By Scott Buehler, Moving UtahThe building
A packing shed built out of the rock the floods brought down
The stone is the whole point of the building. Lee Jost put up the center section in 1944 out of rock that floods had rolled down from the canyons above Fruit Heights, and set a plaque in the wall that dates it and says what it was for. That plaque is the best single artifact in the town. It is fixed to the building, it carries a year, and in a handful of words it names a private packing shed as a gift to an entire industry.
Two names belong to the building, and they do not conflict once you sort out the roles. Lee Jost built the 1944 core. His son Dale, home from service in the Second World War, added the upstairs and the two wings, and later owned it. So Lee built it and Dale extended it, which is why you will see the building tied to both men. Only the center section is the 1944 work.
The finished footprint runs about ten thousand square feet across two stories, with the rock exterior on all of it, so from the street it reads as one building. It is not. The center is wartime, the upper floor and the wings are postwar, and the roofline is quietly showing you two different decades on one site. That is worth knowing if you are standing outside trying to work out what you are looking at.
Erected 1944 by Lee Jost, Dedicated to Betterment of Horticulture in Utah. Eleven words on a wall, and the clearest statement of purpose any building in this town has.
The name
Why it is called the Rock Loft, and what closed the room upstairs
The rock is the flood stone the walls are made of. The loft is the top floor, which in the 1940s held a supper club: dining and dancing, a full orchestra, and an organ played during the intermission, in a town of only a couple of hundred people. For a few years it was the reason to drive out to Fruit Heights of an evening.
The room closed in the early 1950s, and the cause is the same one that runs through the rest of this town's story. The highway cut through in 1948 and took the passing traffic off Mountain Road, and a supper club that lived on people driving by lost the people driving by. The dance floor went quiet, the shops and the packing carried on, and the building kept the name long after the room stopped being what the name described. The wider story of what that highway did to the orchards is on the orchards page; this one stops at the walls of one building.
The cherries
Two hundred pickers, and a machine that filled the middle of the building
A household orchard needs a shed. An operation that needs a two story stone packing house with a machine filling its center is running fruit from a whole district, and that is what the Josts did here. They sorted and fresh packed cherries in this building, with as many as two hundred pickers working the orchard at its peak, and a cherry machine that eventually filled the entire center section, taking fruit from growers across the region and not only from the family's own trees.
Some families, by one account from the time, could pick a ton of cherries in a day. That is the kind of number nobody writes into a record, because no agency collects it, and it survives only because a neighbor remembered it. The operation was said at the time to be the largest sweet cherry orchard in the state, a claim worth holding lightly and worth repeating for what it tells you about scale: this was a serious business, and the building was its heart.
All of it ties back to the crop and the road. The building went up in 1944 in a town that had named itself for the fruit industry five years earlier, and its best floor went dark because of a highway. That is the shape of Fruit Heights in one address, and it is why the building is worth a stop even though nothing about it is dressed up for visitors.