Utah Historical Quarterly, Volume 85, Number 1, 2017

U TA H HISTORICAL Q U A R T E R LY EDITORIAL STAFF Brad Westwood — Publisher/Editor Holly George — Co-Managing Editor

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ADVISORY BOARD OF EDITORS Brian Q. Cannon, Provo, 2016

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Craig Fuller, Salt Lake City, 2018

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Jedediah S. Rogers — Co-Managing Editor

Robert E. Parson, Benson, 2017 Clint Pumphrey, Logan, 2018

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W. Paul Reeve, Salt Lake City, 2018

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Susan Sessions Rugh, Provo, 2016 John Sillito, Ogden, 2017 Ronald G. Watt, South Jordan, 2017

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In 1897, public-spirited Utahns organized the Utah State Historical Society in order to expand public understanding of Utah’s past.

Today, the Utah Division of State History administers the Society and, as part of its statutory obligations, publishes the Utah Historical Quarterly (ISSN 0 042-143X), which has collected and preserved Utah’s history since 1928. The Division, which is part of the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts, also collects materials related to the history of Utah and makes them available online and in a research library; assists communities, agencies, building owners, and consultants with state and federal processes regarding archaeological and historical resources; administers the ancient human remains program; administers the Utah History Day program; offers extensive online resources; and assists in public policy and the promotion of Utah’s rich history.

UHQ appears in winter, spring, summer, and fall. Members of the Society receive UHQ upon payment of annual dues: individual, $30; institution, $40; student and senior (age 65 or older), $25; business, $40; sustaining, $40; patron, $60; sponsor, $100.

Direct manuscript submissions to the address listed below. Visit history.utah.gov for submission guidelines. Articles and book reviews represent the views of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Utah State Historical Society.

The Rio Grande Depot, home of the Utah State Historical Society.

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POSTMASTER: Send address change to Utah Historical Quarterly, 300 S. Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, Utah 84101. Periodicals postage is paid at Salt Lake City, Utah.

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Jeffrey D. Nichols, Mountain Green, 2018

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Kathryn L. MacKay, Ogden, 2017

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Lee Ann Kreutzer, Salt Lake City, 2018

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Book Reviews

97 The Size of the Risk: Histories of Multiple Use in the Great Basin Leisl Carr Childers * Reviewed by Joseph E. Taylor III

98 The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History Matthew L. Harris and Newell G. Bringhurst, eds.

Reviewed by Russell Stevenson

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102 A New Form of Beauty:

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Glen Canyon beyond Climate Change Photographs by Peter Goin, Essays by Peter Friederici

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CONTENTS 6

Becoming More Conscientious of Utah’s Sites of Conscience

59 Studying the Unstudied:

By Kirk Huffaker

16 Modernism on Campus:

Architecture at the University of Utah, 1945–1975

By Bim Oliver

88 The Last Word in Stockyard Construction:

40 Building the Forest Service in Utah:

An Architectural Context

By Richa Wilson

Utah Drawings from the Western Regional Architecture Program Collection, University of Utah, 1982-2016

By Thomas Carter

The Rise and Fall of the Ogden Union Stockyard

By Sheri Murray Ellis

4 In this issue 97 Book REviews & Notices 103 CONTRIBUTORS 104 Utah in Focus

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A History of America’s First National Playground

By Jonathan Foster

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102 Lake Mead National Recreation Area:

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Book Notices

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Larry Gerlach * Reviewed by Chris Elzey

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100 Alma Richards, Olympian

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IN this issue

The Utah Historical Quarterly first devoted an issue entirely to architectural history in 1975, with “Toward an Architectural Tradition”; just over a decade later came a second such issue, investigating “Architecture at the Turn of the Century.” The time has come to add to this body of work. In this issue of UHQ, we focus on historic preservation and on place-based history of the built environment.

Historic preservation has a variety of meanings, depending on one’s perspective and experience. In the broadest of definitions, it encompasses the movement to document and save that which is meaningful to our collective history. While to some this phrase may convey the stoppage of time, to others it represents change. Places are not frozen; they are always evolving. The historic preservation process gives us a chance to collectively determine if and how historic places work within the context of a changing built environment. You can’t see historic preservation in a museum. While history is physically present around us every day, it’s part of a temporary museum undergoing permanent change.

Preservation embraces a cross-section of community-based practices and institutions that include historic architecture and archaeology, as well as mu-

seums, libraries, and archives, festivals, tourism, and long-lived businesses. Though representing even a thread of all these areas in a special issue would be a challenge, the essays in this issue demonstrate the breadth of knowledge of Utah’s architectural historians and archaeologists, highlighting some of the tremendous research and writing in the field. The authors’ expertise and the UHQ’s support of this type of research help generate more public understanding for places that matter. This issue demonstrates the important role of historic preservation in Utah in determining how our state changes for the better when we consider places of meaning—what I refer to in my opening essay as sites of conscience.

