So, you're driving toward the Oquirrhs along the New Bingham Highway southwest of Salt Lake City and you've long passed the last West Jordan developments and you feel as if you're in the middle of nowhere — which basically you are — when out of the open fields and the occasional railroad track and looming Kennecott copper mine pit suddenly appears the quaintest, cheeriest, most down-home little town you ever did see.
Welcome to Copperton.
"It's the best-kept secret in the valley," said Copperton Township Planning Commissioner Joyce Slothower. "When I give people directions for getting here, I tell them, 'You'll think there's no possibility for finding a town here, but just keep going and you'll see it.' "
The approximately 800 inhabitants of Copperton ("On a good day," says resident Jon Callender) have long enjoyed the tiny community's small-town spirit.
And now they have a resource to ensure that when development inexorably creeps west to the Oquirrh Mountains, the same spirit will continue: The Copperton Township General Plan, more than two years in the making, was approved last month by the Salt Lake County Council. Copperton is a "township" under county authority.
"We have a protection in place," said Slothower, chairwoman of the plan's steering committee. "The majority of our people want everything to stay exactly the way it is, but development is coming and we needed to do something."
Interestingly, for a town in the relatively wild-and-woolly southwest part of the Salt Lake Valley, where the car is king and most people feel that anything less than a one-half acre lot is just plain unnatural, the plan heavily emphasizes mass transit and mixed high-density/low-density housing.
But Copperton has always been different from its neighbors.
The town was built by Kennecott predecessor Utah Copper Co. from 1926 to 1930, and for more than 20 years it was a company town. The company built tight, architecturally appealing houses that put the town on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.
"It was the first master-planned community in Utah," Callender said.
Kennecott divested itself of the town in the 1950s but owns the vast bulk of land surrounding it. Now the company is finding itself in the real estate business again.
Callender, a steering committee member, is resource development vice president for Kennecott Land, the entity deciding how to develop Kennecott's 93,000 acres in Salt Lake and Tooele counties as the company's mining operations wind down.
Working together on the general plan, Kennecott, Copperton residents and Salt Lake County planners have opted for several future "little mini-Coppertons," as Callender puts it — areas of concentrated housing that re-create the feel of the original company town.
Kennecott is designing its Daybreak development in South Jordan in much the same way, though on a much larger scale.
That housing arrangement leaves plenty of open space. "It's going to be a model for future developments," Salt Lake Planning and Development Services director Jeff Daugherty said.
E-mail: aedwards@desnews.com