A pioneer teacher's name on a schoolhouse a filmmaker saved

A schoolhouse honours the teacher turned university president

Draper's town leaders built a two-story brick schoolhouse on Pioneer Road in 1912, and gave it a name that pointed backward. They called it Draper Park School, honoring John R. Park, who had taught school in Draper decades earlier before going on to become the founding president of the University of Utah. The building rose in the Classical Revival style, with tall windows and a formal, symmetrical front, a serious building for a farm town that had mostly built in wood and adobe.

The school grew as Draper grew. Rooms were added later, and the building kept teaching Draper's children for years past its first bell. In 1938, during the Great Depression, the federal Works Progress Administration put artist Paul Smith to work inside it, painting a mural on the schoolhouse wall. It survives as one of the more unusual objects tied to a small Utah town, a piece of federal relief-program art hanging in a rural classroom named for a schoolteacher.

A filmmaker's company buys the old brick schoolhouse

By the time the twenty-first century arrived, the schoolhouse had stopped being a school. Old brick buildings on small-town main streets are the ones that usually come down, not the ones that get bought. In 2015, Godfrey Properties & Design, the company founded by entertainer, filmmaker and action-sports athlete Gregg Godfrey, bought the old Draper Park School with the stated intent of renovating, restoring and reusing it for business.

The building had been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1980, a designation that protected its status but not its roof or its wiring. Godfrey's purchase gave it a working future instead of a slow one. The schoolhouse that once carried Dr. Park's name into a farm town's only classroom now carries it into whatever business occupies the rooms where his students once sat.

Poultry farmers built a plant that outlasted its rivals

Draper's poultry farmers built their own cooperative rather than ship eggs through outsiders. The Draper Poultrymen and Egg Producers' Plant grew in pieces. A store opened around 1931. A mill came in 1945. A boiler arrived by 1954. A concrete-block warehouse went up in 1967. Farmers hauled crates through these buildings for decades, past the point when most small-town processing plants shut down or burned. The complex earned a spot on the National Register in 2004, with five contributing buildings recognized at once.

In 2013, a light-rail line reached this stretch of Draper. The new Draper Town Center station went up right beside the old plant. Planners could have ignored the buildings next door. Instead they built a historic display into the station itself. It tells riders what the plant had been.

A lumber yard served for decades as Draper's post office

A few hundred feet from the schoolhouse, Draper's hardware store did more than sell nails and lumber. The S. J. Mickelsen Hardware Store and Lumber Yard was built the same year as the Draper Park School. It grew into six buildings. The newest went up in 1932. From 1914 to 1961, this same complex served as Draper's post office. A farm town's mail passed through a lumber yard for nearly fifty years. The whole complex was listed on the National Register in 2004, with five buildings recognized as one property.

A brick bungalow was moved whole to save it

The Joseph E. and Mina W. Mickelsen House went up in 1929. It was a modest brick bungalow with a hipped roof. Cyrus W. Vawdrey built it at East Pioneer Road. In 2002, Draper needed the lot for a new municipal building. Rather than tear the house down, the city moved it, bricks and all, to East Pioneer Road. Two years later it joined the National Register too.

A settler born before Draper existed is buried nearby

Andrew Jackson Allen was born in 1818, more than thirty years before Draper existed as a town. He lived through its founding and its slow growth into a farming community with a schoolhouse, a hardware store, and a cooperative egg plant. When he died in 1884, he was buried in the Draper City Cemetery, a few hundred feet from where the schoolhouse would rise. He has stayed there ever since, in the same ground the town keeps building on top of.