Bim Oliver served as a consultant in the documentation of the midcentury development of the University of Utah campus. The years after World War II saw extensive growth in student population, though it took the state twenty-five years to catch up to the demand for greater access and new academic programs. The buildings constructed during those years of development and change are now frequently discussed—and targeted—for demolition. One goal of Oliver’s documentation was to foster greater public appreciation for why these places were built in the first place and how they were

used. Although they look different than the older structures forming Presidents Circle, Oliver argues, midcentury, Modernist buildings still deserve preservation.

Given the amount of federally owned public lands in Utah, partnerships between the managing federal agencies, interested stakeholders, lessees of federal property, and the public at large are essential in administering the cultural resources on those lands.

Richa Wilson, a Forest Service architectural historian, offers an overview of the evolution of Forest Service architecture in Utah dating to the early twentieth century. She shows how buildings constructed in the state’s forests both reflected and departed from mainstream trends. The changing nature of federal forest management and policies gave each period distinctive design characteristics that continue to be identifiable today.

In his essay, Thomas Carter, an emeritus professor at the University of Utah, argues that historic preservationists derive cultural meaning through analysis and drawing. Through this series of artistic drawings, Carter highlights a wide range of building types and forms, architectural styles, and influences in construction. His essay also demonstrates the

importance of drawing to historic preservation and how that skill is fading with each generation.

Finally, Sheri Murray Ellis, a cultural resource consultant, details the growth and decline of the Ogden Union Stockyard. This large and profitable facility came to exist largely through the instruments of technology—especially the railroad—and, in the end, newer technologies made the yards obsolete. Today, they are the site of redevelopment efforts.

I want to acknowledge my tremendous appreciation to the authors in this issue and to the UHQ editors for their willingness to produce the issue and persistent, professional guidance to oversee its completion.

Kirk Huffaker, Guest Editor Preservation Utah

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6 A young family stands outside of a tar paper shack in Topaz, Utah, circa 1942–1945 —

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Living in Sugar House for more than a decade now, I’ve enjoyed many runs in Sugar House Park. When I’m out there alone with my thoughts, I often come back to the question, “what makes this a place?” If you are seeking answers at the park, you have to really look to get them, because they’re hidden. A plaque on a monument is hidden in a grove of evergreen trees, and while it’s nice and shady under there, the recognition that Sugar House Park was once home to the first Utah State Penitentiary is completely obscured. Maybe there was purpose behind the monument’s site selection and landscape plan, one that was part let’s put a plaque up to remember and part let’s hide it in a grove of trees because we don’t want to celebrate the prison.

Today, penitentiaries are among the significant historic sites associated with the international movement known as sites of conscience.1 This movement aims to connect past to present by fostering thoughtful civic discussion about the thorny social topics associated with historic places. There are many examples of how untold and challenging stories can be spotlighted at places of newly understood or recognized significance.

While the stories may be difficult to approach in interpretation, promoting healing and reconciliation go far beyond the events or architecture alone. Successful examples of sites that are effectively interpreting the many layers of difficult pasts, telling painful narratives in sensitive and informed ways, include Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia and the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City. As they are places that have deep meaning and connection, sites of conscience are among the spots that represent the future of historic preservation in the United States and Utah.

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Utah’s Sites of Conscience

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The mess hall in the Utah State Penitentiary in Sugar House, photographed in June 1936.

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In mid-2016, the Salt Lake Tribune reported that the Draper Historic Preservation Commission was interested in recognizing the history of the Utah State Correctional Facility that has been in its city since 1951. Preservation Utah posted that article to its social media pages. While we received two supportive comments, we also received one saying that the prison was a scar that needed removal—a place no one needed to remember.

Since then, discussing the Draper correctional facility has become a hot topic at Preservation Utah, sparking conversation whenever it is brought up. It’s an opportunity to talk about how preservation need not include the entire site and how it could be an asset to future development. Envision Utah has been hired to begin planning the area for redevelopment. The typical discussions of density, mixtures of residential and commercial development, and a range of housing options and costs (including educational and recreational aspects) are taking place—yet no one is talking about historic preservation associated with the current land use. Without preservation, we might miss an opportunity to consider the rela-

In contrast, the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City is visited by thousands of school children who have no direct concept of the impacts of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

While it is a daunting task, the presentation of the 9/11 narrative is aimed at helping visitors understand how the attacks shaped the world they live in and the lives of those who experienced them. Lessons are grouped around themes, including community and conflict, heroes and service, historical impact, and memory and memorialization. Anna Bennett, a fifth grade teacher in New York City public schools, explained that “It is my job to teach [students] about these events and how they fit into the bigger picture of our country’s climate and decision-making. I also desperately want them to know, feel and believe that their voices matter and that they, too, can make the world a better place, even when things seem grim and scary.”4 Teaching with historic sites of conscience can give this opportunity to Utah’s children.

