.
Newly constructed homes in A Section
Initial work on Drager began in the fall of 1942 by the W.E. Ryberg-Strong-Grant Corporation of Salt Lake City, who had been awarded the contract at a cost of five million dollars. (Crandall) Springville resident Leo Crandall was hired as a construction supervisor. (Crandall) According to Crandall, the development called for the construction of 725 new modern homes, a community center, hospital, school, movie theater, and many other essential services. From the fall of 1942 until spring 1943, Walter Drager, the chief engineer, spent a considerable amount of time at the project overseeing and observing its steady progress. (Crandall) Due to the geography of the town site it was necessary that it be divided into sections (subdivisions), which were identified alphabetically. The west end of Drager was identified as A section; B section was situated in a large arroyo near the center of town. Adjacent to, just north of and situated on a bluff overlooking B section, was C section. D section was located directly east of A section and was the area where the community center and hospital and were built. E section was the last section to be built, adjacent to C section and was the furthest eastern section of town. In 1959, the high school was built north of and adjacent to E section.
Drager was built on 336 acres of land once owned by the Whitmore family. According to Carbon County land records, George Carter Whitmore, James Whitmore, Rosco Philip Whitmore, and Arthur Lawrence Whitmore were the principal owners of this property. By the time the DPC arrived, none of the principal land owners were living and the property was obtained from their heirs. The actual amount paid for the property is not known, but in 1899 the land was offered to the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad for $100,000. A portion of the land was purchased from David Menotti, a local grocer.
The construction of homes was slated for the fall of 1942. To accomplish this awesome task, it was necessary to hire skilled carpenters, masons, plumbers and electricians, and a large work force of unskilled workers. An estimated workforce of 350 men was needed to complete the project, but as work progressed that figure rose to 600. (Crandall) The men working on this project were paid the salary scale from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). These men were not allowed to work more than 130 hours per month, eight hours per day or 40 hours a week.
The schedule also determined the wages for skilled and unskilled laborers based upon the 1940 population of the county. (Mortensen) Based upon those figures, the men hired to work on the project in Drager received a wage of between $52 and $55 per week. (U.S. Gov. Manuel, pg 360) The initial stage began with the survey of the land, followed by leveling the ground. Tractors, graders and other heavy equipment arrived in the fall of 1942 to begin clearing the land. Leo Crandall, who was there during this time, stated that the shrubs and other vegetation were pushed over the banks of the Grassy Trail Creek and covered with excess soil from the work site. John Lamb, a native of Provo, Utah, arrived and surveyed the land to lay out streets, a site for the school, community center, and hospital. Upon completion of the surveying, trenches were dug to lay water and sewer lines.
The corner of 8th West and Geneva Drive in A Section
It was also Lamb’s responsibility to survey and lay out individual plots for the placement of footings. The footings consisted of redwood posts set in cement, and the floor joists were constructed of pinewood. Crandall stated that the fabrication of the homes was done in Logan, Utah, where the walls and roofs were prefabricated and then shipped by rail to Drager. (Crandall) The walls were built in sections and included the windows and ply board. After the walls were set in place, the board siding was placed on the outside walls at the work site. The interior walls were shipped along with the interior doors that were pre-hung for quick installation.
The floors were hardwood, because fir was not available at the time due to the war’s utilization of fir. The water pipes were extended underground from the property easements to the home sites. When the house was completed, the waterlines were then connected to the house. The same process was repeated with the sewage system, which was connected after the house was completed. However, it was sometime later after many residents had moved in before the system was fully operational. (Crandall) There were several house plans utilized which would be alternated to avoid repetition, and each home would alternate with different frontages at varying distances from the street, in an effort to avoid monotony of long sections of identical homes. The design of the house allowed for either four, five or six rooms, which included a kitchen, bathroom, living room and either two or three bedrooms. The first houses built in Drager were in A section, and were initially designed and built with only one entrance door. However, that quickly changed within a few months after the first residents took up residency. (Crandall) Inside the homes, the walls were bare except in the kitchen, which contained a few cupboards over the kitchen sink. The only appliances furnished by the DPC were the refrigerators and a wood-burning cook stove (later, an electric water heater was installed in the kitchen). Within a few years, all of the wood-burning stoves would be replaced with a modern electric range. The residents themselves purchased other furniture and appliances desired by the families.
