Seven students grew into a school that never stopped moving
Jordan High School began with seven kids in a church basement, a quarter mile from where you stand.
Last reviewed 15 September 2026 · A three-minute read · 100 BC–2015
The short answer
Sandy, Utah, holds ground beneath which archaeologists found a 1,500-year-old pithouse near Dimple Dell Park, evidence of Western Shoshone occupation around 500 AD. The same ground later held Jordan High School, founded in 1907 with seven students, and today borders America First Field, home of Real Salt Lake since 2008.
Construction of Real Salt Lake Stadium - 2008-04-28. — 2008 · Shaan Hurley · CC BY 2.0
1907
Seven students and a teacher formed a college
Jordan High School (Sandy, Utah) took root when seven students started meeting in the basement of a church in Midvale. Their leader was a man named Weston Morley. He had no building, no budget, and no plan beyond teaching whoever showed up.
Morley's students started handing him money. Word spread. The little group in the church basement called itself The People's College, open to students of any age, not just teenagers. Within a year, enrollment had jumped from seven students to two thousand.
That kind of growth could not stay in a basement. The school needed walls of its own, and soon it got them, a short distance from where you are standing now.
A church basement meeting grew into a 2,000-student school within a year.
1914 to 1996
Jordan High School outgrew two buildings in a century
In 1914, Jordan High School opened a real building at 9351 South State Street, about a quarter mile from here. It held the school for over eighty years, long enough to earn a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. That original building is gone now. A movie theater, Jordan Commons, sits on the site today.
By 1996, the school had outgrown that home too. Jordan High moved to its current campus, close to where you stand, built to hold 2,600 students. Its students still call themselves the Beetdiggers. The name comes from when sugar beet fields surrounded the school. Every fall, classes paused so kids could bring in the harvest.
The school marked its hundredth birthday in 2007 with a two-day celebration. A hundred years earlier, the whole enterprise had been seven students and a man willing to teach them for whatever they could give him.
approximately 500 CE
A household dug a pithouse into this slope
Long before there was a basement or a college, this ground held a home. Archaeologists digging near Dimple Dell Park found a pithouse dug into the slope. Its fire pit still held ash and burned bone. Obsidian tools lay scattered around it. The dig dated the site to roughly 1,500 years old. Western Shoshone families lived on these south-facing slopes long before Sandy had a name.
It was never a large settlement. A single household was dug into the earth for warmth. People used what the land offered. The sugar beet fields that later gave Jordan High its Beetdigger name were not the first crop this slope supported. People had been getting by here for over a thousand years before that.
A 1,500-year-old fire pit and obsidian tools were found under the slopes above Sandy.
2003 to 2008
A soccer stadium survived a committee's rejection
A soccer stadium almost never got built here. Real Salt Lake's owner set a deadline. Find a stadium deal or sell the team. Cities from Rochester to St. Louis were ready to take the franchise if Salt Lake City let it go.
A deal with Sandy City looked settled. Then Salt Lake County's Debt Review Committee voted it down, four to nothing, in January 2007. The owner announced the team would be sold. Within days a new plan surfaced. It diverted county hotel taxes to keep the stadium alive. Utah's governor pushed a bill through the state legislature to cover $35 million of the cost, and signed it.
America First Field opened in October 2008, less than half a mile from where you stand. It has since hosted an MLS All-Star Game and a CONCACAF Champions League final. What almost died on a county spreadsheet became a 20,000-seat arena that expands past 25,000 for concerts.
A stadium needs a way to get people there. What did that look like?
2006 to now
A bare train stop anchors a busy corner
Sandy Expo station opened in August 2006 as a bare-bones infill stop on the TRAX light rail line. It was a quarter mile northeast of here. It had no parking lot at all, just a place to step off the train. It served the Real Salt Lake stadium and the Jordan Commons mall nearby.
It was built for people already downtown, not for drivers. Riders now walk or bike in from the Porter Rockwell Trail. Or they arrive on the train from the stadium and the exposition center next door. A stop built with nothing around it now anchors one of Sandy's busiest corners.
1999 to now
A commuter parking lot becomes a neighborhood
The Sandy Civic Center station opened in December 1999, half a mile southwest. It was the far end of the line back then. For years it offered close to 1,200 free parking spaces. It was a simple park-and-ride lot on a hill above downtown Sandy.
That lot is being torn up. Sandy is building the East Village in its place. The project is 32 acres of apartments, offices, and retail space. Three residential buildings are finished. More construction is underway. The parking will move into a garage built to serve the new development instead. A field for commuters' cars is becoming a neighborhood.
The slope above Sandy is still doing what it always did: holding something small until it grows too big to hold.
Open this place in Strata
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.
Sourced records, high and medium confidence. Era background is marked as such.
Ancient
1400s-1500s and earlier
Fremont and earlier Archaic peoples left occupation sites along the northern shore of Utah Lake dating back over 2,000 years, with later Fremont settlements from the 1400s and 1500s.
Archaeologists excavating near Dimple Dell Park found a pithouse with a fire pit, bone fragments and obsidian artifacts, evidence of Western Shoshone occupation of this ground around 500 AD.
The original Jordan High School building earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places, but the listing was removed in 1997 after the building came down.
Familysearch records the place called Sandy in Salt Lake County as established by 1871, part of the wave of settlement following Mormon pioneers into the valley.
A short distance from here, more than a dozen homes built between the 1870s and 1920s for Sandy's early Scandinavian and Mormon settler families carry National Register listings, among them the Hannah Nash Dowding House and the Mary Ellen Parmley House.
Jordan High School took root in 1907 when a student body of just seven students, led by a single teacher, formed one of the oldest public high schools in Utah.
Sandy Civic Center station opened on December 4, 1999, as part of the first phase of Utah's TRAX light rail system, and for years marked the Blue Line's southern end.
The parcel beneath this address was built out in 2015 as a large commercial office building of over half a million square feet, part of the Towne Ridge subdivision.
What was here before Jordan High School was built?
Archaeologists found a pithouse near Dimple Dell Park dated to roughly 500 AD, with a fire pit holding ash and burned bone and obsidian tools scattered nearby, evidence that Western Shoshone families lived on these south-facing slopes long before Sandy existed.
What happened at Jordan High School in 1907?
Seven students began meeting in the basement of a church in Midvale under a teacher named Weston Morley, calling their group The People's College. Enrollment jumped from seven students to two thousand within a year.
Why are Jordan High School students called Beetdiggers?
The name comes from when sugar beet fields surrounded the school, and classes paused every fall so students could bring in the harvest.
How did America First Field almost not get built?
Salt Lake County's Debt Review Committee voted down a stadium deal four to nothing in January 2007, prompting Real Salt Lake's owner to announce the team would be sold. A new plan using county hotel taxes and $35 million in state funding saved the project, and the stadium opened in October 2008.
When did light rail reach this part of Sandy?
Sandy Civic Center station opened in December 1999 as the southern end of the TRAX Blue Line, and Sandy Expo station opened later as a bare infill stop serving the stadium and Jordan Commons mall.
What is replacing the old park-and-ride lot in Sandy?
Sandy is building the East Village, a 32-acre project of apartments, offices, and retail, on the site of the former Civic Center station parking lot, with parking moving into a garage built for the new development.
