Camp Kearns, and the four things that survived it.

A United States Army Air Forces training installation on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley. It came into existence as Kearns Army Air Base on 1 May 1942 and was redesignated Camp Kearns on 1 January 1944. The site was selected on 10 February 1942, construction began on 7 April and the utilities were complete by 22 May, which is five and a half months from Pearl Harbor to a functioning base on what had been dry farmland.

About 5,450 acres for the base itself with roughly 4,250 more used for training, carrying about 926 buildings. The inventory included an 1,800 bed hospital in ten wings, which made it one of the largest hospitals in Utah at the time, 1.7 million square feet of warehousing, sixteen mess halls, five chapels, three theatres, two gymnasiums and a rifle range with 600 targets described then as the largest west of the Mississippi.

It was deactivated on 15 August 1946 and turned over to the State of Utah. The buildings were auctioned in 1948, and a housing developer bought the remaining land, streets, utilities and infrastructure for 287,270 dollars. The subdivisions that filled the site through the 1950s were built on the army's road layout rather than on a new plat, which is why the town's grid does not resemble either a pioneer survey or a later suburb.

Four buildings, one field gun and the street network. A base theatre was absorbed into Kearns Junior High School, a base chapel is part of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church, the old railway station is in use as a day care, and a second chapel was moved to Copperton and became St Paul's Methodist Church. The cannon that stood beside the headquarters flagpole is at the Arlo D. James Kearns Veterans Memorial Park at about 4000 West and 5400 South.

You can stand on it, because the whole town is on it, but there is no visitor centre, no interpretive trail and no preserved ground. The only place you can stop, look at something and know exactly what it is comes from the base is the cannon at the veterans memorial park, which is free, outdoors and on a public corner at any hour. The four surviving buildings are all in active use and should be looked at from the street.

After Thomas Kearns, a Utah mining and business figure who lived from 1862 to 1918 and made his money at the Silver King mine in Park City. The Army's own initial name for the site was Baucus. The Kearns name attached itself because construction crews found an old marker for a Kearns water hole on the ground, a rest stop dating from the mining era, and the older name is the one that stuck to the base and then to the town.

Tens of thousands at any one time, and the utility system the Army built there was sized for up to 50,000 personnel, which is the most concrete surviving measure of the scale. By the spring of 1943 the base had made this one of the largest concentrations of people in Utah. Published troop figures vary by source and by date because the whole point of a basic training installation is that its population turned over continuously.

Yes, and the joke came first. The soldiers stationed here called the tar papered barracks chicken coops, and when the buildings were auctioned in 1948 a good many were bought by farmers, moved off the ground and used as exactly that. It is the detail that best captures how temporary the installation was: a settlement of nearly a thousand buildings that was worth more to the surrounding valley as agricultural sheds than as a town.

The Kearns Historical Society, founded in 1998, has done much of the work of collecting documents, photographs and personal accounts. Scrapbooks and papers from the camp years also sit in university and regional archive collections, which is where the day to day material lives. The documentary record for this base is unusually good and the physical record is unusually poor, which is the reverse of most historic sites and worth knowing before you plan a trip.