The library of ground
Every place Strata has dug, assembled from its sources and filed by locality and era. A place is reviewed again whenever the ground beneath it is dug afresh.
230 places · 98 localities · last reviewed 21 September 2026
United States
Mount PleasantMount Pleasant, Utah, began as a fortified settlement in 1849 and was founded as a city in 1852. Its founder was killed in the Black Hawk War, a conflict that burned the original site and, seven years on, ended with a treaty signed in a bishop's front room on Main Street.
1 dig
14 records United States MapletonMapleton, Utah, began as farmland settled around 1850 under the name Union Bench, an extension of Springville, before disputes over water rights led to its incorporation as a town in 1901. Its Roswell Darius Bird Sr. House, raised in 1892, later became the town's own museum of pioneer memory. 1 dig
13 records United States OgdenOgden, Utah, a city organized in 1844, holds ground marked most sharply by a single night in 1974, when a robbery at a hi-fi shop on Washington Boulevard turned into torture and murder near the United States Post Office and Courthouse and the Helms Apartments, built 1916–1919. 3 digs
38 records
28 records
13 records United States LehiLehi, Utah, grew from farmed ground once worked by families like the Evanses and Harwoods into a town marked by a 1849 killing at nearby Battle Creek Canyon, a defensive wall raised at American Fork, and, much later, subdivisions and a school called Skyridge rising on land that had stood empty. 10 digs
98 records
58 records
4 records United States DallasDallas here is anchored by North Houston Street, where American Airlines Center opened in 2001 on ground once occupied by an old power plant. Dallas voters raised $420 million in hotel and rental car taxes to keep the Mavericks and Stars from leaving Reunion Arena, and the arena now anchors Victory Park. 1 dig
14 records United States PlanoPlano's ground holds a family burial plot begun in 1847 by a War of 1812 veteran, still receiving burials today. Around it, the town changed shape entirely — a church, a highway, and later shopping and offices, rose and in some cases passed while the cemetery remained. 1 dig
10 records United States CelinaCelina grew up on Collin County prairie once broken by early farm families, whose burial grounds still mark the land. Bush Cemetery, laid out in 1862, and the George McGarrah Cemetery, set aside by a farming family in 1879, remain fixed points as the farms around them became ranches, subdivisions and roads. 2 digs
17 records
15 records United States American ForkAmerican Fork, Utah, incorporated as a city in 1850, holds a record that runs from an early pioneer burial ground through a farmstead preserved from 1883 to the rock-walled cemetery, built in 1937, where physicist Harvey Fletcher and congresswoman Reva Beck Bosone were laid to rest. 1 dig
12 records United States ProvoProvo, Utah, grew up along the Provo River on ground taken from Timpanogos families in an 1850 siege, then built over with schools, churches and homes across a century of settlement. Its Brigham Young Academy became a library; its post office took a lawyer's name; its streets remember a botched execution. 10 digs
114 records
129 records
23 records
7 records United States BellevueBellevue, Idaho grew from a mile-wide plateau that yielded more than $60 million in silver, lead, and gold between 1881 and 1893. Platted in 1880 and later reorganized under Blaine County, it served as a county seat, survived fire and explosion, and endured a violent later century. 1 dig
9 records United States Pleasant GrovePleasant Grove began on ground marked by an 1849 militia killing in Battle Creek Canyon, a pioneer dugout, and a forgotten burial plot, before rising as a Mormon farming settlement of stone houses, a tithing office, and a lone surviving blacksmith shop by the mid-twentieth century. 1 dig
15 records United States Elk RidgeElk Ridge, Utah, incorporated as its own city in 1971, holds ground whose written record begins recently: a lot platted from Lee and Haskell Properties' land in January 2021, taken up by Kyle and Kristen Haskell, and marked in 2023 by a fatal garage explosion before a house rose there by 2025. 1 dig
11 records United States DraperDraper, Utah, in this record, is traced through two Longbranch Drive addresses on land pulled into suburban development at the south end of the Salt Lake Valley — ordinary house lots platted in 2000, built up in 2004, and oriented ever since toward the white spire of the Draper Utah Temple a mile and a half north. 2 digs
