The tiny railroad and mining town on the eastern end of Highway 6 through Spanish Fork Canyon is considered by most travelers as the place where you need to reduce your speed coming off the highway before you roll into Price.

It might be a place to gas up before you continue your journey to Colorado, or perhaps Moab. You might even grab a sandwich at the deli situated at the intersection of U.S. 6 and North Main Street.

But if you stick around for a while, you learn that this town has a rich cultural history and is proud of its role in cultivating the West and preserving much of its heritage.

However, whatever chance you might have had of enriching yourself with a first-hand look at Western history in Helper may diminish soon because an overpass being built by the Utah Department of Transportation will bypass North Main Street and travelers will skip the town.

Many of Helper's 2,000 denizens didn't want the overpass. They told UDOT during several public hearings that its $20 million would be better spent improving sections of Highway 6, a winding, mostly two-lane, 60-mile stretch through the canyon long considered one of the most dangerous highways in the country.

The townspeople suggested a traffic light at North Main instead. That would be much cheaper and satisfy any safety concerns about traffic suddenly descending into the town. State officials told the little upstarts that a semaphore light at the intersection was not practical because it would not be visible to drivers far enough away for them to stop in time.

Helperites pointed out that UDOT had installed five semaphore traffic signals on Highway 6 in the Spanish Fork area, on the other side of the canyon, and at least two of them were not visible until drivers are almost on top of them. They should stop crabbing, the townspeople were told, or their $20 million share of the state's Centennial Highway Fund would be lost to them.

Dal Hawks, Division 4 director for UDOT, says Main Street comes off the highway at an odd angle and creates a safety hazard. He said that eventually Highway 6 will be four lanes and that volume of traffic would pose a dangerous hazard if it came onto Main Street. He also said the highway divides Helper in half, where an overpass will unite it so slower traffic and pedestrians can traverse North Main Street uninterrupted.

But the townspeople fear the overpass will put out of business the gas station, deli and small hotel on North Main Street's intersection with Highway 6, one of the town's strongest sales-tax sources.

Helper, named for "helper" locomotives that pushed the heavy coal trains over the steep mountain grades, was founded in 1881 and was home to the wave of immigrants finding jobs in the local coal mines. The descendants of the Mexicans, Greeks, Italians and other immigrants seeking a better life still inhabit Helper, keeping alive its rich ethnic diversity.

The well-preserved Western Mining and Railroad Museum, as well as other memorable sites on the historic Main Street and the town's annual Heritage Week have earned Helper recognition in True West magazine as one of the country's best-preserved OId-West towns.

Heritage Week begins Monday and runs through Saturday. It features a showing of the film "Rails around Helper," a Bordello Ball, and an Old-West-style shoot-out in the street.

Townspeople fear that all that will be lost with the overpass over Main Street so that travelers won't even know the town is there.

But when it comes to their town, apparently UDOT knows best.