Another subject within this emerging field is that of slavery, which is being used to bring people together to talk about race relations in ways that are relatable today. A pioneer in uti-

environment for discussion through a rare opportunity to have a personal, physical interaction with a relic from the past.5 Slave cabins are the oft-forgotten places behind the grand mansions. However, the slave’s story has become the important piece for complete interpretation of these historic sites. Reversing past efforts that tried to erase this story from our history is a major goal for sites of conscience. While we all may experience sadness, anger, or grief over these historic events, it doesn’t have to be a dark shame. Through places and efforts such as the Slave Dwelling Project, experiencing historic spaces can be uplifting. We can’t change our history and we shouldn’t desire to, but we can be more conscientious of it and address it head-on.

Preserving a site of conscience is no different than preserving any other place that has historic significance. The key step in both instances is determining the locale’s character-defining features. In the case of a historic 1920s ware-

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We can’t change our history and we shouldn’t desire to, but we can be more conscientious of it and address it head-on.

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Let’s remember, saving places is not a popularity contest. My colleague at the Los Angeles Conservancy, Adrian Fine, made that point when talking about his organization’s efforts to preserve the Parker Center, which served as offices for the Los Angeles Police Department from 1955 to 2009. Besides being an ultramodern design from a prestigious firm (Welton Becket and Associates), the Parker Center’s significance comes from the many challenging historical events that, in part, occurred there, including Vietnam War protests, the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and October 2000 demonstrations with the “October 22nd Coalition to Stop Police Brutality.”2 Given that the Parker Center is a site of rich and sometimes controversial history, the Los Angeles Conservancy is utilizing the opportunity to discuss those topics with the public while advocating to save the building. The task will be more difficult as Parker Center was denied landmark status by the city’s landmarks commission in February 2017.3

lizing historic places to do this is Joseph McGill Jr. of the Slave Dwelling Project. McGill’s organization, a nonprofit, identifies and assists in the preservation of slave cabins; McGill himself has stayed overnight in a host of these spaces.

His approach to bringing people together in slave cabins creates an affirming and positive

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tionship between the place and the experiences of generations of people who had been incarcerated there.

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In essence, a locale and any buildings present on it can connect people to the history, people, and events that played a role in its significance.

Today the Lion House, together with the Beehive House, is among the most visited historic sites in the state. As such, they provide an opportunity for furthering public conversation about an aspect of the LDS past that remains difficult for some but that is important to the study of Utah history.

Other sites of conscience in Utah include the German prisoner of war camp at Salina, the Topaz Interment Camp west of Delta, and the sites associated with the uranium boom near Moab. During efforts to save the Enola Gay Hangar at Historic Wendover Airfield, we were told that we shouldn’t be involved in preserving the site because of its association with the atomic bomb. Now, after several years of shepherding by Tooele County and the Historic Wendover Airfield organization, the Enola Gay Hangar is protected through a preservation easement, and it was one of the few sites in the state that received Save

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Jacobsen proposed to LDS church president David O. McKay that the Lion House be renovated and made self-sustaining as a banquet hall and restaurant. According to some sources, Henry Moyle, first counselor to McKay, told her that “the house was going down” and that “all it does is remind people of polygamy.” Jacobsen countered Moyle, telling him that she was unashamed of the polygamist past.7 Her determination and vision for what restoration could bring ultimately saved the Lion House.

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The Lion House was built in the early 1850s as a home for some of Brigham Young’s plural wives and many children, and its very design suggested an unusual family structure.6 The association of the Lion House with polygamy remained in the mid-twentieth century, and some questioned the building’s usefulness as times changed. Florence Jacobsen, who became president of the LDS church’s Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association in 1961, is credited with saving the Lion House.

Upon her starting her new responsibilities, she learned that the home was to be demolished for a parking access ramp to the new LDS Church Office Building. Jacobsen responded by leading a charge to save the Lion House.

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While the concepts of sites of conscience as a whole are contemporary, the discussion of them is not new in Utah. The practice of polygamy has long been connected to questions of social impact, cultural acceptability, and equality of opportunity. Looking back a few decades, the conversation about efforts to save the Lion House in Salt Lake City from demolition falls squarely in the realm of today’s sites of conscience movement because

of its historical relationship with polygamy in the LDS church.

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house, those features might be stark concrete walls, multi-paned steel windows, fourteen-foot ceiling height, and an open floor plan.

But what happens when your site is a building that is barely standing, a place where all the buildings have been removed, or a property that never had structures but is instead part of a greater natural and cultural landscape? The history itself then becomes a character-defining feature. This is a more difficult treatment for historic properties because it forces preservationists out of their routine of considering architecture first. In essence, a locale and any buildings present on it can connect people to the history, people, and events that played a role in its significance.

11 An early photograph of the Lion House, which was built in 1855 and used as a residence until 1877.

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America’s Treasures grant funding from the National Park Service.

The uranium mining boom in Moab was one of many products of the Cold War era. As the second-most prolific site of uranium mining in the country, Moab became nationally known.

After Charlie Steen discovered a remarkably rich deposit of high-grade uranium in 1952, the landscape of Moab itself rapidly changed from the pioneer town it had been. Within a decade of Steen’s uranium discovery, ten new subdivisions were platted (including over 1,000 new structures), and ten new landmark institutional and civic buildings were constructed.

