Xanadu

History

The area called Taylorsville today is made up of two historic communities in the central part of Salt Lake County: Taylorsville and Bennion. These communities incorporated through a vote of the people with over 70 percent approval in September 1995. The city officially became the City of Taylorsville during the centennial anniversary of Utah's statehood in 1996.

The land on which Taylorsville is located is part of an interconnected alluvial plain that was formed by the wearing down of the Wasatch and Oquirrh Mountains to the east and west. Beneath the surface, Taylorsville sits on more than a kilometer of unconsolidated rock, sand, and clay. The inactive Taylorsville Fault has been traced down the center of the Salt Lake Valley. Lake Bonneville shaped the topography of the area and deposited lake bottom clay and sand. As Lake Bonneville dried up over the past 14,000 years, the salt from the breakdown of rock remains, making the soil alkaline. Like most desert soils, it has little organic material and is hard to work.

A broad, east-west running ridge called "Bennion Hill" rises perhaps a hundred and fifty feet above the surrounding area. Bennion Hill is the eastern end of a wide ridge that rises toward Farnsworth Peak in the Oquirrh Mountains to the west.

The first (unnamed) people in the region appeared during or after the last ice age on the shores of what remained of Lake Bonneville. Less than five miles (8 km) from Taylorsville evidence of people killing and eating a mammoth have been found. Some of this region's first named visitors were Fremont people who used the area to hunt and gather food along the Jordan River more than a thousand years ago. A large Fremont settlement on City Creek used the land where Taylorsville is located as hunting and foraging especially along the river. In more recent times Ute bands passed through the valley between the marshes of the Great Salt Lake and Utah Valley. Most of the area was dry sagebrush-covered land without any natural water sources except the Jordan River. A well-used Ute trail wound along the west side of the river at approximately 1300 West which the Ute used in spring and fall. Early settlers observed small encampments of Ute in the cottonwoods along the Jordan River. At least one local settler called these people the "Yo-No'". Whether the name is his creation or an approximation of something they said is unknown.

There are poorly documented suggestions that Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and explorers came through the area beginning in the mid-1600s. The whole region was called "Teguayo" and "Lake Copalla" (Utah Lake) appear on maps of Spanish Nuevo Mexico. Spanish and then Mexican land claims remained until the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which ended the Mexican War in 1853 and ceded the whole of northern Mexico to the United States including a few thousand Mormon settlers who had taken up residence in July 1847.

Mormon settlement

The first Mormon pioneer settlers, Joseph and Susanna Harker from England built a log cabin on the west side of the Jordan River in November 1848 on what was called then "the Church Farm" near 3300 South. In 1849, Samuel and John Bennion and several other families moved south crossing the river on the ice in January. There was little in the way of building materials, so the families dug into the bluffs of the Jordan River for shelter. The tiny settlement, the first "over Jordan," was called Harker's Settlement, and they began the difficult work of digging ditches to move water out of the Jordan River and onto the land on the west side. The soil was hard to work and they kept looking for better land to farm. The infamous crickets destroyed much of that year's crop and so the group moved farther south to where Big Cottonwood Creek flowed into the Jordan River about 4800 South known then as Field's Bottom.

By working together, eight families managed to bring in the first successful crop in 1851 using water brought down from Bingham Creek by what was later called Gardner's Millrace. John and Esther Bennion's daughter, Rachael, was the first pioneer child to be born in Field's Bottom. Despite the struggle to get food and shelter in those early days, John Bennion described Field's Bottom in these words:

if peace dwells upon this earth it is here and here are the

happiest and most prosperous people in the world, enjoying free

soil, pure air, liberty to worship our God just as we please…

By 1851, more families settled in or near Field's Bottom where they dug the "lower ditch" and cleared land for small farms and pastures. In January 1852 Harker's Settlement was organized as a part of the West Jordan LDS Ward that included the Salt Lake Valley west of the Jordan River. Some families returned to cabins they had built earlier and dismantled them and brought the logs across the river and reassembled the cabins.

In 1853, the continued threat of attack by angry Utes, locally called the "Walker War" or the "Utah Valley War", forced the settlers to build an 2-acre (8,100 m2) adobe fort called the English Fort just north of the North Jordan Burying Ground in 1854. Stories about "Indian depredations" in Utah and Sanpete Counties and the massacre of John W. Gunnison and his surveying party caused such fear that Salt Lake City fortified itself. Two livestock herders were killed in Cedar Valley, just over "South Mountain" and the Ute attacked cattle herds in Tooele County just over the Oquirrh Mountains. Isolated settlements either built forts or were abandoned. Locals nicknamed the fort in North Jordan, "Fort Hardscrabble," because it was built on what they considered a useless piece of ground. About 30 families moved into or near the fort for protection for the winter, but as the threat of attack faded, families spread out once again and part of the fort was converted into an LDS meeting house which also served as the school.

