Camp Kearns, the base this whole town was built on

A United States Army Air Forces training base on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley. It opened as Kearns Army Air Base on 1 May 1942 and was redesignated Camp Kearns on 1 January 1944. The Army had picked the ground that February, on dry farmland, and had the base running within months. The town of Kearns grew on the same site after the war.

Big enough to be one of the largest cities in the state for a few years. The Army marked out about 5,450 acres of dry farmland and bought roughly 1,400 of them for the base, then put up nearly a thousand buildings: sixteen mess halls, five chapels, three theaters, two gymnasiums, a hospital among the largest in Utah, and the largest rifle range in the West.

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 leftover land, streets and utilities for 287,270 dollars. The subdivisions that filled the site through the 1950s were laid out on the Army's road plan rather than a new one, which is why the town's grid looks like neither a pioneer survey nor a later suburb.

Four buildings, one field gun and the street network. A base theater became part of Kearns Junior High School, a base chapel is part of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church, the base train 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 by the headquarters flagpole is at the Arlo D. James Kearns Veterans Memorial Park, about 4000 West and 5400 South.

You can stand on it, because the whole town is on it, but there is no visitor center, no interpretive trail and no preserved ground. The one spot where 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, so look at them from the street.

After Thomas Kearns, a Utah mining figure and United States senator who lived from 1862 to 1918 and made his fortune at the Silver King mine in Park City. The Army first called the site Baucus. The name changed when construction crews found an old marker for a Kearns water hole on the ground, a rest stop from the mining era, and the older name stuck to the base and then to the town.

About 40,000 at the peak, with 15,000 to 20,000 there on a typical day, and more than 250,000 passing through in four years. Over 90,000 airmen finished basic training here before the base changed missions in late 1943. The population turned over constantly, which is how a basic training base works, so figures depend on the date.

Yes, and the joke came first. Soldiers stationed here called the tarpaper barracks chicken coops, and it was not a compliment. When the buildings were auctioned in 1948, farmers bought a great many of them, moved them off the ground and used them as exactly that. It is the detail that best captures how temporary the place was: a settlement of nearly a thousand buildings worth more to the valley as sheds than as a town.

The Kearns Historical Society, founded in 1998, has done much of the work of gathering 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. For this base the paper record is unusually good and the physical record is unusually thin, the reverse of most historic sites, which is worth knowing before you plan a trip.