A DuPont chemist who bet his own basement over his boss

DuPont said no to a plastic that made him rich

Bill Gore spent seventeen years at DuPont working with a plastic called PTFE. It is a slippery synthetic material now known by the brand name Teflon. He believed it could do far more than DuPont was willing to try. The company kept saying no. Gore wanted to use it in cables and wiring for the new computer industry. It would insulate signals in ways nobody else had managed. His bosses could not see the market. They would not fund the work.

In 1958, at 45 years old, Bill Gore quit. He set up a lab in the basement of his house in Delaware with his wife Vieve. Together they founded W. L. Gore & Associates on the same material DuPont had shelved. The company grew into one that eventually employed thousands. It was built on the same chemistry his employer had turned away.

A chemist ends up in a cemetery in the hills

Bill Gore was born in 1912 and died in 1986. He is buried in Alpine City Cemetery. The cemetery is 2,604 meters from this address, in the hills above the valley. His grave sits near other lives that ended in the same small mountain town. There is a baseball pitcher buried there. There is a university dean. There is a woman named only by her dates. None of them made their names in Utah. All of them are held by it now.

The lot beneath you has no such age to it. County records show it was raw ground inside the Blessing Rock At Beacon Hill subdivision until 2002. That is when Jewkes Brothers Construction filed the plat. The house at 5942 W Horizon Dr went up in 2005. Home Building Consultants LLC built it. It changed hands twice more. Robert and Laurel Vukich bought it in 2013. It is one of the newest things in this story. It sits in a valley that has spent more than a century collecting people. These people built their lives somewhere else. They came here only to be laid in its ground.

A subdivision plat turns raw ground into a house

Wayne C. Booth grew up in Utah. He became one of the most influential literary critics of the twentieth century. He taught at the University of Chicago for decades. His book "The Rhetoric of Fiction" changed how scholars read novels. It taught generations to ask who is really speaking in a story. It taught them whether that narrator can be trusted. None of that happened in Utah. He died in 2005 and came home to Alpine City Cemetery, the same ground that holds Bill Gore.

A literary critic comes home to Utah to be buried

Nick Willhite pitched in the major leagues for the Los Angeles Dodgers and other clubs in the 1960s. He threw from mounds in Los Angeles and beyond, far from any Utah ballfield. His career ended long before his life did. He died in 2008 and was buried in Alpine City Cemetery, 2,604 meters from this address, among strangers who never watched him pitch.

A Dodgers pitcher is buried far from any ballfield

Delilah H. Brown lived from 1912 to 1982. Her grave sits in Alpine City Cemetery alongside the chemist, the dean, and the pitcher. Her name and her dates are what remain. The cemetery holds her the same way it holds the famous men beside her.

A cemetery outlasts the subdivision built beside it

Highland City Cemetery had already been taking the valley's dead for over 150 years before anyone platted the ground under this house. It opened in 1849, when this stretch of Utah was still frontier. Blessing Rock at Beacon Hill did not exist as a name on a plat map yet. But this valley had already settled into the habit of burying people. They came from somewhere else and stayed for good.