Oak City was founded in 1868 by pioneers who had formerly lived at Deseret and chose the site as a refuge from Sevier River floods, naming it after Oak Creek, whose water sustained the community. Their animals had previously been pastured on Oak Creek, and the town site was surveyed into twenty-four blocks patterned after the original survey of Salt Lake City, with lots drawn for property. Families made the wagon trek late in the season near November, bringing doors and windows from their homes in Deseret, while others dismantled their houses there, hauled the materials to the new settlement, and reassembled them on their newly acquired land. Twenty-three families hauled logs from the canyon, dug dugouts, made adobes, and built many one- or two-room houses with dirt roofs and floors. By tapping Oak Creek with shovels and digging irrigation ditches, and by working together through the first winter to fence 360 acres, they established agriculture and cattle raising as the leading early industries. John Lovell served as the first presiding elder from 1868 to 1871, and the first public meeting was held on November 8, 1868. In Oak City, a 300 pound bell ordered in 1893 for a combination church, school, and social hall first hung on a frame on the front porch of the Niels Peter Nielson home before the belfry was completed, and Niels rang it precisely one-half hour before church meetings and before school. The bell later hung in a belfry added to the school building in 1898, was placed on top of the new school from 1915 to 1928, then rehung in the original belfry, and remained there until it was placed in the tower of the new church in 1969. In 1993, stones from the original building were used in a monument reuniting the bell and belfry, and the belfry was returned to Oak City by Don and Colleen Parker.