Adobe Rock, and the lost resort at Lake Point.

Before it was Lake Point, the settlement carried a stranger name. Families moved onto this ground in 1854 and called it E.T. City, after Ezra T. Benson, the Latter-day Saint apostle who had organized the first local congregation a few years earlier. The very first house was not even built here: Peter Maughan took apart his cabin over in Tooele and hauled the pieces north to the lake shore in August of that year, then stood it back up.

The early going was rough. Three straight years of failed crops had driven most of the settlers off by 1857, and a count in 1868 found only ninety-seven people still hanging on. The place carried on as a farm and ranch community on the edge of the salt water, and it did not take the name Lake Point until 1923, decades after the resort era that made the point briefly famous.

One landmark tied to the same man sits in the next town over, not here. The Benson Grist Mill, ordered by Brigham Young and built in 1854 for that same Ezra T. Benson, still stands a few minutes south in Stansbury Park and is one of the oldest buildings in western Utah. It belongs to the neighbor's story, but it is worth knowing the mill and the vanished town were named for one apostle.

Here is the surprise almost nobody who drives past expects. In 1870, a Salt Lake City physician and alderman named Jeter F. Clinton turned this quiet shore into a Great Salt Lake resort. He called it Lake Point, though people also knew it as Clinton's Landing, and he set it at the northwest toe of the Oquirrh Mountains, where the water then reached close to the hills.

Clinton built a place people traveled to reach. There was a Lake House with a pier running out to the water and bathhouses for swimmers who wanted to float in the famously buoyant brine. In the fall of 1874 he opened a new three-story stone hotel with a dining hall, a dancing room, and about forty guest rooms. For a few summers it worked: on the Fourth of July in 1876, some fifteen hundred people came out to the resort.

It did not last. As the lake's shoreline shifted and flashier resorts opened closer to Salt Lake, Lake Point faded, and by around 1890 the crowds had drifted to newer beaches. The hotel and the pier are long gone. What Clinton built survives now only in old photographs, a few written accounts, and the name still printed on the map.

A resort on the lake needed a way to reach the lake, and for a while Lake Point had two. The first was a steamboat. The City of Corinne, one of the few real steamers ever to work the Great Salt Lake, used the landing here as its home mooring and ran a summer schedule, three times a week, carrying passengers and freight between this south shore and the railroad town of Corinne up on the Bear River.

The station collected a small pile of names over the years, depending on who was writing: Lake Point, Steamboat Landing, Steamboat Point, Clinton's Landing, and Short Branch among them. The steamer itself was later renamed after a visit by General James Garfield, but its early working life ran out of this landing.

The second connection came by rail. The narrow-gauge Utah Western Railway, finished in 1877, ran west out of Salt Lake through Lake Point and on toward the Stockton mines south of Tooele, so the same little line that ferried resort-goers to the lake also aimed at the ore country beyond it. It was reorganized as the Utah and Nevada Railroad in 1881. Between the boat and the train, a summer crowd could leave the city in the morning and be swimming off the pier by afternoon.

Set your expectations before you come, because the honest answer is that the resort is gone. There is no hotel to tour, no pier, no boat. The Great Salt Lake has pulled far back from this shore in the recent low-water years, so even the water sits well out across the mudflats rather than up against the hills where Clinton built. What you get here is a horizon and a story, not a beach.

What does survive is Adobe Rock and its marker, still standing east of State Route 36 where every traveler in this story would have passed it. Read the Daughters of Utah Pioneers plaque, look west across the flats toward where the Lake House stood, and the whole vanished world is easier to picture than any freeway sign would suggest.

The modern gateway is the other thing to take in, and it helps to be clear-eyed about it. Lake Point today is a commuter city at the meeting of State Route 36 and Interstate 80, and the junction with its travel centers is what most people mean when they say Lake Point now. For the boating side of the lake's story, the nearest working access is the Great Salt Lake marina a short drive east; that piece, and the rest of the shoreline, lives on the Tooele County overview.