Biohazard Cleanup Near North Willard Willard, UT

Willard is a city in southeastern Box Elder County, Utah, bordered by the city of Perry to the north and the unincorporated community of South Willard to the south.

Willard was settled on March 31, 1851, by five families, followed by six more families that fall, and was first called North Willow Creek.

Henry G. Sherwood surveyed North Willow Creek in 1851, and the community built a fort of dirt and rock between 1853 and 1855 to defend against local Native American groups, principally the Shoshone.

The community was renamed Willard in the late 1850s in honor of Willard Richards, a recently deceased Apostle of the LDS Church and counselor to Brigham Young, and Willard received its charter as a city in 1870.

Willard's Shoshoni name is Sogo-timp-bow ya.

The population of Willard was 1,978 at the 2020 census, up from 552 in 1870.

Willard developed a booming fruit economy, with local Native Americans teaching settlers to care for service berries, haw-berries, and chokecherries, followed by a cannery and railroad exports of fruit goods.

The flood of 1923 devastated Willard, covering hundreds of fine farms with rock and gravel, washing away crops, and ruining orchards after overgrazing kept rainwater and snowmelt from being absorbed.

In 1964, a reservoir was built in Willard as part of the Weber Basin Project to store surplus water from the Ogden and Weber Rivers.

The Willard Historic District was the first designated historic district in Utah and reflects the Welsh heritage of many of the earliest settlers, with Welsh stonemason Shadrach Jones as the main builder of its Greek Revival and Gothic style homes, forming the largest grouping of pioneer stone homes in Utah, with some forty homes predating 1895 and twelve listed on the National Register of Historic Places.