How can one drive through this productive valley and not consider stopping at the Pepperidge Farm bakery outlet store on U.S. 91 in Richmond to pick up some cookies or Goldfish, those tiny crackers, available here in bountiful plastic bags?

How about specialty ice cream (and perhaps a yummy sandwich) at Utah State University's campus Aggie Ice Cream shop, or fresh cheese (curds anyone?) or ice cream at Gossner Foods at 1000 W. 1000 North?

Or "harvesting" a few sweet honey bottles at Cox Honeyland on U.S. 89-91, between Wellsville and Logan? Or chocolates at the Bluebird Candy Co. (and cafe) downtown?

But the guide also points visitors to vendors who make and sell artisan bread (Crumb Brothers), micro-dairy cheese (the Rockhill Creamery farmstead, a few blocks east of U.S. 91 on State Street in Richmond), and the jams and juices from another working farm (Weeks Berries of Paradise — in Paradise, of course).

And as anyone who has motored through Cache Valley can tell you, green pastoral scenes and history are everywhere. Why, wandering the valley to see calendar-worthy barns isn't a bad pastime. (The area has at least two century-old barns advertising in huge white lettering "Dr. Pierce's tonic" for women.)

Several blocks of downtown Logan itself are considered a bona fide historic district, listed on the National Registry of Historic Places.

"Logan displays a not unpleasant mixture of the new and old, having retained much of the charm of the venerable and distinguished age," Ward J. Roylance wrote in his 1982 revision of the Depression-era WPA book "Utah: A Guide to the State."

Drive through Logan's central residential areas and you're likely to see homey examples of just that: Lovely houses that could have been the inspiration for a little girl's dollhouse, circa 1920; or one with craggy tan stones and pastel flowers that looks like it could have been transported directly from rural England.

Downtown has its own self-guided walking tour brochure — or you could join Ann Egland at 10:30 a.m. each Monday, Wednesday and Friday for her take on the area's past, complete with anecdotes..

"It gives people an idea of what it was like here in the 1880s," she says of both the guided and self-guided tours.

The courthouse itself, built in 1883 and renovated in 2005, is a fine example of Logan Past.

Egland shows off the antique, scenery-painted (but empty) Moser safe in the center hallway; large-scale paintings on the walls by Utahns Minerva Teichert, Everett Thorpe and Kent Wallis; the elegant board room, with specially milled and tinted carpet, where the Cache County Board still meets ("this is the oldest government building still in use" — as a government building — "in Utah," she says).