Wilford Clyde had a decision to make. Two shop buildings in the large construction yard his company owns on the north end of Springville were in the way of expansion plans to construct an executive office building there.
Since W.W. Clyde — the 100-year-old Utah company that likes to say there isn’t a town in Utah it hasn’t built a road through — has plenty of bulldozers, the easy call, as many were urging, was to demolish the old wood structures and move on.
But Wilford had a feeling that these weren’t any old buildings. On their walls were insignias of the U.S. Army Air Corps, the forerunner to today’s Air Force, and color drawings of what looked like pinup girls from the 1940s.
Wilford called in Brad Westwood, a friend and former Utah state historian, to do some investigating.
It didn’t take Westwood long to determine that the buildings were once part of the Wendover Air Base, a massive outpost on the Utah-Nevada line that housed 20,000 military personnel during World War II. The base is remembered for bomber training that took place from 1941-45 over more than a million acres of barren Utah desert, including training for the crew that flew the Enola Gay, the B-29 superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
In the years following the war, from 1948 into the early 1950s, the Wendover base, like many other WWII installations, was largely dismantled; most of its 668 buildings were sold off as army surplus.
Somehow — and no one is old enough to remember exactly when or how — two of them wound up intact 170 miles away in the W.W. Clyde yard in Springville.
Once he knew where the buildings came from, deciding what to do with them was an easy call for Wilford.
“We should donate them back to Wendover,” he said. “They’re an important part of history; they need to be preserved.”
The Clydes got in contact with Jim Petersen at the Wendover Airfield Museum. Twenty-five years ago, Jim founded the nonprofit museum, located at the edge of the once-massive base, to help preserve its story before it is lost to the dustbin of history. In the years since, he has preserved a number of the 85 buildings still standing, including the hangar that housed the Enola Gay.
He jumped at the chance to get two more buildings. With one caveat.
“We knew we wanted them,” says Jim, “but we also knew there was no way we could afford to move them.”
Then Sophie Heath, the Clyde Companies’ corporate historian, explained that they’d pay to have them transported.
That clinched the deal.
Wilford Clyde and Brad Christofferson, director of special projects for the Clyde Companies, got busy figuring out how to get the buildings from here to there. Their first call was to another longtime Utah family business, Valgardson House Movers. The Valgardsons have been around since 1948. Their motto is, “We can move almost anything you need.”
“We’ve done worse, a lot worse,” is what David Valgardson and his brother Bill said when they looked at the Wendover buildings.
Their company records don’t go back that far, but there’s a chance their dad, Paul Valgardson, was the one who, 70-something years ago, moved them to Springville in the first place.
Each building measures 28 feet long by 25 feet wide and weighs about 15 tons.
Since a Utah highway lane is only 10 to 12 feet wide, that led to Wilford and Brad’s next call: the police.
The Highway Patrol’s response was equally as patriotic as the Clydes. The Highway Patrol not only gave them an oversized load permit, but a three-car escort.
The first building left Springville on Sunday, Nov. 23, traveling the back roads — and taking up both lanes — through Cedar Fort, Fairfield and Stockton before joining the I-80 freeway in Grantsville. It took eight hours to get to Wendover.
Building No. 2 is scheduled to take the same route sometime in December, weather permitting.
The cost to move each building is $36,000. Add in a few additional expenses, and the Clyde Companies are writing out a $75,000 check to preserve a unique part of Utah history.
“We’re always trying to be involved in some kind of community project,” said Wilford. “We figure our mission is to build a better community and give back after all we’ve been given.”
“We really appreciate them thinking about the history and not just demolishing the buildings, which would have been so easy for them to do,” said Jim Petersen. “They’ve been extremely generous and extremely easy to work with.
“There’s a certain feeling you get when you stand in the buildings out here in Wendover, when you think about what went on here, and why it mattered,” the museum director added. “You can almost hear the past talking to you.”
Especially when it comes rolling right back to your front door.