14 records United States LouisvilleLouisville grew from Virginia's western outpost before Kentucky was a state into a city of department stores, theatres, a soaring insurance tower, and a cathedral raised by enslaved labour. On June 1, 2020, that ground bore witness again, when David McAtee was shot dead steps from the Cathedral of the Assumption. 1 dig
15 records United States Heber CityHeber City, Utah, became the seat of Wasatch County in 1859 and grew under settlers like Abram Hatch, bishop and territorial legislator, buried in the cemetery he helped lay out. War refugees, a young lumber-yard worker, and graves displaced by a rising reservoir all found their way into its record. 1 dig
11 records United States SedaliaSedalia sits near ground more thoroughly recorded under the name Castle Pines Village, a private Colorado community platted from 1981 around a Nicklaus-designed course that hosted The International, a PGA Tour event built around high-altitude scoring, from 1986 to 2006. 1 dig
9 records United States Castle RockCastle Rock, United States, took shape around ground first recorded not in story but in survey: soil mapped in 1974, and a vanished hamlet called Douglas, absorbed once Castle Rock became county seat in 1871 and Tomah was platted nearby in 1909. 2 digs
13 records
12 records United States HerrimanHerriman, once open field on the edge of the Salt Lake Valley, took shape as suburban subdivisions like Rosecrest Place replaced pasture from the mid-2000s onward, with new houses on streets such as Larawood Lane arriving alongside institutions, including a school that changed its plans before it ever opened. 1 dig
3 records United States OremOrem grew up on the bench above Provo, a farming settlement that became a city in 1877 and later filled with Geneva Steel housing, a mall, and a transit hub. This record gathers one plot near the Carter–Terry–Call House, where a bishop's second chance and a century of change sit close together. 1 dig
13 records United States AlbuquerqueAlbuquerque's ground carries layers from a 1716 Spanish land grant to a modern grid of named streets. Elena Gallegos, a soldier's widow permitted to hold property in her own right, once held land stretching from the Rio Grande to the Sandia Mountains, later divided by inheritance, courts, railroads and the city itself. 1 dig
8 records United States ClearfieldClearfield, Utah began in 1877 as a rail siding platted on farmland in Davis County, serving lines including the Ogden & Syracuse Railway. Recognised as a city that same year, it later grew in the shadow of Hill Air Force Base, whose Cold War-era buildings replaced the wheat fields and grain elevators of its founding. 1 dig
10 records United States San JoseSan Jose gathers together ground that ranges from a 7,982-acre Mexican land grant to a Franciscan friar's borrowed name to the bureaucratic churn of transit fare estimates repeated four times over five years. Each piece shows a different kind of change, held in the same town. 3 digs
13 records United States NaugatuckNaugatuck, Connecticut, grew up in a low valley cut into 500-million-year-old Waterbury Gneiss beside the Naugatuck River, where Charles Goodyear's rubber industry crowded mills and worker housing onto the only flat ground — ground the river reclaimed on August 19, 1955, when it rose 27 feet and killed eight people in town. 2 digs
16 records
12 records United States SimsburySimsbury grew along Hopmeadow Street from a 1711 farmhouse into a town of schools, a bank and a memorial hall. David Phelps raised that farmhouse; his son Elisha died in 1776 supplying Revolutionary War troops. Later generations, including the Beldens, built on what he left behind. 1 dig
12 records United States Preston CityPreston City grew as the hub of a Connecticut town whose land came by deed from Uncas's son. It held a Congregational church from 1698 and a Baptist church from 1812, then a psychiatric hospital that opened for 95 years and closed for none, sold by the state for a dollar. 1 dig
8 records United States PomfretPomfret, Connecticut, grew up along the spine now known as Pomfret Street, ground that carries a colonial-era tragedy alongside the ordinary passage of schools and churches through the town's centre. 1 dig
8 records United States WindsorWindsor, Connecticut, holds two brick houses raised a generation apart: one built by a brickmaker from clay dug across the road around 1825, the other by a tobacco farmer whose crop made him rich enough to outbuild the town's wood-framed houses, around 1860. 2 digs
20 records
10 records United States BostonBoston's ground near Congress Street carries the weight of a single violent night: on March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired on a crowd, killing five men, including Crispus Attucks. That corner, once colonial Quaker Lane, later burned in the Great Fire of 1872 before rebuilding into the Financial District known today. 1 dig