 Typical home found in C Section
The first houses built in Drager were those along the both sides of Eighth West, and then along the north side of Whitmore Drive, up to First West. (Crandall) The work crews then moved over to First West and, as the homes were completed, the crews moved down to Second West. This routine was repeated as they worked their way west until they had completed the homes on Seventh West. The crews then moved back toward Cedar Road, then along Whitmore Drive and over to Garden Road and continued along Whitmore Drive to a certain point in front of the school. (Fowler) With the completion of C section, the work proceeded down Grassy Trails Drive to Grant Avenue, which is in B section and then up Grassy Trails Drive to C section. The details of the plans indicated that C section would contain the highest number of homes in Drager, containing 267 houses. The work began from the east on Shurman Street to West Park Place, which included Berkley, Carson, and Denver Avenues, Wilkins and Rawlings Streets and Grassy Trails Drive. (Crandall)
D section contained 43 houses and included all the houses around the hospital along Whitmore Drive, with Edgehill and Geneva Road included. E section contained the homes along West Park Place, then east and included Ryberg Street, and parts of Denver, Carson and Berkley Avenues. It contained 124 houses and it was the last section to be built. (Crandall)
Before construction began in B section, near the area of the boarding house, a make-shift trailer park sprang up. Small mobile trailers were brought in to alleviate the housing problem and provide a modicum of housing for the construction workers hired to assemble the houses. Among the first families was that of José Duran, who came from Pagosa Springs, Colorado, along with his wife, Darita and their three daughters (Bertha, Mabel and Mary) and a son (Louie) to work at Horse Canyon Mine. (Carrillo) He, like many of these families, was still reeling from the effects of the depression that left him unemployed and homeless. Like the other arriving miners, he was anxious to work with the prospects of obtaining housing and building a new life in this new town. (Carrillo) Those prospects were all the incentive needed to endure the hardships encountered while working inside the coal mine.
Typical home found in E Section
These men and their families brought an attitude of patience, perseverance, and a great work ethic, which were their defining characteristics. Men from every race, creed, religion and nationality converged upon this newly created town and lent their heritage and customs to the legacy of this coal town. As the invasion of miners and their families descended upon Drager in anticipation of obtaining employment, it became painfully obvious that the lack of housing would create a problem.
Horse Canyon began producing coal before any houses were ready for occupancy. In the interim many of these early miners and their families were forced to set up tents in the cedars, at various locations surrounding the construction site. The site of these tents was reminiscent of the early days of Sunnyside and Columbia when coal mining began at those locations.
The tents placed near Horse Canyon and in the vicinity of Columbia were tagged with the name “Tent City” because of their large numbers. (Trujillo) José R. Martínez and Henry Trujillo both arrived from New Mexico and were among the early miners at Horse Canyon. They, along with their families were among those that lived in “Tent City.” (Trujillo)
Typical home found in A Section
On March 20, 1943, a small celebration was held to commemorate this special event, with the first families receiving the keys to their new home. After all the houses in Drager were built and despite the availability of housing there were still a few hermitic individuals that continued to live in the cedars. Darrell Valdez, the current fire chief of East Carbon City, remembers that as late as the mid 1950s, an individual by the name of Ché Archuleta lived in a shanty amongst the juniper and pinion trees behind the Carbon Grocery Store. Billy Simmson an African-American was another of those individual, his shanty was located down the dugway near the Icelander wash. (Fowler) By March 11, 1943, construction workers had completed 60 houses, which were ready for occupancy. According to Leo Crandall, it was anticipated that 48 additional houses would be completed each week until the project came to a conclusion. (Crandall) Putting those numbers into perspective meant that each week a block would be completed. The projections by the Defense Plant Corporation indicated that as many as 5,700 residents would eventually live in Drager when the mine was fully operational and the homes completed. (Crandall) However, there was no way for the developers and engineers to foresee that by the late 1950s the population of Drager(ton) would exceed 7,000 residents. (Dragerton Tribune, June 1953)
The development of a modern community located near the mine site was essential to attract miners to work at the new mine. The area selected for the new town site was located in lower Clarks Valley twelve miles north of the mine, which was the area that extended northwest of Sunnyside and included the old Whitmore Cattle Company ranch.
