A suburb built around a single white spire
East Longbranch Drive is a cul-de-sac in Draper, Utah, built after 2009 on bench land near the Wasatch Range, its layout oriented toward the Draper Utah Temple roughly a mile and a half away. Before development, the ground sat within a succession of redrawn county boundaries and, earlier still, served a state conservation nursery growing bitterbrush seedlings for rangeland restoration.
A temple's spire gave this cul-de-sac its reason to exist
The Draper Utah Temple was dedicated in 2009. It is a Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It sits against the mountains above the valley floor. It stands about a mile and a half from the driveway you are standing on, on Walnut Grove Drive where it meets Longbranch Drive.
Before the temple, this stretch of Draper was open bench land. It sat at the base of the Wasatch Range. Developers held this kind of ground for decades. They waited for a reason to build.
The temple gave the town one. Its white spire is visible from long stretches of the valley. Streets around it filled in with subdivisions in the years after 2009. Curving cul-de-sacs like this one were laid out to face toward it or away from it.
The houses at 1763 and East Longbranch Drive, and the one at East Walnut Grove Drive, carry no older story of their own. They are part of that wave of building. They are ordinary homes on ordinary lots. They went up once the temple made this corner of Draper worth platting. The temple did not just give the neighborhood a landmark. It gave the ground underneath these driveways its reason for existing as a neighborhood at all.
A county government formed and dissolved twice in two years
Long before any spire went up on the east bench, the ground under this whole valley belonged to a county government. It barely had time to settle. Great Salt Lake County formed in 1850. It was dissolved and refounded a year later, then dissolved again in 1852. Each version drew its own boundary across the valley floor. None of them lasted.
Salt Lake County's boundary kept moving for nearly fifty years
The pattern held for decades. Salt Lake County was reformed under new lines in 1862, then again in 1868, then again in 1880. Only in 1896 did its boundary finally hold. For nearly fifty years, the ground under this cul-de-sac sat inside a county that kept getting redrawn. Officials from above did the redrawing. They never asked the people living on it.
Utah County's lines shifted across this same stretch of bench
Utah County went through its own churn. It was set apart in 1850, dissolved in 1851, refounded in 1852, then redrawn again in 1862 and 1880. Each new boundary moved the line a little differently across the same stretch of bench and valley. Nobody living on this ground had a say in where the lines fell. The county that finally stuck did not settle until 1896, the same year Salt Lake County's borders did.
A state nursery grew bitterbrush seedlings on this bench land
Before Longbranch Drive and Walnut Grove Drive carried names at all, this bench land served a different institution. A state-run facility, the Lone Peak Conservation Nursery, grew bitterbrush seedlings on Draper ground. It tested how soil treatments before planting affected the young plants' survival. Bitterbrush is browse for deer and other wildlife. The nursery grew it for reclamation projects across Utah, not for anyone's yard. The land was managed, measured, and treated like a resource long before a developer ever platted a lot on it.
The driveway under your feet has answered to a county, a nursery, and a temple, in that order, and none of them asked first.
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.