The falcons have no history yet
Skyridge High School sits in Lehi, Utah, on ground with no settlement history of its own, opened in August 2016 after a 2011 bond vote and a 2014 groundbreaking. Two miles northeast, near Pleasant Grove, Timpanogos Ute people were killed in the 1849 Battle Creek massacre, an event that shaped the walled and forted town Lehi later became.
A high school was built from scratch in 2016
Skyridge High School did not exist until a bond vote in 2011 set the money aside. Alpine School District broke ground in 2014. Two years later, in August 2016, the doors opened for the first time. There was no old building to renovate and no older school to replace. The falcon mascot came from scratch. The burnt-orange and steel-gray colors came from scratch. A driver's-education range was funded by a 2015 grant. All of it was built on ground that had no story attached to it yet.
Lehi has always sent its notable people elsewhere
The ground under Skyridge sits inside a town that has spent more than a century sending people away from it. James Taylor Harwood was born in Lehi in 1860. He grew up to become one of Utah's first professionally trained painters and etchers. He studied in Paris before returning west. He died in 1940, eighty years later. He is one of several Lehi natives whose lives played out far from the town that raised them. The high school's own list, so far, runs the other direction. Its early notable names are athletes and alumni who are still just getting started. They play football and run track. Their school colors are less than a decade old. Lehi has always been better at producing people than at keeping them.
Militiamen killed Timpanogos Ute people near Pleasant Grove
The quiet Lehi gave its children did not come free. In March 1849, General Daniel H. Wells led 35 militiamen against a Timpanogos Ute camp near what is now Pleasant Grove, about two miles northeast of the school. At least four people were killed. A boy captured in that attack is said to have grown up to become the war chief Antonga Black Hawk. Wells ordered a defensive wall built around the American Fork settlement that same year. Later he ordered a full fort, as the valley filled with families. Those families stayed. Their descendants are the ones the town later raised, educated, and watched leave.
A Lehi-born politician spent his career far from home
Abel John Evans was born in Lehi in 1852, three years after the wall went up. He spent his adult life in Utah politics, carrying the town's name into legislative rooms and public offices far from where he grew up. He died in 1939, having spent decades of his working life away from Lehi. His career followed the same shape as Harwood's, a Lehi childhood behind him, the real work of his life happening somewhere else.
A subdivision lot changed hands through a decade of paperwork
Half a mile from the school, the ground itself kept changing hands without much happening on it. In 2013, a developer platted the Eagle Ridge Phase 2 subdivision, turning open land into house lots. A single-family home went up on one of those lots in 2016, the same year Skyridge opened its doors. The property passed from builder to first owners that same August. It changed hands again through a decade of financing. It sold once more a decade later. No event marks the lot beyond the paperwork. It is ordinary ground, platted, built on, and sold, the way most of the valley around the school has always been.
The falcons practice on ground that took a wall, a fort, and two centuries of quiet turnover to become unremarkable.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and it will dig the ground you are standing on instead, wherever that is.