A temple gave a nameless corner its only name

A temple a mile away came to mark this neighbourhood

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dedicated a new temple on a hillside a mile and a half north of here. It was their 129th temple worldwide. The Draper Utah Temple changed that in a single year. Before that, the slope above Point of the Mountain held no name anyone outside the valley would recognize.

You are standing on 1938 East Longbranch Drive, one of a run of ordinary houses on an ordinary street. Nothing here predates the subdivision itself. The ground under Longbranch Drive sat quiet through most of Draper's history, and it still does.

The temple's white spire is visible from streets like this one precisely because it was built to be seen from a distance. Its function in the landscape is to mark the whole area. It is not tied to one lot. It marks the benchmark of hillside and suburb around it. Ask most people what part of Draper they mean when they point toward this end of the valley. They will point at the temple, not at any street.

Three and a half miles west, the ground carries an older story. Porter Rockwell opened a Pony Express stop and brewery there in 1856. It stood at the base of Point of the Mountain. That history belongs to Bluffdale's edge of the pass, not to this row of houses. Here, on Longbranch Drive, the story is shorter and newer. It runs from open land to subdivision to a view of somebody else's temple on the hill.

Porter Rockwell named the pass with a brewery

Porter Rockwell built more than a brewery when he opened his Pony Express station at the base of Point of the Mountain. He gave that stretch of the pass its name for the next century and a half. Rockwell had ridden as a bodyguard for Joseph Smith. Later he worked for Brigham Young. By 1856 he was running stage stock and whiskey out of a stone inn four miles west of here. Travelers coming south out of Salt Lake Valley knew the spot as Rockwell's long before Draper had a name of its own. The Hot Springs Hotel and Brewery outlasted Rockwell himself. He died in 1878. The site kept his name in local memory for decades after the building was gone.

A state prison gave the mountain gap a second name

A few miles farther west, the state picked the same landform to build something far larger. The Utah State Prison went up at Point of the Mountain, and the phrase itself stopped meaning just a gap in the mountains. For most of the twentieth century, "Point of the Mountain" meant the prison as often as it meant the pass. The Utah State Prison held the state's most serious offenders for generations. It sat on a bench of land within sight of the same range that frames the Draper temple. Two landmarks, three miles apart, did the same job for the valley around them: telling strangers where they were, because the ground itself never said.

A plural wife raised thirteen children in a surviving house

In 1870, Perry Fitzgerald built a house in Draper for Agnes Wadsworth, his third plural wife. She raised thirteen children in it. The Perry and Agnes Wadsworth Fitzgerald House still stands. It is one of the few structures from Draper's earliest Mormon settlement to survive the town's growth into suburb. It sits on ground that once looked much like the blocks around Longbranch Drive look now: open, unremarkable, waiting to be subdivided. The house held on. The fields around it did not.