A bond built the school, the town supplies the names
Lehi, Utah, is the birthplace of painters James Taylor Harwood and Edwin Evans and church leaders Oscar A. Kirkham and J. Leslie Broadbent, and the site three miles north of Battle Creek, where militia killed at least four Timpanogos people in 1849. Skyridge High School, opened nearby in 2016, was funded by a 2011 Alpine School District bond.
A 2011 bond built Skyridge High School nearby
Skyridge High School opened its doors in August 2016. It sits a quarter mile from where you are standing, its colors burnt orange and steel gray, its mascot a falcon named Flash. The building exists because of a 2011 bond passed by the Alpine School District. Voters agreed to pay for it, and construction broke ground three years later. In 2015 the school picked up a grant to build a driver's education range, a small, practical addition to a large new campus. None of it looked like history in the making. It looked like what it was: a school district solving a crowding problem with a bond measure and a construction schedule.
Lehi kept sending its children into public life
Lehi has been exporting names since before this school had a foundation. Abel John Evans, a politician, was born here in 1852. James Taylor Harwood and Edwin Evans (artist), both painters, were born here within a year of each other, in 1860. Oscar A. Kirkham, a church leader, was born in 1880. J. Leslie Broadbent, another Mormon leader, followed in 1891. Among them stands Kay Christofferson, a politician born in Lehi, one more name in a town that kept quietly sending people into public life. None of them are recorded as having set foot on the ground where Skyridge now stands. This is what this town has tended to produce. It did so generation after generation. It did so long before it had a bond measure or a falcon mascot to show for it.
Militia killed Timpanogos people at Battle Creek
The valley's naming started with violence. Thirty-five militiamen, ordered out by Brigham Young, attacked a Timpanogos group at a creek eight kilometers north-northwest of here. At least four people died. Settlers first called the place Battle Creek. The name embarrassed the town that grew there, and it was changed to Pleasant Grove. The killing happened before any school, any bond, any painter was born in Lehi. It sat under the valley's later, quieter history the way bedrock sits under a foundation.
A distance runner's life ended in Lehi
Paul Cummings was a distance runner. He raced competitively for years, far from this valley, before he died in Lehi in 2001 at age 47. The record gives no more than that: a life spent running elsewhere, an ending recorded here. Lehi appears in his biography the way it appears in so many others in this town's ledger, as the last line rather than the plot.
A killing in American Fork ended in convictions
Three miles south in American Fork, a man was killed in 1984. Two people were convicted of the crime and sent to prison for it. The valley's civic surface, its bonds and its falcon mascots, sits over episodes like this one too. The killing belongs to the same ground as the painters and the preachers. It just belongs to a different kind of record.
A platted lot became a house near Skyridge
Where a single-family house now stands, three-tenths of a mile from the school, there was open ground until 2013. That year a developer platted the lot into the Eagle Ridge Phase 2 subdivision, one of dozens carved that decade out of Lehi's fields. A house went up on it in 2016, the same year Skyridge opened its doors a quarter mile away. Two pieces of paperwork, one town, the same decade of turning open land into rows of addresses.
The school still holds classes on ground that spent a century and a half handing its most interesting people to somewhere else.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.