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An old building is transported from the Clyde Companies construction lot in Springville to the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum.

Courtesy Nate Christofferson

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An old building is transported from the Clyde Companies construction lot in Springville to the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum.

Courtesy Nate Christofferson

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An old building is transported from the Clyde Companies construction lot in Springville to the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum.

Courtesy Nate Christofferson

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An old building is transported from the Clyde Companies construction lot in Springville to the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum.

Courtesy Nate Christofferson

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An old building is transported from the Clyde Companies construction lot in Springville to the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum.

Courtesy Nate Christofferson

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An old building is transported from the Clyde Companies construction lot in Springville to the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum.

Courtesy Nate Christofferson

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An old building is transported from the Clyde Companies construction lot in Springville to the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum.

Courtesy Nate Christofferson

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An old building is transported from the Clyde Companies construction lot in Springville to the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum.

Courtesy Nate Christofferson

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An old building is transported from the Clyde Companies construction lot in Springville to the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum.

Courtesy Nate Christofferson

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An old building is transported from the Clyde Companies construction lot in Springville to the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum.

Courtesy Nate Christofferson

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An old building is transported from the Clyde Companies construction lot in Springville to the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum.

Courtesy Nate Christofferson

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An old building is transported from the Clyde Companies construction lot in Springville to the Historic Wendover Airfield Museum.

Courtesy Nate Christofferson

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In the late 1940s, W.W. Clyde purchased a pair of framed buildings from a World War II air base being disassembled in Wendover and trucked them across the west desert to the Clyde Companies construction yard in Springville.

Approximately 75 years later, Clyde Companies was preparing to build new headquarters on the land where the warehouses stood and determining what to do with the structures.

They decided to send them back to their original home, the Wendover Airfield.

“The question was, should we knock them down? It’s cheap to knock them down and just get rid of them,” Clyde Companies’ Brad Christofferson said. “Or, we repurpose them on our yard somewhere and try to make something out of them, which would require us moving them. And our thought was, well, if we’re going to move them, let’s see if they want them back in Wendover.”

The Wendover Airfield agreed to take the buildings and will preserve them in perpetuity.

Last Sunday, the first of the two was loaded onto a large trailer by Valgardson House Movers. The next one will be delivered in December.

The buildings

According to Historic Wendover Airfield Foundation President Jim Peterson, the Wendover Airfield was home to 668 buildings during World War II, used as barracks and utility and mess halls.

After the war, everyone went home and there was no use for the buildings, so they were placed in Army surplus.

Around that time, W.W. Clyde was doing highway work in Nevada. Christofferson believes this is when Clyde purchased the buildings and moved them to Springville.

“They were resourceful back then, and it was cheaper to just do that than it was to build something new, and the materials weren’t as readily available,” he said.

Clyde Companies does not know the exact year the buildings were acquired, but knows they were sent to the construction yard.

They have served a number of purposes there throughout the years. Most recently, one was a paint shop and the other was a carpentry shop. But they no longer serve a need because a new maintenance shop is being built in Spanish Fork, and Clyde Companies’ new four-story, 125,000-square-foot office is coming in.

When determining what to do with them, a Clyde Companies historian identified the buildings as military and called Peterson at Wendover Historic Airfield to learn more about their history. Museum representatives then visited the warehouses.

Peterson said they could not find any specific information on what the buildings were used for, but surmised they were utility warehouses.

However, they were able to verify their origin, thanks to the construction type and some interior artwork in the buildings, including insignias of the Army Air Corps, Christofferson said.

The museum agreed to take them in, adding to one of the most preserved World War II bases in the country, which includes six original hangars.

“Our whole objective out there is to try to preserve the history of this training base,” Peterson said.

The first building will be used to house a refurbished ’43 bomb truck, while the use of the second is still to be determined, according to Peterson.

Bringing it out

The Valgardson family has been moving homes and buildings via trailer since the 1940s, and it is a form of transportation that has become increasingly uncommon.

Such trips require extensive planning. According to Christofferson, they planned a route free of obstructions for the 17½-foot-tall building and added a skeeter board on top so any low-hanging wires would slide off.

They also coordinated with the Utah Highway Patrol, which scheduled the low-traffic Sunday morning to escort the trailer.

The first building was lifted onto the trailer, and a convoy that included patrol cars and a spare trailer left the W.W. Clyde construction yard at 7 a.m. Sunday, driving down State Street from Provo to Lehi and onto Lehi Main Street.

Christofferson said the convoy waited an hour in Lehi for fog to clear before continuing its journey on State Road 73 to Fairfield, through Stockton and up to Grantsville.

Then they got on Interstate 80 the rest of the way, going slow and steady.

“They would get off each exit basically because they were going slower than traffic on I-80, and they kind of created a plug behind them,” Christofferson said. “And so every exit, they would get off and then back on the on-ramp and let the traffic that was behind them go through.”

The warehouse arrived Sunday afternoon.

“It went very smoothly,” Christofferson said.

When the second building is moved in December, the same process will start all over again.

It was not a cheap ordeal for Clyde Companies, but Christofferson said it was important to preserve the history and was good to give back.

The historic airfield was a happy recipient.

“We’re very grateful to the W.W. Clyde Company for their generosity and being able to do this for us, because we know it wasn’t an inexpensive proposition for them,” Peterson said.