11 records United States PhiladelphiaPhiladelphia's Independence Hall, built as the Pennsylvania State House and completed in 1753, held the vote for independence on July 4, 1776, and the signing of the parchment a month later. The same room later drafted the Constitution, in 1787. 1 dig
15 records United States CharlestonCharleston's Court House Square holds ground that carries centuries in layers: pirates condemned nearby in 1718, a colonial statehouse burned in 1788, and James Hoban's courthouse raised over its ruins between 1790 and 1792, a design he then carried to Washington to build the President's House. 1 dig
14 records
14 records United States MapletonMapleton, Utah, began as farmland settled around 1850 under the name Union Bench, an extension of Springville, before disputes over water rights led to its incorporation as a town in 1901. Its Roswell Darius Bird Sr. House, raised in 1892, later became the town's own museum of pioneer memory. 1 dig
13 records United States OgdenOgden, Utah, a city organized in 1844, holds ground marked most sharply by a single night in 1974, when a robbery at a hi-fi shop on Washington Boulevard turned into torture and murder near the United States Post Office and Courthouse and the Helms Apartments, built 1916–1919. 3 digs
38 records
The night a stereo shop errand became a massacre
Ogden · 1811–1974
The night the drain cleaner didn't kill fast enough
Helms Apartments · 1841–1974
A stereo shop robbery became a night of torture and murder
United States Post Office and Courthouse (Ogden, Utah) · 1850–1988
United States
Park CityPark City, Utah, incorporated in 1869, grew up around silver mines that demanded constant pumping to stay dry. Railroads built in the 1880s hauled coal to keep those mines running until Union Pacific abandoned the line in 1989; three years later it reopened as a 28-mile recreational trail.
2 digs28 records
The mines needed dry shafts, so a railroad grew here
Historic Union Pacific Rail Trail State Park · 1869–2024
The line that outlived the mines it was built to save
Historic Union Pacific Rail Trail State Park · 1853–2015
United States
LoganLogan, Utah, organized as a city in 1859, grew from a Mormon settlement into a valley seat marked by a college founded by Brigham Young, a mob lynching, and the quiet record of immigrant lives built into its houses and churches.
1 dig13 records United States LehiLehi, Utah, grew from farmed ground once worked by families like the Evanses and Harwoods into a town marked by a 1849 killing at nearby Battle Creek Canyon, a defensive wall raised at American Fork, and, much later, subdivisions and a school called Skyridge rising on land that had stood empty. 10 digs
98 records
Three skiers bought a desert nobody wanted
Eagle Mountain · 1994–2021
A falcon named Flash and ten years of state titles
American Fork-Pleasant Grove · 1848–2016
A field became a lot in one year flat
Mason Court · 1852–2019
The band that grew up faster than the school
Saratoga Springs · 1852–now
A hamlet named for a president, then erased
Kern Avenue · 1878–2024
A school with no past to tell
Highland · 1972–now
The house that has no story to tell
Highland · 1972–2024
The falcons have no history yet
American Fork-Pleasant Grove · 1849–2024
A bond built the school, the town supplies the names
American Fork-Pleasant Grove · 1849–now
The falcon on empty ground
American Fork-Pleasant Grove · 1849–2021
United States
HighlandHighland, Utah, incorporated in 1870, grew from Lake Bonneville's old lake bed and later farmland into subdivisions like Dry Creek Highlands and Blessing Rock at Beacon Hill, platted through the 2000s and 2010s. Its ground holds ordinary residential turnover alongside Lone Peak High School and the nearby resting place of inventor Bill Gore.
7 digs58 records
A DuPont chemist who bet his own basement over his boss
Highland · 1849–now
A knight for a mascot, a title for real
Lone Peak High School · 1849–2025
An address, and nothing else on record
5942 West Horizon Drive · 2004–2025
Some ground has only ever been ground
5942 West Southern Cross Court · 2004–2021
A lakebed lot in Highland became a subdivision house
Highland · 2005–2019
A lake bottom platted, sold, and refinanced
West Broadleaf Hollow Circle · 2014–2020
United States
SteinauerSteinauer grew from German-immigrant farm families who opened Rinne Cemetery in 1868 and Salems Cemetery in 1869, then raised Salem United Church of Christ in 1879. The settlement later endured a shooting on its road and the 1918 influenza pandemic.
