William Davis, a Mormon pioneer settler, explored the area around Box Elder Creek in 1850 and returned the following year with his family and two other families to take up permanent residence. By the fall of 1853, eight families with a total of twenty-four people lived in the settlement.

In the October 1853 Mormon general conference, church president Brigham Young directed Lorenzo Snow, an apostle in the church, to take fifty families to the Box Elder area and develop a cooperative system in which the community would become self-sufficient, producing all that they consumed. Snow chose artisans skilled in trades important to the development of a pioneer community. Most were Mormon converts from Denmark.

Snow became the political and ecclesiastical leader of the community. In 1855 he had the town plat surveyed, renamed the settlement Brigham City after church president Brigham Young, and encouraged the people to build permanent homes. Several small businesses were established during the 1850s, and the Box Elder County Courthouse, under construction from 1855 to 1857, was used for city and county business, theatrical productions, and religious meetings until church buildings could be built.