Unfortunately, the city has not been interested in recognizing, documenting, and preserving these places as part of the story of Moab. The community pool building in Swanny City Park and the Helen M. Knight Elementary School have already been lost. As tourism continues

to grow as the primary economic force for the city, greater development pressure will be placed on the neighborhoods and locales that emerged from the uranium boom could soon disappear, including some prominent sites funded by Steen himself.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the internment of Japanese Americans, German Americans, and Italian Americans to camps across the country. After several hasty months of preparation, the Topaz War Relocation Center west of Delta, Utah, was opened on September 11, 1942. Also known as the Central Utah Relocation Center, the thirty-one-acre site served as home to over 9,000 people of Japanese descent. While much documentation exists of the three years that the center was in operation, the irreversible human effects of the internment remain. No structures remain on

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13 The Uranium Reduction Company, opened by Charlie Steen, was the first large, independent uranium mill in the United States.

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The front of Camp Salina, as it appears today.

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the Topaz site, though infrastructure and archaeological remnants of imprisoned life evoke questions, stories, and emotions. According to Anne Mooney and John Sparano, architects of the Topaz Museum in Delta, their design provides spaces in the museum’s architecture for contemplation and healing. One of those spaces is an elongated threshold and entry sequence.

A bench located across from a traditional Shou Sugi Ban (charred wood) wall provides a subtle but traditional Japanese material expression that allows a proper environment for reflection. However, the biggest decision—the museum’s location—is perhaps also the biggest step in bringing the issue to the forefront. As Mooney states, “the decision to put the museum on Main Street was about giving the issue visibility.”8 Thus, the decision avoided situating it in the same obscure location that was forced upon Japanese Americans in the first place.

East of Salina, a marker for the former Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camp states how many young men between 1933 and 1942 contributed to building the infrastructure of central Utah as part of Company 479. However, the marker leaves off the significant second part of this place’s story. The entrance of the United States into World War II called an end to the CCC and thus an end to the Salina CCC camp.

Many of its structures were moved to be used at the Topaz Japanese Internment Camp. Three original buildings remained and, with the addition of a tent village, the site was repurposed as a camp for dozens of German prisoners of war.

Their daily life included work on local farms in the Sevier and Sanpete areas, where many local young men were then serving in the military.

The tragedy of the Salina Massacre occurred on July 8, 1945, when a guard fired a machine gun into POW tents from the watch tower.

Eight of the prisoners were killed, with many

others wounded, making this event one of the great atrocities committed in the United States during the war.9 Fortunately, the community has spearheaded a campaign to preserve and interpret one of the buildings, thus telling the full story of the site.10 Many positive steps forward continue to be taken with pioneer-era sites, including those of the Mountain Meadows and Bear River massacres, with new and ongoing efforts to acknowledge the events with descendant groups and other organizations. On the other hand, the physical traces of Salt Lake City’s historic ethnic neighborhoods—while not strictly sites of conscience—have already been largely erased from the city. Nothing stands to recognize Little Syria and Little Italy. Only a plaque acknowledges China Town. Only religious structures stand to represent once-prominent Japanese and Jewish communities. Without protection, the final

commercial section of historic Greektown will also meet this end, leaving the Greek Cathedral to represent an entire community.

Despite these notable places on the landscape and in our consciousness, Utah is one of very few states to not have any sites listed by the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience.

Consider the alternative to acknowledgment and better understanding through the coalition and through the efforts of local groups: would society be better off if such sites were gone, instead of interpreted and formally recognized?

Given how these places play a vital role in the understanding of current national and international policy and foreign relations, the answer to this question is a definitive no.

Historic places—even those associated with tragic events or people—can inspire positive outcomes. While creating the record-breaking

WEB EXTRA

Visit history.utah.gov/uhqextras for an interview with Kirk Huffaker and additional photos of the sites mentioned in this article.

14 Two men stand in front of a Chinese merchandise store by the dirt roads and buildings of Plum Alley.

Salt Lake City, August 24, 1907.

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Broadway musical Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda took to writing songs in the New York City bedroom occupied by Aaron Burr from 1832–1833 in the Morris-Jumel Mansion. Many prominent Japanese American designers drew influence from their time at internment camps.

Their work crossed the fields of design from the Twin Towers to the Corvette Stingray to highly crafted furniture and the graphics that sold Eames chairs. The same design abilities that allowed Japanese Americans to survive with dignity have made their history more relevant for all Americans through inspired artistry that has affected all America.

Inevitably, some places will be repurposed or redeveloped. However, if we remake a site such that it does not express its true and fully represented history, we deny that history. We also deny our conscience. Our future challenge in historic preservation is to find common ground

in preserving our controversial and diverse past.

Preservation’s future will undoubtedly include more places associated with the woman suffrage, equal civil rights, and LGBTQ movements.

The sites of conscience movement is much larger than the relevancy of buildings to the landscape. It has to include the relevancy of place to people and their community, then and now.

