The Utah General Depot
Near Ogden, Utah
In the late summer of nineteen forty-one, the Army Corps of Engineers broke ground on more than one thousand acres of farmland in the community of Marriott, just west of Ogden. The facility they were building would be called the Utah General Depot. Four months later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and what had been a planned logistics installation became an immediate wartime necessity.
The site was chosen for three reasons that were obvious on a map. Ogden sat at the intersection of transcontinental rail lines. Everything the country shipped by rail passed through or near here. It was equidistant from multiple Pacific ports in California: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland. And it was close to two other major military installations: Hill Field, an air base and maintenance facility that had opened in November nineteen forty just to the south in Davis County, and what would become the Clearfield Naval Supply Depot.
The depot's job was to receive, store, and distribute military supplies moving toward the Pacific theater. By the end of the war it had grown from eight original warehouses to twenty-eight warehouses and nineteen sheds. A prisoner of war camp was established on the grounds; German and Italian prisoners of war worked in the facility. At its wartime peak it employed thousands of civilians, many of them women whose husbands were overseas. It was a transformation of Ogden's labor force that proved permanent.
After the war the facility was redesignated the Defense Depot Ogden. It operated through the Korean War, the Vietnam era, and the Gulf War. It was finally closed in nineteen ninety-seven under the Base Realignment and Closure process. The land is now partially redeveloped as a mixed-use area called Business Depot Ogden.
The footprint of the original warehouses is still visible from the air, a grid pressed into the west side of the city.