1 dig4 records United States DallasDallas here is anchored by North Houston Street, where American Airlines Center opened in 2001 on ground once occupied by an old power plant. Dallas voters raised $420 million in hotel and rental car taxes to keep the Mavericks and Stars from leaving Reunion Arena, and the arena now anchors Victory Park. 1 dig
14 records United States PlanoPlano's ground holds a family burial plot begun in 1847 by a War of 1812 veteran, still receiving burials today. Around it, the town changed shape entirely — a church, a highway, and later shopping and offices, rose and in some cases passed while the cemetery remained. 1 dig
10 records United States CelinaCelina grew up on Collin County prairie once broken by early farm families, whose burial grounds still mark the land. Bush Cemetery, laid out in 1862, and the George McGarrah Cemetery, set aside by a farming family in 1879, remain fixed points as the farms around them became ranches, subdivisions and roads. 2 digs
17 records
A cemetery outlasted the family farm around it
Singletree Court · 1848–2019
Where the first settlers of this prairie still lie
McKinney · 1862–now
United States
GalvestonGalveston sits on a barrier island that passed from Mexican to Texan hands, grew into a Gulf Coast port town of churches, mansions and a public library, and was struck on the night of September 8, 1900 by the deadliest natural disaster in American history.
1 dig15 records United States American ForkAmerican Fork, Utah, incorporated as a city in 1850, holds a record that runs from an early pioneer burial ground through a farmstead preserved from 1883 to the rock-walled cemetery, built in 1937, where physicist Harvey Fletcher and congresswoman Reva Beck Bosone were laid to rest. 1 dig
12 records United States ProvoProvo, Utah, grew up along the Provo River on ground taken from Timpanogos families in an 1850 siege, then built over with schools, churches and homes across a century of settlement. Its Brigham Young Academy became a library; its post office took a lawyer's name; its streets remember a botched execution. 10 digs
114 records
A siege that ended in beheadings on the Provo River
Provo · 1849–now
The siege that made room for this street
Provo · 1849–1986
The two-day fight that ended in beheadings
Provo · 1849–now
The man who refused to be tied down
100 East · 1866–2025
The siege that cleared this valley
Provo · 1849–now
A Provo lawyer argued 59 cases before he lost his life
Provo · 1849–2002
How Provo built a school system out of nothing
Provo · 1849–2018
The condemned man who chose the bullet over the rope
2230 North · 1849–now
The lawyer Congress gave a post office to
Provo · 1849–now
A school for a thousand students stood empty for twenty years
Provo City Library · 1850–2001
United States
Salt Lake CitySalt Lake City spans a valley once called Sivogah, trapped by ambush in 1824, settled by Mormon pioneers under Brigham Young, and reshaped since by mining fortunes, a stalled billionaire's development, farming villages absorbed into suburbs, and a temple that reordered a whole hillside in 2009.
14 digs129 records
A village that outlived its own name
West Valley City · 1849–2022
The village that became a shopping center
West Valley City · 1000 BC–2022
The dirt here used to grow bitterbrush, not spires
Draper · 1849–2009
Seven students grew into a school that never stopped moving
Sandy · 100 BC–2015
A hillside empties out, then fills back up
1910 East Aspen Leaf Place · 1866–2009
A bungalow built in 1929 was picked up whole and carried across town
Joseph E. and Mina W. Mickelsen House · 1818–2018
A pioneer teacher's name on a schoolhouse a filmmaker saved
Draper · 1849–2025
The brothers who came home to South Jordan
11351 South 1385 West · 1859–2023
The senator's house that caught fire on Christmas night
David Keith Mansion and Carriage House · 1875–1985
The trap on the Jordan River
9661 South 2810 West · 1877–1994
The towers that never got their steel above the ground
Salt Lake Hardware Building · 1823–2024
The mansion where Utah made peace with the army sent to crush it
Devereaux House · 1857–2024
United States
MiamiThis record gathers the Collins Avenue beachfront in Miami Beach, built up from bay and barrier island from the 1870s onward, where a 1957 MiMo tower hosted the Beatles in 1964 and was, decades later after a fire, deliberately reduced to rubble in 2022.
