Reinventing American Fork's City Hall

In the application for the National Register of Historic Places, the American Fork City Hall is described as having a "provincial yet earnest manner."

These days, Juel Belmont can't remember exactly who wrote those words. The City Hall made it onto the National Register back in 1994, so the application was prepared a dozen years ago, and several people helped write it. Over the years, lots of folks have worked to save the building.

Belmont says Wilson Martin may have been the one to notice the building presents itself in a "provincial yet earnest manner." Or it may have been Roger Roper who wrote those words.

But most likely, Belmont says, she herself wrote them. "Because buildings are speaking to me all the time," she says.

Of course buildings do go silent once they are torn down — and Belmont can recite a list of historic buildings in American Fork whose voices she will never hear again. The Carnegie Library, the LDS Tithing Office, Chipman's Mercantile, the old high school ... "I've certainly lost a lot more than I've saved," she says.

This summer, however, she can celebrate. The restored City Hall will reopen in a month or so. It is the largest success to date for the American Fork Historic Preservation Commission.

The Salt Lake firm of Cooper Roberts Simonsen Architects is in charge of the restoration, and architect Allen Roberts recently showed the Deseret Morning News through the building. Roberts says the cost is coming in at less than $1 million. He notes that, at $100 a square foot, the restoration costs significantly less than new construction of a comparable building.

The hall was well worth saving, Roberts says. "It was built in 1903 and is probably one of the oldest continuously used city halls in the state."

The City Hall sits just north of Main Street, next to the 1894 Harrington School. The old Community Presbyterian Church is across the way. This part of town has been the ecclesiastic and government center since the 1850s, when American Fork was first farmed and platted.

Church and government often shared offices in the small towns of the Utah Territory. (That must have made life easier for people like Leonard Harrington, who served simultaneously for 29 years as American Fork's mayor, postmaster and LDS bishop.) After Utah became a state in 1896, even small cities and counties built separate structures for their government offices.