Camp Kearns: Documents offer new glimpse into life at dismantled WWII base
The local amateur baseball team included residents who were former players for the New York Yankees, Brooklyn Dodgers and St. Louis Browns. Some soon-to-be-famous artists were working there, but they were merely painting street signs or walls.
The community of 40,000 boasted what was maybe the nation's largest dental facility. It also had a 1,100-bed hospital. And unlike most Utah communities, it had a gas-warfare training range, a huge firing range and even a stockade.
It was Camp Kearns, an Army Air Forces base during World War II. It was razed after the war, and the Salt Lake County suburb of Kearns grew in its place to provide much-needed affordable housing for ex-GIs. The growing town utilized the base's abandoned streets, water and sewage systems and electrical lines.
A few Army buildings were converted to civilian uses that still survive. A theater for "colored personnel" became part of Kearns Junior High School. A base chapel is now part of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church. The base train station is a day-care center. A cannon that had stood next to the headquarters' flagpole now decorates the corner of 40th West and 54th South.
A city overnight
Two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the Army chose 5,000 acres of wheat fields in the Kearns area for a basic-training site for future pilots and ground crews. Documents say it was chosen because it was far from enemy danger on the coasts and because Salt Lake Valley had good rail, highway and air connections.
In just a few months, nearly 1,000 buildings were completed for what at first was called "Basic Training Center No. 5." Some construction workers included young Japanese-American men being shipped to internment camps but who were temporarily diverted and hired.
"From wheat field and waste land has blossomed Utah's third largest community," housing 40,000 soldiers, said a proud base history written in November of 1943.
"Within its boundaries are the largest rifle range in the West, second largest in the nation, and Utah's second largest hospital. It has one of the largest dental installations in the United States with the finest of modern equipment — and when it was started, patients sat on a barrel to be treated ...
Recent comments
They say that your past dictates your future. If that is the case...
Paula Larsen | July 21, 2008 at 1:58 p.m.
This was an accurite article. Well done..
Three books in...
monte rouska | July 21, 2008 at 12:31 p.m.
What a great story. We lived in Kearns for years many many years...
Gary James | July 21, 2008 at 7:24 a.m.
