A platted road in Highland City

A builder's plat became a city-owned street

You're standing on Highland Boulevard, a road built inside the Dry Creek Highlands subdivision in Highland, Utah. The pavement under your feet isn't private property. The county lists it as public road, carved out of a larger development tract when builders laid out the neighborhood around it.

A company called Ivory Development LLC filed the plat for this subdivision's third phase in October 2004. It mapped out house lots, then set aside strips for the streets that would serve them, this one among them. Two years later, in 2006, the county formally created the road parcel and recorded Highland City as its owner, a status it has held ever since.

It was raw land, then a builder's plat, then a city street, all within a couple of years.

Edmund Wordsworth died on December 13, 1850, and was buried on December 15, 1850, on a knoll just north of what is now Alpine City, Utah County. Edmund Wordsworth had contracted mountain fever at Sweet Water while traveling to Zion and never recovered. He was the first person buried on that knoll.

A cemetery grew up on that knoll north of Alpine starting with Edmund Wordsworth's burial in December 1850. Hundreds of burials followed there over the years, and it became the Alpine City Cemetery, now at North Grove Drive. The cemetery holds over 2,500 memorial records and is one of the oldest burial grounds in Utah County.

Widening, a roundabout and offices arrive on the boulevard

The road has kept changing since. Highland City widened Highland Boulevard north of 11800 North and added a roundabout, work that started in 2025. Near the intersection with 11800 North, crews have also milled and relaid the asphalt, part of routine upkeep on a street that's barely old enough to need it. A few hundred feet north, a developer has filed plans for four commercial buildings on the boulevard, office space for a corner that was still a plat map twenty years ago.