The size or scope of what happened should not be the issue, but rather that the event happened at all. There needs to be a broader perspective communicated, understood, and embraced about historic places that goes far beyond the narrow interest of historic architecture. To do this, we need more involvement and diverse voices in the conversation, as well as flexibility in our current tools and the development of new tools, to accomplish what the preservation movement demands of us.

Brooches created by internees at the Topaz Internment Camp in Delta, Utah. Residents gathered sea shells found at the camp, bleached them, and then painted and arranged them into brooches and other designs.

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See Public Historian 30, no. 1 (2008) for a special issue about sites of conscience and “opening historic sites for civic dialogue.”

2 “Parker Center/Police Facilities Center,” Los Angeles Conservancy, accessed February 21, 2017, laconservancy.org/issues/parker-centerpolice-facilities-building; “What’s Next for L.A.’s Parker Center?,” Los Angeles Times, December 29, 2016; Christina Villacorte, “End of an Era: LAPD Closes Parker Center, Iconic Headquarters,” Los Angeles Daily News, January 15, 2013.

3 For additional context about the preservation and use of the sites of socially fraught, twentieth-century history, see Rachel Donaldson, “Placing and Preserving Labor History,” Public Historian 39, no. 1 (February 2017): 61–83.

4 Julia Glum, “This is How NYC Schools Teach Kids about 9/11,” Gothamist, September 9, 2016, accessed February 21, 2017, gothamist.com/2016/09/09/nyc_ schools_911_history.php.

5 Tony Horowitz, “One Man’s Epic Quest to Visit Every Former Slave Dwelling in the United States,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 2013; “About Us,” Slave Dwelling Project, accessed February 27, 2017, slavedwellingproject.org.

6 John S. McCormick, Historic Buildings of Downtown Salt Lake City (Salt Lake City: Utah State Historical Society, 1982), 52–53. See Ellen E. Dickinson, New Light on Mormonism (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1885), 162, for a contemporary take on the Lion House and Young’s polygamous family.

7 Because Jacobsen only recently passed away, not all sources on this episode are available. For some context, see Trent Toone, “Granddaughter of Two LDS Church Presidents Turns 100,” Deseret News, April 11, 2013; Lavina Fielding, “Florence Smith Jacobsen: In Love with Excellence,” Ensign, June 1977; Andrew Hamilton, “Florence Smith Jacobsen: Saving Our Material Heritage,” Keepapitchinin, April 2, 2013, accessed March 6, 2017, keepapitchinin. org/2013/04/02/guest-post-florence-smith-jacobsen-saving-our-material-heritage/.

8 Anne Mooney, interview with Kirk Huffaker, February 3, 2017, in possession of author.

9 Allan Kent Powell, “The German-speaking Immigrant Experience in Utah,” Utah Historical Quarterly 52, no.

4 (Fall 1984): 336.

10 Alex Cabrero, “German POWs Killed in Salina Remembered,” KSL, March 11, 2015, accessed March 3, 2017, ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=33792431.

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The years following World War II were ones of unprecedented growth and change at the University of Utah. The period from 1945 to 1975 saw an exponential increase in enrollment with a corresponding boom in construction as new buildings rose to accommodate the rapidly growing number of students. During this brief thirty-year span, the campus would more than triple in size, and over seventy-five new buildings would be constructed. The sheer number of new buildings would certainly change the dynamics of the university, but it was their varied designs—in styles that diverged significantly from the existing buildings near Presidents Circle—that would fundamentally alter the architectural character of the university. New ideas of form and material—collectively known as “Modernism”—came to define the postwar campus. This article looks at the emergence of these new architectural ideas through the stories of the buildings that most clearly represent them.

A 1940s aerial view of campus. Note the vast empty spaces above and to the right of Presidents Circle that would soon be filled with new and very different buildings.

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S pe c i a l C o l l ec t i o n s, J. Wi l l a rd Ma rriot t L ibra ry, Un ive rsit y of Ut a h

At the end of World War II, it would have been difficult to envision these sweeping changes. The campus was compact—only 150 acres—with most buildings lining Presidents Circle. Various factors, including two economic depressions, the diversion of building materials to the war effort, and the fiscal conservatism of Utah’s elected officials, had combined to limit the university’s ability to plan and construct new buildings prior to and during the war. As the war started, there were fewer than twenty-five buildings on campus.

The war’s end brought dramatic changes to the status quo. During the 1940s, enrollment more than doubled, creating an immediate demand for additional classrooms, offices, and other space.1 That demand, in turn, created an urgent need for more land area on which to build new build-

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ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH, 1945-1975

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The first substantive step to alleviating what was rapidly escalating into a crisis was the purchase in 1948 from Fort Douglas of nearly 300 acres to the south and east of the original campus. The transaction included over 100 military surplus buildings that would house various university functions, including classes, offices, and dormitories. Although the Fort Douglas buildings served their purposes they were ramshackle—in some cases, even dangerous.