3 digs23 records
Beatles played here, then the hotel was left to rot
Akoya · 1870–2022
The hotel that hosted the Beatles and died on purpose
Monticello Hotel · 1870–2004
United States
PinedalePinedale, Wyoming, sits in Sublette County beside Fremont Lake, ground worked and watched for thousands of years before it held a federal biologist's memorial, a family's hidden graves, and the town's own cemetery, founded in 1904 and passed to public hands in 1973.
1 dig7 records United States BellevueBellevue, Idaho grew from a mile-wide plateau that yielded more than $60 million in silver, lead, and gold between 1881 and 1893. Platted in 1880 and later reorganized under Blaine County, it served as a county seat, survived fire and explosion, and endured a violent later century. 1 dig
9 records United States Pleasant GrovePleasant Grove began on ground marked by an 1849 militia killing in Battle Creek Canyon, a pioneer dugout, and a forgotten burial plot, before rising as a Mormon farming settlement of stone houses, a tithing office, and a lone surviving blacksmith shop by the mid-twentieth century. 1 dig
15 records United States Elk RidgeElk Ridge, Utah, incorporated as its own city in 1971, holds ground whose written record begins recently: a lot platted from Lee and Haskell Properties' land in January 2021, taken up by Kyle and Kristen Haskell, and marked in 2023 by a fatal garage explosion before a house rose there by 2025. 1 dig
11 records United States DraperDraper, Utah, in this record, is traced through two Longbranch Drive addresses on land pulled into suburban development at the south end of the Salt Lake Valley — ordinary house lots platted in 2000, built up in 2004, and oriented ever since toward the white spire of the Draper Utah Temple a mile and a half north. 2 digs
14 records United States LouisvilleLouisville grew from Virginia's western outpost before Kentucky was a state into a city of department stores, theatres, a soaring insurance tower, and a cathedral raised by enslaved labour. On June 1, 2020, that ground bore witness again, when David McAtee was shot dead steps from the Cathedral of the Assumption. 1 dig
15 records United States Heber CityHeber City, Utah, became the seat of Wasatch County in 1859 and grew under settlers like Abram Hatch, bishop and territorial legislator, buried in the cemetery he helped lay out. War refugees, a young lumber-yard worker, and graves displaced by a rising reservoir all found their way into its record. 1 dig
11 records United States SedaliaSedalia sits near ground more thoroughly recorded under the name Castle Pines Village, a private Colorado community platted from 1981 around a Nicklaus-designed course that hosted The International, a PGA Tour event built around high-altitude scoring, from 1986 to 2006. 1 dig
9 records United States Castle RockCastle Rock, United States, took shape around ground first recorded not in story but in survey: soil mapped in 1974, and a vanished hamlet called Douglas, absorbed once Castle Rock became county seat in 1871 and Tomah was platted nearby in 1909. 2 digs
13 records
The town that vanished under the county's own word for it
Hickory Oaks Street · 1871–1986
The survey that mapped you instead of a story about you
Green Fern Point · 1902–1986
United States
LindonLindon, Utah, took shape as a recognized place around 1850, on ground worked by Wadley Farms from 1869 and near an 1877 soft-rock farmhouse raised by an English convert and his wife. One recorded lot, platted in 1992, traces a single ownership chain to a 2021 house.
