During the Christmas season, as people drive on Main Street in Tooele, it is hard to miss the brightly-lit Christmas tree perched atop Little Mountain year after year.

Standing 30 feet tall, with 180 light bulbs, the tree is put up every year on the day after Thanksgiving until the new year.

The tree’s debut was during the early 1960s when Maxine Grimm, a longtime Tooele resident, decided that she wanted something that would spread the Christmas spirit throughout the entire city.

It was only a few months earlier that Grimm had put a flag pole on the mountain on property owned by Tooele resident Doug Gordon. After receiving so many positive comments about the flag pole, Grimm decided that it would be a good project to string lights from the pole, making a Christmas tree.

That first year, Grimm recruited Tooele resident and friend Paul Bevan and together they completed the large project by themselves. It was hard work, according to Grimm, now 94.

“We had to get the cord and then splice it so that it would go to the lights,” Grimm said. “We worked every night in the dark, and we wore most of the skin off of our fingers trying to do everything. Eventually somebody had to climb to the top of the pole, and once we had everything ready to go, we blew all of the lights out and had to start over.”

Even after Utah Power, now Rocky Mountain Power, donated the electricity to light the tree the first year, Grimm felt that it was too much work to do by themselves. The next year she approached the Tooele County Search and Rescue team, which had the resources and manpower to maintain the tree year after year.

That partnership worked. Since that time, Search and Rescue has been in charge of the manual labor while Grimm has funded the maintenance by replacing light bulbs. The tree has been continually lit by donated power.

But each year, new problems are presented as people drive over the cords and they become damaged. And this year, the tree almost didn’t get put up and lit.

Last year, a terrible windstorm blew the flag pole, complete with lights and cords, to the ground, shattering every single light bulb.

Fortunately, the county replaced all the bulbs. And Wireless Beehive, which was putting a tower near the original location of the pole, gave permission for the lights to be strung from their tower.

A few weeks prior to Thanksgiving, the tower was finished, the lights were strung, the power was donated and the tree was lit.

Even after all of these years, the tree is still something that is very important to Grimm. She said she recently received a phone call from a friend telling her that there was no light on the mountain. Grimm called dispatch and asked them to fix the problem. However, the next night, the problem still wasn’t fixed. On the third night, Grimm said, “My friend called me again and said, ‘Hooray, I can find my way again.’ It warms my heart to hear stories like that.”

There’s one more addition Grimm would like to see on the Christmas tree.

“I really want to put a star on top of there,” she said. “I think about it all the time, but don’t know how to go about it. That’s my next project. But, I’m delighted to give this tree to the Tooele Valley.”