Crews began dismantling the pioneer-era Jehu Cox home Friday, marking the beginning of the end of the longest and most controversial land development conflict in Salt Lake County's history.
Built by Cox in 1849, the modified adobe structure is believed to be the oldest pioneer home still standing on its original site, a distinction it now loses.Hermes Associates purchased the house from the Austin Walker family in 1992 as part of its expansion plans for the Family Center at Fort Union, 1100 E. 7200 South. The $27.1 million project will more than double the size of the shopping complex south of the existing development.
Perry Vidalakis, Hermes' special projects manager, announced the disassembly of the Jehu Cox home, saying it was the culmination of three years of historical studies and analysis.
The pieces of the house will be inventoried and warehoused and eventually reassembled in a "historic plaza" in the parking lot of the Family Center. Vidalakis said the plaza will also preserve sections of the Union Fort wall, the Union Fort monument and other historical artifacts in a park-like setting.
"You kill Union by taking that house out," Marion Cox, Jehu Cox's great-grandson, said Friday after learning that the dismantling work had begun.
His voice breaking with emotion, Cox said he had been "hoping and praying" for two years that a way could be found to preserve the house on-site.
He called the planned historic plaza a "disgusting" concept that was motivated by greed. He and a number of other Union community residents had proposed that the county or the developer establish a public park around the house at its existing location. According to Cox, that alternative was rejected because it wouldn't generate any income.
In a statement issued Friday, Hermes said those who wanted the house left in place failed to come up with a way to pay for restoring or maintaining it. Austin Walker gave the community groups a chance to develop an alternative, "but none ever provided a workable plan," Hermes said.
"Perhaps the most sincere, heartfelt testimony for Hermes' plan is the fact that just before he died, Austin Walker sold the house which has been in his family for generations to Hermes because he believed that only Hermes' plan would ever become real," the statement said.
Jehu Cox and other pioneers settled the Union area along Little Cottonwood Creek in 1849. Union Fort was built in 1854 to protect the area's 273 settlers. Though the Jehu Cox house is the only remaining structure from the Union Fort era, some historians have argued that it lost much of its historical integrity through neglect and alterations.
Brigham Young University professor Leonard Arrington, who was hired by Hermes as the consulting historian on the project, reported to Hermes and the county that the structure could be safely moved. He also wrote that a "proper restoration would make this 1849 adobe house a treasure for the county and state."
Arrington said a number of historic structures in Utah have been moved to other locations with positive results. He cited Pioneer Village at Lagoon, Wheeler Historic Farm, Jensen Historical Farm in College Park near Logan and Pioneer Trails State Park as "good examples of this treatment."
But the bottom line, according to Vidalakis, is that, "Without the shopping center, there would be no feasible way to preserve the Walker/Cox house because only as part of the shopping center will there be funds to create the historic plaza."
Salt Lake County is participating in the development with a contribution of about $6 million in Redevelopment Agency tax increment financing. The project was tied up in court and administrative hearings longer than any other commercial development in the county's history.
Cox and other opponents of the shopping center expansion said that while they may have lost the battle to preserve the house, they will redouble their efforts to incorporate Union and "take back control of our community."