🠈 Box Elder Utah 🠊
Box Elder is a county in Northwestern Utah. The county is named for the maple trees that are plentiful in the rolling foothills of the Wasatch and Sawtooth Mountains.
The Boxelder Maple (Acer negundo) has pinnately compound leaves like elder trees and light bark like the boxwood trees of Europe; hence the strange taxonomy of the tree.
One also encounters the term "boxelder" in reference to the "boxelder bug" that feeds on boxelder maples. The boxelder bug is a true bug, not a beetle. They tend to congregate in large colonies. They are prone to hibernate on the inside of siding and mistake central heating systems for spring; so one often finds the bugs crawling around houses throughout the year.
Box Elder County includes towns along the Wasatch Front such as its county seat Brigham City and Tremonton. It also includes sparsely populated areas of the Northwest corner of Utah including stark sections of the Great Salt Flats and the rolling hills of the Raft River Range in the Northwest corner of the state.
The California Trail dips from Idaho into Box Elder County following Grouse Creek into Nevada.
Box Elder County first received national attention on May 10, 1869 with the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad at Promontory Summit. The county continues to play an important role in transcontinental transportation with the intersection of I84 and I15 near Tremonton.
The 2010 census recorded a population of 49,975. The 2015 population estimate was 52,097.