Editing Taylorsville, Utah (section)

=== World War II ===

In World War II, 75 men from Taylorsville served and two lost their lives overseas. After the [[attack on Pearl Harbor]] in December 1941, the [[United States Army Air Corps]] wanted an isolated place to build a training base safe from any attacks by the Japanese and on the main rail routes to the Pacific Coast. The [[United States Department of War]] bought {{convert|5000|acre|km2}} of dry farmland in the western part of [[Salt Lake Valley]]. The land originally was part of a federal land grant to the state of Utah to be used to benefit schools and universities in Utah. But it had long since passed into private hands and was used for dry farms. [[Kearns, Utah|Camp Kearns]] went through renamings as the focus and mission of the base changed; Camp Kearns was the name which stuck. It opened in 1942 but took about a year to gain its final size. The base was named for Senator [[Thomas Kearns]] of Utah, who had made his fortune in the silver mines at [[Park City, Utah|Park City]]. Camp [[Kearns, Utah|Kearns]] was not in Taylorsville but to the west of the settlement.

A year later, Camp Kearns had 40,000 residents and was Utah's third-largest city at the time. It had two main missions. It served as a basic training facility for replacement troops headed for the war against Japan. Camp Kearns included a 600-target practice range, the largest in the U.S., a difficult, mile-long obstacle course, a grenade practice ground, and barracks for thousands of men on their way to the Pacific coast. The motor pool hired more than 80 local women just to drive trucks; in all about 1200 civilians worked at the base at any given time. Camp Kearns had the largest hospital in Utah at the time which spread into ten buildings. A camp newspaper called the ''Valley View News'' provided information and entertainment to the troops stationed there.

The base had a water system and one of two water treatment plants in the state. The streets were laid out in a huge grid pattern lined with over 900 wooden buildings covered with tar paper. A railroad spur from the Denver and the Rio Grande was built to transport equipment and personnel to the base. By August 21, 1942, the Kearns had {{convert|1700000|sqft|m2}} of warehouse space, two all-purpose theaters, gyms, two firehouses, several dusty parade grounds, a post office, a lending library, and a bank. Thousands of trees and shrubs were planted to keep the dust down.

The second mission of Camp Kearns was a practice air force base for Army Air Corps ground crews. In time, technical training of air force ground crews became Camp Kearns's main objective. This included many kinds of schools: navigation, intelligence, radio, [[teleprinter]], clerical, and many others. It was not an air force base with airplanes landing and taking off, ground crews were trained on planes scattered around the base.

The base had five chapels, three stores, and three theaters, one of them for African-American servicemen. It still exists as part of Kearns Junior High School. The [[United Service Organizations]] brought many entertainers to the base to keep the troops from getting homesick. The Band Wagon Committee raised more than $15,000,000 in war bonds from the communities around Salt Lake and the men and women in uniform.

Camp Kearns gave an indirect boost to Taylorsville in that a huge water pipe brought water from the east side of Salt Lake to the camp. Once Camp Kearns closed, the presence of clean drinking water and a sewer treatment plant made it possible for people to move to Kearns and live in some of the first large subdivisions built in western Salt Lake County in the 1950s. But the camp is not in the Taylorsville city limits but the Kearns metro township.

Taylorsville and Bennion joined to form their own water and sewer district to provide clean water. The large water tank on the hill at 3200 west and 6200 South and the other ones buried inside the hill are a part of the work to provide the clean water. Salt Lake County's rapidly-growing population began expanding west in the early 1970s and farmers found they could sell their land to developers for a lot more than they were making on the farms.{{citation needed|date=July 2012}}