Twentieth century

The territorial legislature passed Utah's first Compulsory Education Law in 1890 which gradually brought most children off the farms and into the classroom. It had little effect until the early 1900s when small local school districts, seen as a roadblock to raising the standard of Utah education, were consolidated. In December 1904 the Salt Lake County Commission voted to combine 22 of the 36 local school districts into the Granite School District with boundaries that matched the LDS Granite Stake boundaries. Schools which up to that time were often numbered were given names.

In 1905, 600 people lived in Bennion, enough to split from the Taylorsville LDS Ward and create the Bennion Ward to the south. Meetings were held in the red brick schoolhouse for a time until the Bennion meetinghouse was built in 1907 at the corner of 6200 South and Redwood Road next to the school.

The need for a "modern" school and the establishment of compulsory tax-supported public schools throughout Utah gave rise to the old Plymouth Elementary School on Redwood Road and 4800 South. By 1907, there were so many children in the Bennion school that the upper grades were sent to the two-story red brick Plymouth School in Taylorsville. In 1909 an amusement hall and classrooms were added to the Taylorsville Chapel. Electricity came to the Taylorsville area during the early 1900s but had little effect on the life of most people who saw little use for it outside lighting their homes. It was considered a luxury and many families chose not to connect until the 1920s or 1930s when rural electrification made power available to everyone.

Two railroads were important to Taylorsville, the Rio Grande, and Western to Bingham Junction (Midvale), and the Bingham-Garfield Railroad was added through the area in 1910. A well was dug at 4700 South and 5400 West where a locomotive watering station was built. In 1913 the electric Salt Lake Inter-Urban, often call the "Orem Line", was built to make it possible to ride into Salt Lake or as far as Payson on the "Red Arrow" in from the Francklyn Station in Murray or at the Bennion Station. The line ran parallel to Redwood Road about 1800 West. In 1915 the first water system was built by private subscription. People who wanted clean water piped to their homes paid to have it delivered to them. Later this system was bought and expanded by the Taylorsville-Bennion Improvement District. Electricity came to the area in 1916 along Redwood Road. During World War I four young men from Taylorsville lost their lives and sixteen served in the armed forces.

World War II

In World War II, 75 men from Taylorsville served and two lost their lives overseas. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United States Army Air Corps wanted an isolated place to build a training base safe from any attacks by the Japanese and on the main rail routes to the Pacific Coast. The United States Department of War bought 5,000 acres (20 km2) of dry farmland in the western part of Salt Lake Valley. The land originally was part of a federal land grant to the state of Utah to be used to benefit schools and universities in Utah. But it had long since passed into private hands and was used for dry farms. Camp Kearns went through renamings as the focus and mission of the base changed; Camp Kearns was the name which stuck. It opened in 1942 but took about a year to gain its final size. The base was named for Senator Thomas Kearns of Utah, who had made his fortune in the silver mines at Park City. Camp Kearns was not in Taylorsville but to the west of the settlement.

A year later, Camp Kearns had 40,000 residents and was Utah's third-largest city at the time. It had two main missions. It served as a basic training facility for replacement troops headed for the war against Japan. Camp Kearns included a 600-target practice range, the largest in the U.S., a difficult, mile-long obstacle course, a grenade practice ground, and barracks for thousands of men on their way to the Pacific coast. The motor pool hired more than 80 local women just to drive trucks; in all about 1200 civilians worked at the base at any given time. Camp Kearns had the largest hospital in Utah at the time which spread into ten buildings. A camp newspaper called the Valley View News provided information and entertainment to the troops stationed there.

The base had a water system and one of two water treatment plants in the state. The streets were laid out in a huge grid pattern lined with over 900 wooden buildings covered with tar paper. A railroad spur from the Denver and the Rio Grande was built to transport equipment and personnel to the base. By August 21, 1942, the Kearns had 1,700,000 square feet (160,000 m2) of warehouse space, two all-purpose theaters, gyms, two firehouses, several dusty parade grounds, a post office, a lending library, and a bank. Thousands of trees and shrubs were planted to keep the dust down.

The second mission of Camp Kearns was a practice air force base for Army Air Corps ground crews. In time, technical training of air force ground crews became Camp Kearns's main objective. This included many kinds of schools: navigation, intelligence, radio, teleprinter, clerical, and many others. It was not an air force base with airplanes landing and taking off, ground crews were trained on planes scattered around the base.

Incorporation

In the 1980s, the intersection at Redwood Road 5400 South began to be developed into a regional retail center with Harmons, Grand Central, Walmart, and the Family Center. Taylorsville, Bennion, and Kearns continued rapid growth into the early 1990s. Some people felt that the Salt Lake County Commission, which governed the area, was allowing too much growth too fast, especially apartment complexes. The county seemed unwilling to listen to residents which resulted in the first drive to incorporate Taylorsville City. It failed by a narrow margin.

In 1995, voters approved the creation of a new city due to the rising costs of county services, a feeling that the county was not giving residents their money's worth revolving around insufficient law enforcement, a lack of input in how Taylorsville and Bennion were developing, and the seemingly unlimited apartment developments.