For university president Ray Olpin, there was another less obvious drawback to the school’s inadequate facilities: they presented a deterrent to recruiting and retaining faculty.3 The new Fort Douglas tract posed an additional challenge in that it created what was essentially a second campus. Getting from a class on one campus to a class on the other could involve a trek of over one mile (and up a long hill heading east). As the university grew, it would need to integrate the two campuses into a functional, efficient whole.

This goal was hindered by the fact that for nearly twenty years following the war, the uni-

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Finally in 1962 the university issued its first master plan with the goal of creating a strategic outline for development. The central element of the plan, developed with the aid of outside consultants, was a concentric-ring concept that focused on various functions and activities, placing those functions and activities of greatest intensity at the “core” of campus (the area that included the union and new library) with various gradients of activity toward the edge of campus where those functions of less intensity (e.g., dormitories) could be more appropriately located.4

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ings. With only 150 acres, most of it already occupied, there was no place to grow. In addition, the area around the existing campus was characterized by a patchwork of ownership, by the federal government, the State of Utah, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS church), among other entities, complicating the potential acquisition of new land.2

versity lacked a formal master plan. Without an overarching vision, the new dual campus was in danger of growing in piecemeal, disjointed fashion. So in 1956, the university created a Department of Planning and Construction. Although the department initially lacked an overall strategic direction, it did have a clear purpose: to coordinate and integrate the planning of various buildings to ensure that they related to one another in function and aesthetics. Two years later, the university’s Board of Regents established a design committee as an adjunct to the new department.

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As the university grew, it would need to integrate the two campuses into a functional, efficient whole.

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While the concentric-ring zone concept provided a general organizational framework, planners recognized the need to establish a more focused construct that would guide the specific placement of buildings and the movement of people through and around the larger consolidated campus. That construct emerged as two malls, one running north and south and the other running east and west. These two major malls intersected at the southwest corner of Orson Spencer Hall, which had already been constructed.

The malls served as the defining geographical feature of the new integrated campus. By establishing axes, lines of reference for determining how the campus should grow, the malls organized the two disparate campuses into a single cohesive whole. The north-south mall running between the site of the new library and new union was designed “to tie the older part of campus, the view up past the Park Building, up into this new environment of Behavioral Science, Library, and Fine Arts together. To make it a smooth and interesting transition.”5 The malls also facilitated movement: students

The “concentric-ring” concept was conceived as a to structure that could accommodate the growth of the new campus.

— Crisis on Cam pus

core of the new integrated campus, extending as it did from Marriott Library, considered to be the most important building on campus.6 At the time of its construction in 1969, the plaza’s key role was recognized by the Deseret News as “the central hub of the ‘new’ campus.”7 And in 2013, the Central Campus Precinct Study reiterated this assertion by calling Library Plaza “arguably the crossroads of campus,” noting that it “serves as the spatial focal point of the entire Main Campus.”8

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Library Plaza served as the core of the integrated campus, linking the old campus near Presidents Circle with the new campus expanding to the south and east.

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and faculty walking to another building or to the other side of campus. And they served an important visual function by creating long views—or “vistas”—across campus. The eastwest mall was even dubbed “Vista Avenue.”

The malls didn’t just connect buildings. They connected open spaces (plazas) that served as collection areas to accommodate the flow of students and faculty in and out of various buildings. In most cases, the plazas were integral to the design of individual buildings. So it is, for example, that the Social and Behavioral Sciences Building rose out of a large plaza and a breezeway opened beneath the Fletcher Physics Building. In some cases, however, the plazas were intended to serve as gathering places for impromptu social or academic interactions.

The “Library Plaza,” east of Marriott Library, was especially important because it defined the

As much as anything else the malls created a spatial transition from the old campus to the new. But the university’s broader transition to a postwar world would also need to address significant demographic, cultural, and technological changes. These changes would dramatically affect not only how the postwar university would function; they would also affect how it would look. The architecture of the new campus would, by necessity, both incorporate and reflect all of these changes.

The completion of a master plan in 1962 was a significant development for the postwar university, because it came just as the pace of construction was accelerating dramatically. During the 1950s, eight new buildings had appeared, increasing the university’s building stock by over 30 percent. But this pace of change was not particular to the U. In 1948, the Utah State Agricultural College (soon to be renamed Utah State University) launched what the Salt Lake Tribune termed “the biggest building program in the history of the school.”10 More ambitious was the postwar building agenda of Weber State College, which had outgrown its downtown Ogden campus to begin building an entirely new campus on Ogden’s east bench. Even Brigham Young University saw the number of buildings on campus more than double during

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Significant as it may have been, Library Plaza itself wanted a defining element. According to the university’s consulting architects, a fountain could “add a large measure of strength and repose” to the area between the Library and Orson Spencer Hall, thereby unifying the two buildings “into a single strong composition.”9 That fountain, designed by Boyd Blackner, presented a bold Modernist abstraction of the concept of streams cascading from the canyons into the valley.

21 Of all the university’s ventures into modernist design, perhaps none was bolder than the Tanner Fountain with its abstraction of the canyons to the east.

