Draper’s early gathering places centered first on a one-room adobe school building erected in 1852 on the north wall of Draper Fort, followed in 1860 by a second public structure called the Vestry near the fort’s northeast corner, which served as a school, meetinghouse, and community center. In 1863 a main hall was added, and the building became known as the Old White Meetinghouse. Built largely from local materials, including lumber, mortar, bricks, paint, granite blocks, and "Mormon adobes" made from local clay, it hosted John Rocky Park’s village school, and Park later became the first president of the University of Deseret, precursor to the University of Utah. For more than twenty years, the meetinghouse served Draper in public and spiritual gatherings. Draper’s Latter-day Saints settlers formed a branch in 1853, and in 1856 the community became the Draper Ward, with Isaac Mitton Stewart sustained as its first bishop in October 1856 and serving until his death on March 15, 1890. As the population grew, Bishop William Coleman Allen began a new meetinghouse in the spring of 1892. Church members excavated the basement with wagons, plows, scrapers, and horse teams, quarried and hauled granite for the foundation, molded bricks, and supplied labor of many kinds. Completed at a cost of $13,000 and dedicated on May 24, 1903, under Bishop Willard Boulter Enniss, the First Ward Church contained a chapel with a pipe organ on the main floor and classrooms and a kitchen in the basement. After a windstorm blew off part of the roof, the church was abandoned on June 14, 1953, and razed in 1954. Another important gathering place was the Draper Roundhouse or Amusement Hall, begun in 1913 and nearly completed in 1916 after a show helped raise enough money to finish it. Built east of the Draper Ward meetinghouse and designed by a young architect named Bjorling of Murray, Utah, it followed an oval plan and hipped roof design modeled on the Salt Lake Tabernacle. The Roundhouse served Draper as a social center for dances, socials, basketball games, weddings, and theatrical use until it was demolished in 1961 after the city judged it insufficient for the town’s needs.