With the economy struggling to right itself, many businesses are playing price wars. Each store finds some discount or other unique way to attract customers, hoping to pull itself out of the red.

Once upon a time, however, there existed a store in one of Tooele County’s smallest towns that had a great crowd-attracting feature: it was underground.

The open landscape between Vernon and Stockton was once home to a small community of Welsh farmers. This small town called Centre was a result of the exploding mining industry of the 1860s — and it wasn’t the only community to dot the region.

In 1869, William Ajax moved his family from Salt Lake City to the open landscape of southern Tooele County when the department store he owned tanked in sales. Ajax’s main attraction to Tooele County stemmed from rumors he’d heard about the growing need for farmers west of Salt Lake City, where miners were in need of food and supplies.

With his family housed in a dugout, Ajax started growing hay to sell to the mines. As he collected his profit from sales, he built a two-room adobe house next to his hay crop.

But old habits die hard and the former merchant soon found himself stocking his kitchen shelf with dry goods and supplies to sell to passing travelers. Soon he was making a better living selling goods from his kitchen pantry than slaving away in the fields.

By 1870, the in-home grocery store had outgrown the house, and when the call for a post office came, Ajax took the responsibility to house the post office in his store. But he was still short of space.

While brainstorming ideas for how to run his store outside of his residence, Ajax remembered his first underground dugout home — a home that kept him safe from the elements and held a fairly constant temperature year round.

Inspired, Ajax quickly began construction on his underground store, digging into the desert soil and lining the edges of the hole with cedar timbers. When the main chamber reached about 12 feet deep and 1,800 square feet in area, Ajax laid timber over the hole and covered it with mud, leaving a south-facing skylight.

The Ajax Underground Store was ready for its first customers.

In the beginning, the store operated as more than a general store. The inventory included expensive fabric and fine china, in addition to the usual necessities for frontier life. Locals could buy supplies to last through the harsh winters while pleasing their wives with elegant trinkets, and the store became a gathering place for the nearby communities of Mercur, Stockton and Ophir.

As an honor to the popularity of the store, the town formerly known as Centre was re-christened Ajax, though the post office maintained the original name.

An above-ground hotel was quickly added with a stable and corral that could manage 100 horses, 300 cattle, and 6,000 sheep all at the same time.

Business kept booming and Ajax felt the urge to keep digging. Eventually the store’s main room stretched 80 feet long and 100 feet wide. Additional rooms made the underground store expand over 11,000 square feet with more than $75,000 of merchandise inside.

As the railroad expanded and people were able to travel to Salt Lake more easily, however, the store started to lose business. Then Ajax died in 1899 and left the store in the care of his children, even as the town was quickly dissolving.

The store took another hit when mail order catalogs came into circulation, but the final blow was dealt when Mercur closed in 1913. The store was forced to close a year later and all that remains of it now is a hole in the desert soil.

Natalie Tripp: ntripp@tooeletranscript.com