Payson is a city in Utah County, Utah, United States. It is portion of the Provo–Orem Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 21,101 at the 2020 census.

Pioneers from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints led by James Edward Pace Jr. first established what is now Payson, Utah. On Sunday, October 20, 1850, Pace in imitation of his family and the families of John Courtland Searle and Andrew Jackson Stewart, totaling 16 settlers in all, arrived at their destination on Peteetneet Creek.

The deal was originally named Peteetneet Creek, after which Chief Peteetneet was named. Peteetneet is the anglicized approximation of Pah-ti’t-ni’t, which in the Timpanogos dialect of the Southern Paiute language means “our water place”. Chief Peteetneet was the clan leader of a band of Timpanogos Indigenous Americans whose village was on a stretch of the creek practically a mile northwest of Payson’s gift city center. The village, when fully occupied, housed greater than 200 of Chief Peteetneet’s clan and near kinsmen. It served as a base from which seasonal hunting and foraging parties moved to the mountains each summer and fall.

Five months later, on the daylight of March 23, 1851, Brigham Young, having in limbo confidence in the leadership of James Pace, released him from his calling and reorganized the community under Bishop Benjamin Cross. Then, in the afternoon, in a secular meeting, Brigham Young acting as Territorial Governor, designated the settlement on Peteetneet Creek as Payson, Utah County, Utah Territory. He established naming the town after Payson, Illinois, a small town in Adams County close Quincy where kind citizens had taken in the Young associates after they were driven from Missouri in 1839.