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the 1950s as the school responded to its own expanding enrollment.11 Expansive as the University of Utah’s building program was during the 1950s, the pace of development would only intensify during the 1960s with the construction of twenty-two buildings, including massive projects such as the Marriott Library, the Special Events Center and HPER complex, and the largest building constructed during the period: the Medical Center. The building boom was stimulated by strong administrative support from university president Ray Olpin, strong political support from the university’s Board of Regents (which approved a ten-year building program in 1960), and strong fiscal support from Governor Calvin Rampton who—unlike his predecessors— favored bonding as a means for financing new construction at the university.

The new buildings reflected a significant change in the university’s role.

However, it was not only the pace of construction that was dramatically affecting the built environment of the university. The new buildings reflected a significant change in the university’s role. President Ray Olpin, who took his position in 1946, brought a clear vision for the postwar institution, one in which research

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22 The Biological Science Building’s straight lines and right angles typified postwar modernism on campus. Note the concrete panels along the roofline, designed to screen the greenhouses on the roof.

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The three disparate parts of the Physics Building—the windowless research labs to the left; the all-glass administrative offices in the center; and the circular classroom structure to the right—exemplified the Modernist ideal of having a building’s structure define its functions.

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would assume primacy in its agenda. Coupled with a corresponding demand within the private sector, the time was ripe for the university to position itself as an essential locus of research. As Anne Palmer Peterson has noted, Olpin “stated that he could see scientists taking over the responsibility not only for supporting but leading society.”12

necott’s researchers could benefit from easy access to the university faculty’s expertise.

The university would, in turn, benefit from the presence of a facility dedicated to research.

The impact of this new research-based focus on programming was immediate, according to Paul Hodson, shifting the emphasis “from an essentially undergraduate college with a few professional schools to a major research and graduate university with numerous professional schools.”13 This change in turn affected the scope and nature of building design on campus.

With the university’s agenda expanding, more and more varied buildings were needed. Those new buildings prioritized innovative research facilities. The days of the general classroom or

multi-purpose buildings, such as those lining Presidents Circle, were essentially over.

The first of these, the Kennecott Research Center completed in 1954, was a clear statement of this new direction. It was, as its name implies, dedicated to research. Only research. No classrooms. No faculty offices. No student lounges.

The Kennecott Research Center manifested President Olpin’s belief that the postwar university had a responsibility to more directly demonstrate its value to Utah residents through research that could impact the state’s economy.

Constructed solely to benefit Kennecott’s mining operations, it was the “first large-scale research facility to be built by a private firm or an industry in the Mountain West.”14 Fittingly, the Kennecott Research Center was located in the area known as “Mineral Square,” a cluster of mining-related buildings on the north side of the existing campus. Here, Ken-

But the real impact of the university’s postwar commitment to research was expressed in its new academic buildings. Nowhere would that be more apparent that in the Biological Sciences Building completed in 1967. Its 119,000 square feet contained over 100 labs, twenty-three temperature-control rooms, and even several “animal rooms” but only four conference and seminar rooms. Almost an afterthought, classes were held in the nearby Life Sciences Building.

Designed by Utah architect William F. Thomas, it existed exclusively to facilitate research, so much so that its roof even served as a yard for experimental greenhouses. The cutting-edge nature of these functions manifested itself in the building’s stark Modernist design—straight

lines, hard edges, and little ornamentation.

For the total integration of research, however, no building exceeded the Browning Building.

Completed in 1971, its actual structure incorporated “two concrete piers for calibration of delicate earthquake detection equipment” that would allow it “to not only resist earthquakes but to record earth movement,” “space for a cloud chamber,” and labs that were “designed to maintain precise temperature controls important to accurate and very delicate equipment.”15 Again, classroom space was a secondary consideration: of its approximately 160 rooms, only five were for seminars.

Other new buildings, while not centered on research, nevertheless intensified its presence as part of the academic life of the university. As with the Biological Sciences Building, the Eyring Chemistry Building contained a mechanical core with the requisite labs and offices, as

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24 The Sterling Sill Home Living Center was distinctive as an example of a particular style of Modernism that had developed on the West Coast.

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well a laboratory wing that could be isolated (for safety purposes) from the rest of the building. Unlike the Biological Sciences Building, however, its plan included teaching space and lecture rooms. But it shared the former’s austere Modernist style, particularly in the columns of narrow windows that accentuated its rectilinear shape and the semicircular auditorium fanning out from its north side.

This concept of separate-but-connected functions was expressed even more distinctly in the Fletcher Physics Building, which comprised three very different structures in one building. The east half of the building, dedicated to research, was almost monolithic—with nary a window—to allow for full control of the research environment. At the west sat a circular auditorium, the teaching space. These two dis-

parate architectural ideas were connected by the Physics department’s administrative space, clad entirely in glass. Ironically, the Physics Building’s austere Modernist assemblage sat adjacent (and in stark contrast) to Kingsbury Hall in all its proud Neoclassical grandeur.

