A college built on ground with no past

A computer science college is the oldest thing recorded here

You are standing on ground that has almost no recorded past. The city around it goes back to the 1840s. This particular patch does not. The oldest names tied to Salt Lake City in these records belong to people who never saw this spot. Joseph Fielding was a Mormon pioneer who died here in 1863. Men like him settled the valley more than a century and a half before anything stood on this lot.

Whatever this ground was before 2003, it left no name behind. No farmstead, no ditch, no findspot. Then Neumont College of Computer Science opened its doors. It was a private for-profit school that taught software development. It became the oldest thing anyone has bothered to record within 500 feet of where you stand.

There was no town here to displace and no earlier building to tear down. The school arrived on open land near the Jordan River. The place took its identity from it rather than the other way around. Everything that followed grew up around a campus that had nothing under it. The offices came. The retail lots came. The rail line came.

A retail lot and a train station rise together

Nine years after the college opened, the lot at S River Front Parkway got its first building. County records call it Riverpark Corp Ctr Retail Ph 2, lots 18 and 19. It was a commercial plat carved out of the same open ground. A 7,270-square-foot building went up in 2011. It sat on a little under an acre. It was bought as raw commercial space. There was no earlier use to inherit.

A year later, FrontRunner commuter trains began stopping at the new South Jordan station. It was about three-quarters of a mile northeast. The rail extension opened in December 2012. The station, the retail lot, and the college all belong to the same short stretch of years. None of them replaced anything. They were simply the first things anyone built here at all.

An infant's burial began a cemetery nearby

While this lot lay open and nameless, the valley a half mile off was already burying its dead. A two-month-old boy named John A. Bills died on September 9, 1863. He became the first burial at what became South Jordan Memorial Park Cemetery. An early settler named James Oliver had given the land to the town. That cemetery still holds a century and a half of names this exact ground never earned.

A governor and two boxing brothers rest close by

The same cemetery kept filling in while the college ran its first classes. A middleweight boxing champion named Gene Fullmer was buried there in 2015. His brother Don Fullmer, also a boxer, died in 2012 and was buried there too. A Utah governor, Norman H. Bangerter, was buried there in 2015. Three lives that shaped the state. They rest within yards of each other in the older ground to the north. None of that history ever touched the parcel under the college.

A farmstead survives where subdivisions did not spread

Farmland once covered most of this stretch of the valley, and some of it still stands. The Samuel and Geneva Holt Farmstead survives about three-quarters of a mile off. It is old enough to earn a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. It is a rare piece of the agricultural valley that came before subdivisions and college campuses. Whatever grew there, nobody wrote it down.

A transit project filled in ground beside the rail line

Development kept arriving new, never old. In 2017, a transit-oriented project called SoJo Station went up beside the South Jordan train stop. It was about three-quarters of a mile away. Like the college, it rose on ground with nothing under it worth naming. Offices, shops, and apartments filled in around a rail line that hadn't existed five years earlier.