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Show I ' I o ( ifinfiMj., g 'You don't know what you've got 'till it's gone . . . ' J oed as a per mill some time after the arrival of the first Mormon pioneers. Then it stood vacant for a feu, year, until in the twenties, it was taken and turned into a dance hall. tnii Aind hT somcon,e h sayin& "Why- y" y P"ts iys talk about the times they used to have there. They used to have some really wild times, dancing under the stars and like that." Through the years after the big bands had died, the building stood gnmly by as the nearby mountain slopes were chewed up as various companies went after gravel. It made no move as the houses of Binlerville, off in the distance, grew in number and the cars headed up the two canyons to the ski resorts got faster and faster. On quiet nights the kids still came out there to dream, even without the bands and the excitement of its earlier days. , f a,ter a bf fling as a Country and Western palace, the budding housed a different kind of band. It was an unmual kind of remcamation; the first kids who'd come out there shook their heads and said they couldn't imagine loud amplified music where sweet saxophones and mellow drums hail been. But their kids had no trouble at all; for most of a year and a half, the place was called a discotheque. Now, after a final farewell bash, the Old Mill sits silent again, looking across Big Cottonwood Canyon past the Wagon Wheel tavern where all those cowpokes hang out up to the billboards bill-boards advertising picturesque mountain estates. There are rumors ru-mors floating around about a Denver concern picking it up and turning it into a private club, where a yearly fee would be required re-quired to sustain the right so many generations have enjoyed there, the right to dream. Cut possibly as it languishes in a quiet summer sunset, the Mill can consider the words of Joni Mitchell as it looks at the hills where once ran sheep and wild birds but now run bull-dozerss bull-dozerss "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone ... 1 "They paved paradise and put up a parking lot." The Old Mill, long a landmark at the mouth oi Big Cottonwood Canyon, is the latest casualty to progress. photo by AARON JONES |