A hillside empties out, then fills back up
East Aspen Leaf Place in Salt Lake City is a house built in 2001 on a fifth-acre lot in the Oak Vista 3 At Suncrest subdivision, one of many lots carved from open hillside above Draper. A couple of miles away, the Draper Utah Temple was dedicated in 2009, becoming the landmark by which the hillside is now known.
A house rises on a fifth-acre lot above Draper
The house at East Aspen Leaf Place went up in 2001. It was one lot among many carved out of a subdivision called Oak Vista 3 At Suncrest. Salt Lake County's assessor record puts it at 2,369 square feet. It sits on a fifth of an acre. It was built the same year as its neighbors on Aspen Leaf Place and Oak Bend Drive. Before that, this was open hillside above Draper, unbuilt ground on the shoulder of the Wasatch. The subdivision didn't arrive with a single landmark event. It arrived the way most American neighborhoods do. A plat got filed. Lots got surveyed. Houses got framed one after another. A street existed where none had before.
A temple on the hillside becomes the local landmark
In 2009, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dedicated the Draper Utah Temple a couple of miles from this driveway. It sits on a promontory above the valley, visible for miles in the clear Utah air. Before it went up, this end of Draper was mostly ranchland and scattered new subdivisions like the one under your feet. After it went up, the temple became the reference point for the whole hillside. Neighbors here now give directions by it. A house built in 2001 didn't move an inch. But the ground around it changed what it meant to live here. What rose nearby eight years later made the difference.
County lines around this hillside kept getting redrawn
The county lines around this hillside never held still. Salt Lake County was created in 1850. It dissolved into Great Salt Lake County the next year. It was rebuilt again in 1852. It got redrawn twice more before 1896, when its borders finally settled into the shape they hold today. None of those changes were decided on this hillside. They were drawn in territorial offices miles away. They happened years before anyone platted a street here. The ground under Aspen Leaf Place sat inside a jurisdiction that kept getting erased and redrawn. This happened long before it had a name of its own.
A camera at Fort Douglas recorded soldiers, not this slope
Somewhere in the valley below, a photographer set up a camera at Fort Douglas. This was between 1896 and 1899. He caught a formation of Black soldiers standing on a cut lawn. They were members of the U. S. Colored Troops. They were stationed at the fort that watched over Salt Lake City. The print survives as an albumen cabinet card. It shows soldiers in dark uniforms lined up in front of brick buildings and tall trees. Nobody photographed this stretch of Suncrest hillside in the 1890s. It was empty range above the valley. What got recorded instead was the federal garrison. The government had planted it nearby. A fact about the valley was decided in Washington. It was not decided on this slope.
A Rhode Island spoon sold the valley's story east
A spoon company in Providence, Rhode Island, cast a souvenir spoon around 1891. It was made to sell the story of Latter-day Saint settlement in Salt Lake City. It never touched Utah ground. It was stamped, sold, and mailed out as a keepsake. Its buyers had likely never seen the place. The idea of the valley traveled east before most of the valley itself had streets. Two thousand miles from the hillside sat a New England workshop. A temple would eventually stand on that hillside. Someone in that workshop decided what Salt Lake City meant. He put it on a spoon.
The temple still catches the evening light two miles off, and it is still the thing people here point to when they give directions.
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.