The town of Drager was to resemble a modern urban community, estranged from any canyon, with a back drop of the rugged and colorful Book Cliff Mountains. It was starkly different from Sunnyside, which was built within the confines of a rugged canyon, surrounded by mining equipment, railroad tracks, and coal tipples, that filled the narrow canyon along the valley floor. One benefit from the location of Drager was that it did not suffer from the same maladies of thick heavy smoke produced by the hundreds of coke ovens located in Sunnyside and the ever-present coal dust that inevitably found its way onto everything.
Dragerton's boarding house
One of Dragerton’s landmarks for many years was the large wooden boarding house located in the dip or the area known as B-section. It was built in 1943 to accommodate the construction crews that came to work on the town of Dragerton. There were approximately 600 construction workers in the area hired by W.E. Ryberg-Strong and Grant Corporation, as well as subcontractors that arrived to assist in this project. While the boarding house was being completed, many of the men camped out in the cedars in tents or lived in trailers. When the new boarding house was completed, it contained 100 rooms that accommodated two men per room. It also contained a kitchen, laundry room and showers for the convenience of the boarders. The actual dimensions of the main building measured 120 feet long and 30 feet wide, and on each side of the main building a wing was built, which measured approximately 60 feet long and 40 feet wide.
Initial plans were to hire Nick and Josephine Rinetti — owners and operators of the Rinetti and Capitolo restaurant located in Price — to operate the boarding house. The Defense Plant Corporation purchased and all the fixtures and furniture to furnish the kitchen at the boarding house from the Renietti’s. (Sun Advocate Aug. 13, 1943) Eventually the Defense Plant Corporation hired forty-four-year-old Columbia resident Myrtle Coleman Tittle, to manage the boarding house. She was born in Woodside, Utah, on 15 November 1896, and was a long-time resident of the area. She met her husband, William Tittle while living in the town of Kenilworth in 1920 and the young couple married on July 1921. (Tittle) William was a miner and was working at the Columbia mine. She, along with hired help, provided three meals a day for the men and washed and pressed their clothes. Her employment lasted until the boarding house was converted into apartments and she was replaced by Josephine Tomsick, who many former residents may remember from her days as a lunch lady at the Wooden School. (Tittle)
 Dragerton Mercantile/Community Center
In 1943, construction on the Mercantile Center began near the center of town. The building when completed had seven individual shops and a Post Office, with each shop featuring a large display window. The build was made of red brick and spanned 250 feet in length and 100 feet in width and become the center of activity for the residents of Dragerton.
In the rear of the Mercantile Center, just behind the Post Office was the fire station. Next to the fire station, along the back of the building was a large room intended for a laundry. In January 1949, Jack Clifford used that room to open the Geneva Variety Store. He sold housewares, hardware, drugs, toiletries, and toys. His business venture ended in December 1950, and in 1952, Irvin Dean Anderson opened a shoe shop at that same location.
A large smoke stack extended upward from the rear of the building. It emitted a large plume of smoke generated by the large coal-burning furnace used for the boiler system. Ample parking was available in front of the building and along its west side. Also surrounding this large complex was land for future development. In the late 1950s, U.S. Steel built a large building next to the Mercantile Center for their company offices. Today that building is currently used by East Carbon City for their city offices.
The Mercantile Center opened on October 4, 1943, and was under contract to Karl L. Jameson, a Price resident. The Union Department Store comprised the largest portion of the center. When it opened for business, there were eighteen employees ready to assist the customers. (Sun Advocate, October 4, 1943) Jameson’s contract included all the shops operating within the entire building. Store departments included a grocery store, managed by J. D. Coletti, a resident of Columbia. Ellis Peacock managed the meat department and Mrs. Mary A. Cook managed the dry goods department. Other departments within the store included hardware, furniture, notions and shoes.
The front entrance faced southwest at a slight angle. Upon entering the store, the hardware department and sporting-goods were situated to the left. During Christmas seasons it was the location where all the toys were displayed. On the right side was the clothing, shoes and housewares department. The back half of the store contained the grocery store, and toward the east end of the grocery store was the meat and butchers’ department. The checkout counter was located at the front of the grocery store. Midway into the store was a walkway that led to the furniture department. Just at the head of this walk way was the office where residents went to make payments on their credit account.
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