A bungalow built in 1929 was picked up whole and carried across town
The Joseph E. and Mina W. Mickelsen House is a brick Bungalow-style home in Draper, Utah, built in 1929 by carpenter Cyrus W. Vawdrey for Joseph E. and Mina W. Mickelsen. It stood on Pioneer Road for more than seventy years until 2002, when the whole structure was moved nearby to clear ground for Draper's city hall.
A carpenter built a brick bungalow for the Mickelsens
A carpenter named Cyrus W. Vawdrey built a one-story brick house at 1020 East Pioneer Road in 1929. He gave it a hip roof and wide eaves, in the plain, sturdy Bungalow (architectural style) common across Utah at the time. The house was built for Joseph E. and Mina W. Mickelsen. It sat on Pioneer Road for more than seventy years. At the time, Pioneer Road was the heart of a small farming town. A family lived there.
The city moved the whole house instead of tearing it down
By 2002 Draper wanted a real municipal building on Pioneer Road, and the Mickelsen house stood in the way. The city did not demolish it. On August 7, 2002, crews moved the whole brick structure to a new lot nearby, clearing the ground for city hall. On May 6, 2004, the relocated Joseph E. and Mina W. Mickelsen House was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The move became part of its own history. It now stands about 335 feet from this point, a family's house still standing, just not where it was built.
Numic-speaking peoples called this ground Sivogah, the Willows
Before Draper had a name of its own, Ute, Paiute and other Numic-speaking peoples called this ground Sivogah, meaning "Willows." It was a living name for a living place. Settlers arrived in 1849 and the name did not survive the change. Nothing was carried across town to save it. The willows gave way to fields, then streets, then the town that grew around Pioneer Road.
Draper's first cemetery had to be relocated
Draper's first cemetery went up around 1850 on Sand Hill, where the earliest Mormon pioneers buried their dead. The ground did not hold. Weather wore at the graves and animals disturbed them, badly enough that the whole cemetery had to be moved. In 1870 the town relocated its dead to a new site. This site still serves as Draper City Cemetery. It sits about 550 yards from where the Mickelsen house now stands. Even Draper's oldest residents did not get to stay where they were first put down.
A lumber store took on a second job as post office
S. J. Mickelsen built a hardware and lumber store on Fort Street in 1912. It was a two-story brick building. It was meant to sell nails and timber to a farming town. In 1914 the business took on a second job. The building became Draper's post office and kept that role until 1961. The town did not tear down the old store to make room for the post office. Instead it let the post office move in alongside the lumber trade. More buildings were added to the complex over the next two decades as the business grew.
A schoolhouse held a Depression-era mural and outlived the district
Draper Park School opened its doors in 1912. It was a Classical Revival building named for a schoolteacher who once taught in the town. It held a mural painted by Paul Smith in 1938, a piece of Depression-era public art tucked into a small-town schoolhouse. The National Register listed the building in 1980. Decades later, when the school no longer served the district, nobody tore it down. In 2015 the entertainer and filmmaker Gregg Godfrey's company bought the building, intending to restore it for business use.
A brick bungalow, a hardware store, and a schoolhouse all still stand in Draper, none of them where or what they started out to be.
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.