Independence, UT

Independence is a town in Wasatch County, Utah, just east of U.S. Route 40 southeast of Heber City. The 2020 census counted 121 residents. The town's official history dates its birth to June 5, 2008, when it incorporated around a vision of planned growth, sustainability, nature, and recreation. Its governing body has a mayor and five council members. On the county map, Center Creek Road skirts the north side while U.S. 40 runs along the west, placing Independence between the Heber Valley road network and the Wasatch foothills.

The footprint is unusually large for a town that had 121 residents in 2020. The town describes more than 9,000 acres of private land and 10,000 acres of Forest Service land, ranging from farmland to wooded alpine terrain. Independence also has a legal-history wrinkle: it was among the communities grandfathered under a short-lived Utah incorporation law that allowed certain petitions from landowners in places with populations in the hundreds. That legal history makes the town's story about land planning as much as a central business district. Here, the local map is the main character: highway, canyon roads, open ground, and forest lands around a very small population.