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Show OREM MA YOR NO.3. IVAN J. BURR 4 ' , J V L , 1932-1935 The transformation of the sagebrush and rattlesnake-infested ' bench land, once known as "Provo Bench," tdthe thriving metropolis, known today, as the City of Oiem, is a remarkable story, that bears telling to most of the City's current residents, who have little idea how it all came about. Those familiar with the early settlement of dozens of communities, now spread all over Utah, and extending into Idaho and Nevada, may surmise that Orem was one of those communities which came into being at the instigation of the great Mormon colonizer, Brigham Young. They would be wrong! As a matter of fact, the five-mile stretch of highway, presently running through Orem, known as State Street, has a history which dates back, even beyond the coming of the first settlers to the Provo Bench. The road was opened for regular travel in the Spring of 1848 by explorers, sent to California by Brigham Young. As groups of settlers traveled over the rocky route, the trail was deepened. As homesteaders came onto the Bench, beginning in 1861, they measured their property back from the eight-rod strip, to allow room for what has become one of the widest streets in Utah. The width of Orem's State Street, as weil as many other streets in the early settlements, was specified by Brigham Young, as part of a great corridor highway, over which emigrants and merchandise from all over the country could travel. Brigham Young, however, never did call families to settle on Provo Bench. As a. matter of fact, he was, at times, heard to express his reservations about settlers populating this rocky, barren bench land with its lack of irrigation and culinary water. For many years, Young's great corridor highway here, seemed too wide for the limited traffic of the early days. In other cities the wide highways were reduced by extensions of property lines or parkways. An attempt was made by settlers in 1890 to get the dusty, rocky road narrowed to what they considered more realistic dimensions. They petitioned to reduce the width of the road on the grounds that only a narrow strip was being used for traffic, and that the sides were being used for rock dumps and livestock bedding grounds. Those who felt that the width of the road should not be changed, supported John H. Stratton, the first road supervisor for the area, who circulated a petition in favor of keeping the full width of the road. In 1910 Brigham Young's dream of a cross-country thoroughfare across the western empire came true. The highway, planned and developed by Mormon colonizers, was taken into the nation-wide system of highways and designated as United States Highway No. 91. It was about the very same time, that a young man from Burrville, Utah, looking to seek his fortune somewhere other than in the Grass Valley of Sevier County, decided to put down his roots, deep in the Provo Bench. Little did he realize at that time, that some 22 years later, he would become the Mayor of the Town of Orem. Page 24 |