1 dig12 records United States HerrimanHerriman, once open field on the edge of the Salt Lake Valley, took shape as suburban subdivisions like Rosecrest Place replaced pasture from the mid-2000s onward, with new houses on streets such as Larawood Lane arriving alongside institutions, including a school that changed its plans before it ever opened. 1 dig
3 records United States OremOrem grew up on the bench above Provo, a farming settlement that became a city in 1877 and later filled with Geneva Steel housing, a mall, and a transit hub. This record gathers one plot near the Carter–Terry–Call House, where a bishop's second chance and a century of change sit close together. 1 dig
13 records United States AlbuquerqueAlbuquerque's ground carries layers from a 1716 Spanish land grant to a modern grid of named streets. Elena Gallegos, a soldier's widow permitted to hold property in her own right, once held land stretching from the Rio Grande to the Sandia Mountains, later divided by inheritance, courts, railroads and the city itself. 1 dig
8 records United States ClearfieldClearfield, Utah began in 1877 as a rail siding platted on farmland in Davis County, serving lines including the Ogden & Syracuse Railway. Recognised as a city that same year, it later grew in the shadow of Hill Air Force Base, whose Cold War-era buildings replaced the wheat fields and grain elevators of its founding. 1 dig
10 records United States San JoseSan Jose gathers together ground that ranges from a 7,982-acre Mexican land grant to a Franciscan friar's borrowed name to the bureaucratic churn of transit fare estimates repeated four times over five years. Each piece shows a different kind of change, held in the same town. 3 digs
13 records United States NaugatuckNaugatuck, Connecticut, grew up in a low valley cut into 500-million-year-old Waterbury Gneiss beside the Naugatuck River, where Charles Goodyear's rubber industry crowded mills and worker housing onto the only flat ground — ground the river reclaimed on August 19, 1955, when it rose 27 feet and killed eight people in town. 2 digs
16 records
Built and rebuilt on a river that kept taking it back
Naugatuck · 1800–2025
A river that kept coming back for the valley
Naugatuck · 1730–now
United States
BristolBristol, Connecticut began as New Cambridge, a winter chapel granted in 1742 to farm families scattered over Fall Mountain and Chippens Hill so they might avoid exposed travel to church in Farmington. Incorporated as Bristol in 1785, it grew into a clockmaking city, becoming a city in 1911 and home to ESPN since 1979.
1 dig12 records United States SimsburySimsbury grew along Hopmeadow Street from a 1711 farmhouse into a town of schools, a bank and a memorial hall. David Phelps raised that farmhouse; his son Elisha died in 1776 supplying Revolutionary War troops. Later generations, including the Beldens, built on what he left behind. 1 dig
12 records United States Preston CityPreston City grew as the hub of a Connecticut town whose land came by deed from Uncas's son. It held a Congregational church from 1698 and a Baptist church from 1812, then a psychiatric hospital that opened for 95 years and closed for none, sold by the state for a dollar. 1 dig
8 records United States PomfretPomfret, Connecticut, grew up along the spine now known as Pomfret Street, ground that carries a colonial-era tragedy alongside the ordinary passage of schools and churches through the town's centre. 1 dig
8 records United States WindsorWindsor, Connecticut, holds two brick houses raised a generation apart: one built by a brickmaker from clay dug across the road around 1825, the other by a tobacco farmer whose crop made him rich enough to outbuild the town's wood-framed houses, around 1860. 2 digs
20 records
A brickmaker built his house from his own backyard
Windsor · 1595–1979
The largest brick house tobacco money built
Windsor · 1595–1916
United States
Rocky HillRocky Hill grew around ground first claimed in 1638, when John Robbins took land that his family would hold for nearly three centuries. His grandson raised a brick house and tavern there around 1767, and the town's story since has passed through pewtersmiths, ministers and ballplayers.
1 dig10 records United States BostonBoston's ground near Congress Street carries the weight of a single violent night: on March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired on a crowd, killing five men, including Crispus Attucks. That corner, once colonial Quaker Lane, later burned in the Great Fire of 1872 before rebuilding into the Financial District known today. 1 dig
11 records United States PhiladelphiaPhiladelphia's Independence Hall, built as the Pennsylvania State House and completed in 1753, held the vote for independence on July 4, 1776, and the signing of the parchment a month later. The same room later drafted the Constitution, in 1787. 1 dig
15 records United States CharlestonCharleston's Court House Square holds ground that carries centuries in layers: pirates condemned nearby in 1718, a colonial statehouse burned in 1788, and James Hoban's courthouse raised over its ruins between 1790 and 1792, a design he then carried to Washington to build the President's House. 1 dig
14 records
A record of ground, not a magazine.
Nothing here was commissioned. Each place is assembled from its own sources, published at the resolution of the ground rather than the point, and reviewed again when the record changes. No page reports a person.