Many Kearns residents were upset when Taylorsville's proposed boundary extended its western border to 4000 West which was considered by residents in that area to be part of Kearns. But residents there approved Taylorsville's incorporation by a significant margin, (as they were given large tax breaks) and that is where the border remains.

After incorporation, there was a lively discussion about what the new city should be called. Midvalley City, Oquirrh City, Centennial, and Taylorsville–Bennion were all discussed. Eventually, Taylorsville was chosen. Taylorsville's nickname is "Utah's Centennial City" because it officially came into existence 100 years after Utah became a state.

Governance

Taylorsville is governed by a five-member city council, mayor, and presiding judge representing the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. City council members and the mayor are elected to staggered four-year terms of office. The election of city council members and the mayor are non-partisan, contested elections. The presiding judge and other judges serve six-year terms of office. Every six years, the judges must stand for retention in an unopposed, non-partisan election. The retention election of the judges is county-wide and are the only municipal elected positions to permit voters from outside of the city boundaries to vote for or against a city official.

The city has been divided into five districts each with its own city council member. There are no "at-large" seats. The mayor is the only elected position that runs citywide. The city council elects from its members a chairperson and vice-chairperson who are responsible for the organization and operation of the city council.

In addition to its mayor, the executive branch is managed by a full-time city administrator. The city administrator is appointed by the mayor and confirmed by the city council. While the city contracts for many of its services (public works, garbage collection, street and road maintenance), it has its own code enforcement, economic development, police, and community development departments. Unified Fire Authority is managed and funded separately from the city of which the City has a seat on the UFA board.

The judicial branch is vested in a municipal justice court which is administered by a presiding judge. The presiding judge is elected from amongst the judges of the court and confirmed by the city council. The presiding judge, with the input of all of the judges of the court, oversees the hiring and training of all court personnel and manages the court budget. The Taylorsville Court is notable by establishing the second DUI (drunk driving) court in the nation and the first misdemeanor Drug/DUI hybrid court in Utah. In addition, the Court has a dedicated Domestic Violence calendar and a Dual Focus program for Drug/Alcohol abusers with a history of violence. Judges serve six-year terms and must stand for a retention election at the end of each term.

Geography

Taylorsville is located at 40°39′18″N 111°56′58″W (40.654930, -111.949454).

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 10.85 square miles (28.1 km2), all land.

Demographics

2020 census

As of the 2020 census, Taylorsville had a population of 60,448. The median age was 34.7 years. 24.8% of residents were under the age of 18 and 14.1% of residents were 65 years of age or older. For every 100 females there were 99.3 males, and for every 100 females age 18 and over there were 97.2 males age 18 and over.

100.0% of residents lived in urban areas, while 0.0% lived in rural areas.

There were 20,615 households in Taylorsville, of which 35.1% had children under the age of 18 living in them. Of all households, 51.3% were married-couple households, 17.7% were households with a male householder and no spouse or partner present, and 24.1% were households with a female householder and no spouse or partner present. About 21.0% of all households were made up of individuals and 8.3% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older.

There were 21,371 housing units, of which 3.5% were vacant. The homeowner vacancy rate was 0.7% and the rental vacancy rate was 6.3%.

2010 census

As of the 2010 census, there were 58,652 people, 19,121 households, and 13,477 families residing in the city. The population density was 5,415 people per square mile (2,076.5/km2). There were 20,049 housing units at an average density of 1,851.2 per square mile (692.6/km2).

The racial makeup of the city was 78.2% White, 1.9% African American, 0.9% Native American, 3.9% Asian, 2.2% Pacific Islander, 9.5% from other races, and 3.4% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 18.6% of the population.

There were 19,121 households, out of which 39% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 54.9% were married couples living together, 12.6% had a female householder with no husband present, and 26.7% were non-families. 20.6% of all households were living alone and 6.7% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.96 and the average family size was 3.43.

In the city, the population was spread out, with 27.5% under the age of 18, 11.1% from 18 to 24, 28.7% from 25 to 44, 23.7% from 45 to 64, and 9% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 31 years. For every 100 males, there were 100.1 females. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 95.6 males.

The median income for a household in the city was $54,881, and the median income for a family was $62,023. Males had a median income of $34,947 versus $24,801 for females. The per capita income for the city was $21,210. About 9.7% of families and 12.8% of the population were below the poverty line, including 22.1% of those under age 18 and 4.5% of those age 65 or over.

Notable people

Johnny Anderson, former member of the Utah House of Representatives

Adam S. Bennion, LDS official

Harden Bennion, member of the Utah State Senate and former Utah secretary of state

Milton Bennion, academic administrator

Samuel O. Bennion, LDS official

John Buck, MLB player

Kim Coleman, former member of the Utah House of Representatives

James Dunnigan, member of the Utah House of Representatives

Wayne Harper, member of the Utah State Legislature

Richard P. Lindsay, LDS official

Aimee Winder Newton, member of the Salt Lake County Council

Ryne Sanborn, ice hockey coach and former actor

Beverly White, longest serving woman in the Utah State Legislature