Tooele, Utah, and how it got here, a farm valley that became a rail, smelter, and Army town.

The first chapter is farming. On September 4, 1849, three pioneer families settled on a small stream south of present downtown, part of a call from Apostle Ezra T. Benson to build a mill and tend cattle in the valley. Tooele grew slowly as an agricultural settlement on the benches, and by the turn of the century it counted only about 1,200 people.

It became a city early. Tooele was incorporated on June 19, 1853, which makes it one of the oldest cities in the state. The county seat was not settled quite so cleanly: the territorial legislature first placed it at Richville, and it was not until 1861 that the act was repealed and voters made Tooele City the seat of county government. County business rotated between Tooele, Richville, and Grantsville until a courthouse was built in Tooele in 1867.

You can still stand in that first chapter. The old Pioneer City Hall on Vine Street, now home to the Daughters of Utah Pioneers museum, is the kind of plain, four-square building a farm county seat put up when it finally had the means, and it anchors the historic core the later chapters grew around.

The second chapter arrived on rails. In 1904 the mainline of the Los Angeles and Salt Lake route reached the valley, tying a farm town into the transcontinental network and giving it a way to ship out and bring in at a scale wagons never could. Rail is what made the next chapter, the smelter, possible.

Tooele then grew a railroad of its own. The Tooele Valley Railway, a separate short line, ran from 1908 until 1982, hauling ore and smelter traffic between the town, the mainline connection at Warner, and the smelter up the canyon. It is worth keeping the two straight: the big Los Angeles and Salt Lake line was the outside world's rail, and the Tooele Valley Railway was the local one that served the mines.

The best artifact of that era sits in a museum you can walk into. Locomotive 11 is a Consolidation-type steam engine the short line bought in 1912 and kept as a backup for decades. Its last run, on May 20, 1963, from Warner to the smelter, was the last time a steam locomotive pulled revenue freight anywhere in Utah. Today it is the centerpiece of the free Tooele Valley Railroad Museum on Broadway, where you can stand alongside it on the original rail yard. The cab is closed for safety, but the historic military railcars on the grounds are open to step inside.

The third chapter is the one that put smoke over the valley. International Smelting and Refining built a smelter in Pine Canyon, east of town, in 1909, and it began smelting copper in 1910 and added lead and zinc in 1912. For six decades the smelter and its mines were the engine of the local economy, the reason a farm town of 1,200 grew into an industrial one many times that size.

The strangest thing that era left behind never touched the ground for most of its length. To feed the smelter, the company strung an aerial tramway roughly 20,000 feet long, built by Trenton Iron Works, that carried ore in hanging buckets from the Highland Boy mine on the Bingham side, up and over the crest of the Oquirrh Mountains, and down to the works near Tooele. The buckets weighed about 1,200 pounds each, hung roughly 200 feet apart, and crept along at under seven miles an hour. For a stretch of the 20th century there was a cable highway strung over the top of the mountain between Tooele and Salt Lake, moving copper ore the whole time.

The metal ran out chapter by chapter. Copper smelting ended in 1946, zinc in 1968, and the last lead line closed in 1972, and the whole site was cleared soon after. The ground was later designated an environmental cleanup site and reclaimed into a wildlife management area; the great smokestack that once marked the valley is gone. What the smelter left is not a building but the size of the town it grew.

The fourth chapter is the one that outlasted the rest. In 1942 the Army acquired a tract of about 25,000 acres four miles south of town and opened it as the Tooele Ordnance Depot, a storage and logistics base for ammunition, war supplies, and combat vehicles. The dry, sandy, inland site was chosen on purpose, far from the coast and hard on rust. The name changed to Tooele Army Depot in 1962, and its work today is conventional ammunition logistics.

What matters for the town is the timing. When the mines and smelter wound down through the middle of the century, the depot did not. It became the steady federal payroll that carried Tooele past the end of the mining era, and it remains one of the county's largest employers. The industry that made the town gave way to the institution that steadied it.

Two recent landmarks show a county seat still adding to its center. The 1939 Ritz Theater on Main Street closed for good in 2023, and then it did not: the owner handed it to the Tooele City Arts Council in December 2024, it received a historic marker in June 2025, and it runs today under city stewardship. And on the northwest edge of town, the Deseret Peak Utah Temple was dedicated on November 10, 2024, the 200th operating temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. From a stream south of downtown in 1849 to a county seat of about 35,000 that now looks over the hill to Salt Lake for much of its work, that is the whole arc.