In 1853 Abraham Coon, an early Mormon pioneer, explored a canyon in the Oquirrh Mountains on the west side of Salt Lake Valley and found abundant timber for lumber, oak bark useful for tanning leather, and ample water to power a saw mill and tan-bark processing plant. He obtained permission to open the canyon for these purposes, established a toll fee for access, used the revenue to build and maintain the road, and the canyon was officially named Coon Canyon. Abraham Coon and his family settled at the mouth of the canyon and started a farming community known as Coonville, the first settlement on the west side of Salt Lake Valley, covering a one-square-mile area south of this marker. The Coon, Deardon, Hardman, Shafer, Thomas, Sadler, Ek, Jenkins, and Larson families settled there, and the 47th District School House was built to house first- through eighth-grade classes and church functions. In the 1860s, settlers from Salt Lake City were attracted to the fertile soil north of Coonville, where the farming community of Pleasant Green grew up on a two-square-mile area. Early family names in Pleasant Green included Spencer, Reid, Taylor, Cockrell, Jacobs, Lecheminant, Breeze, Perkins, Sutton, Mellen, Hirst, Brown, Bouck, Bertoch, Hartley, Lambert, Whipple, Shields, Adamson, Drury, Featherstone, and Wolstenholme. In 1906 Daniel C. Jackling brought the Utah Copper Company into operation by commencing open-pit mining in Bingham Canyon, and over the next forty years the mine, smelting, and milling operations expanded as the company became known as Kennecott. By 1992, after continued modernization of the mine and processing plants, this remained one of the great copper producing centers of the world. With the advent of the copper industry, Coonville and Pleasant Green merged into the unincorporated city of Magna, whose name means magnificent or great, and the name became official with the opening of the first Magna Post Office in 1917.