Corinne, UT

Corinne is a Box Elder County city on the west bank of the Bear River, founded in 1869 as the transcontinental railroad reached northern Utah. Former Union officers and non-Mormon merchants from Salt Lake City laid out the town as a freight-transfer point for goods moving toward the Montana mining country. For several years Corinne was promoted as the Gentile Capital of Utah, with warehouses, banks, hotels, an opera house, and a busy river-and-rail trade. The town's fortunes changed when new rail lines shifted the freight routes, but the old story remains visible in the Corinne Historical Museum and the 1870 Methodist-Episcopal Church, Utah's oldest existing Protestant church building. Corinne now sits near I-84 and the Bear River marshes. It is a small Utah city with a frontier beginning, a complicated religious history, and a railroad map that once reached far beyond the Great Salt Lake.