old Bishop. He accused Old Bishop of stealing a shirt. He hid the body in the Provo River. He weighted it down with rocks. The killing was covered up. Timpanogos people responded by taking cattle.
Brigham Young authorized the militia to answer. Between February 8 and 17, 1850, about ninety men attacked Timpanogos camps along the Provo River. The camps were near where you stand. They killed somewhere between forty and a hundred men, women, and children. Some of the dead were decapitated. Their heads were displayed at Fort Utah.
The killing that started it was hidden in the river before the town had built a single classroom.
April 1850
A Ute man was garroted in Provo before any trial law existed
That same spring, Provo answered a different question with the same speed. A Ute man named Patsowits was accused of killing two settlers. He was garroted, strangled to death, in Provo that April. There was no territorial government yet to try him under. It was the first recorded execution in what would become Utah Territory. Settlers decided his fate on the spot. They worked out justice the same way they would soon work out schooling.
The massacre left survivors alive. What Provo did with them came next.
February 1850 onward
Survivors were bound into settler households as labor
About forty Timpanogos people survived the killings along the river. Most were women and children. Fort Utah held them afterward. Settler families took them in. They were not neighbors. They were indentured labor. They worked in houses and fields for people who called it charity. Some were informally adopted. A few were later ransomed back by Ute leaders who negotiated for their return.
The same families debating what they owed the children they were raising had already answered what they owed someone else's children. It was labor, not a classroom.
The ground under the seed catalogs and the schoolhouse ledgers was, first, ground where a killing was hidden and a people were dispossessed.
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Modern
winter 1849-1850
In the winter before the attack, measles spread from Fort Utah's settlers into Ute camps in Utah Valley, killing many Timpanogos people and deepening the tensions that exploded into violence.
In February 1850, about 90 Mormon militiamen under orders authorized by Brigham Young attacked Timpanogos Ute encampments near the Provo River, killing an estimated 40 to 100 men, women, and children.
A Timpanogos man known as Old Bishop was killed by a settler over an accusation of stealing a shirt, and his body was sunk in the Provo River with rocks tied to it, an act that set off the retaliatory violence that followed.
About 40 Timpanogos survivors, mostly women and children, were taken after the massacre and indentured or informally adopted into Mormon settler families.
A Ute man named Patsowits was garroted, or strangled, in Provo in April 1850 for killing two settlers, the first recorded execution in what became Utah Territory.
Albert Enstrom, Andrew Johnson, and Alfred Nelson were murdered near Pelican Point on Utah Lake in 1895, and despite a high-profile trial and a gubernatorial pardon, the case was never solved.
Westland Construction, working with Intermountain CNS LLC, filed notice of completed construction for Brigham Young University on this parcel in early 2001.
Wells Fargo Financial National Bank reconveyed the property to David A. and Andriana L. Cassani in 2004, releasing a deed of trust recorded back in 1997.
What was here before Provo's school system existed?
Before any schoolhouse, families met in cabins and meetinghouses to teach their children, with no trained teachers or tax base to support formal education.
What happened at Provo along the Provo River in February 1850?
About 90 militiamen, authorized by Brigham Young, attacked Timpanogos encampments near the Provo River, killing an estimated 40 to 100 men, women and children, and displaying some of the dead's heads at Fort Utah.
Who wrote the history of Provo's school system?
J. C. Moffitt, a Provo schoolteacher who had lived through much of the era himself, wrote "A century of public education in Provo, Utah."
What led to the killing of Timpanogos people near Provo?
A settler killed a Timpanogos man named Old Bishop over an accusation of stealing a shirt and hid his body in the Provo River, an act that was covered up and that led Timpanogos people to take cattle in response, triggering the militia attack that followed.
What happened to the Timpanogos survivors of the 1850 attack?
About forty survivors, mostly women and children, were taken in by settler families as indentured labor, some informally adopted, and a few later ransomed back by Ute leaders.
What was Utah's first recorded execution?
A Ute man named Patsowits was garroted in Provo in April 1850 after being accused of killing two settlers, decided on the spot because no territorial government yet existed to try him.
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