These and other new buildings of the 1950s and 1960s reflected not only a change in the university’s complex societal and academic agenda; they reflected as well the emergence of a new set of architectural ideas on campus. World War II had created something of an architectural hiatus at universities across the country. At war’s end, traditionalist styles that had dominated educational architecture in the first half of the twentieth century (such as Kingsbury Hall’s Neoclassicism) had given way to a set of architectural ideas collectively referred to as Modernism.

Because it introduced a new set of ideas, Modernism—which was not widely accepted around the country—was embraced by academia. Its appeal as a preferred style of postwar campus architecture was greatly enhanced by the fact that Modernist designs, because they were simple and unadorned and often based in prefabricated elements, were also relatively inexpensive to construct. At the University of Utah, an additional factor favoring Modernism was the establishment in 1949 of the School of Architecture and, more specifically, the designation of Roger Bailey as its first dean. Bailey was a staunch Modernist and was actively involved in the planning and design of the new campus.16 More to the point, however, is the fact that the architects commissioned to design the new buildings had either absorbed these new ideas or been trained in them and were themselves incorporating them in the postwar built environment on the University of Utah campus. It’s important to note that all of the buildings constructed between 1945 and 1975 were designed

by Utah architects. The roster represents a veritable “Who’s Who” of mid-century Utah architects, including Edwards and Daniels, Young and Fowler, Slack Winburn, and William F. Thomas. Some, like Ashton Evans and

Brazier, were venerable Utah firms adapting to changing architectural influences. Others, like Dean Gustavson, were educated at institutions that had incorporated Modernism in their curricula. Regardless of the origin, however, Modernism was now the primary influence on how architects would design new buildings at the university.

The first example on campus of these new architectural influences was, in some ways, something of an anomaly. Designed by Ashton Evans and Brazier and completed in 1953, the Sterling Sill Home Living Center represented the university’s only example of a particular style of Modernism that had migrated to Utah not from Europe or even the East Coast (the hotbeds of Modernist architecture) but from the West Coast. Stylistically, the Sill Center was distinctive among university buildings of the post–World War II period because of its extensive use of wood and natural stone, materials closely associated with Modernist architectural ideas that were emerging primarily in California. Known as “Bay Area Modernism” or “Rustic Modernism,” this style adopted basic geometric forms but—unlike European or East Coast Modernism—made liberal use of natural materials. In some of its elements, particularly the configuration of its windows, the Sill Cen-

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With its south- and west-facing facades clad almost entirely in glass, the Olpin Student Union reflected Modernism’s emphasis on integrating inside and outside space.

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The Art and Architecture Center blended visual regularity and irregularity, introducing the architectural concept of abstraction to campus.

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ter also harkened back to visual ideas of the Prairie School made popular by architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

By far the more prevalent form of Modernism in 1950s America, however, was that known as the “International Style” that had migrated to America from Europe in the early part of the twentieth century. It emphasized simple geometric forms, smooth surfaces, and the extensive use of metal and glass. At the same time, architects designing in the International Style eschewed applied ornamentation. However common nationally, the International Style was short-lived on the University of Utah campus.

Nevertheless its legacy includes two of the most significant buildings of the post-war era: Orson Spencer Hall and the Olpin Student Union.

Designed by Lloyd Snedaker, Orson Spencer Hall was probably the university’s purest example of the International Style, with its hor-

Working from the premise that “the greatest scholastic activity is carried on through the cooler months of the year,” Markham faced the entire south and west-facing sides with glass, “providing a maximum of light from natural sources and opening vistas to the surrounding mountains.”17 In 1967, the Union Building was expanded with an extension of the east-west wing to the west and a second addition on the northeast corner.

Although brief, appearing in only a handful of university buildings, the International Style’s appearance on campus opened the door for Modernist architectural ideas. By the late 1950s, however, architects across the country—and in Utah—had adapted the basic tenets of Modernism to a broader, more expressive set of stylistic ideas. At the same time, the roster of architects designing new buildings on campus had expanded as well. These conditions created a challenge for campus planners: how to ensure that new buildings would be compatible with other buildings while communicating their own distinct identities. To that end, the university in 1958 established a design committee “to obtain greater aesthetic kinship in the buildings under

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While OSH may have been the purest representation of the International Style, the most dramatic was clearly the Olpin Student Union.

Designed by Fred Markham and dedicated in 1957, the massive structure (its 149,000 square feet enclosed nearly 1.8 million cubic feet) was sited and configured to frame the new campus core extending to the south and west while creating a connection to the new area of campus expanding to the east. The configuration, cubes of various sizes and shapes, showed a progression of the International Style towards the abstraction of the basic shape of a building.

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izontal profile, geometric form, long bands of aluminum-framed windows, and stylized metal louvers. Unlike so many other postwar buildings on campus, whose design revolved around research, Orson Spencer Hall (“OSH” as it was affectionately called), was conceived, designed, and constructed exclusively as a classroom building. Actually, OSH was, in effect, three separate buildings, three east-west wings tied together by a common north-south structure and constructed in phases over a period of more than ten years.

At the request of the faculty of the College of Engineering, architect Dean Gustavson designed the Merrill Engineering Building to express the latest in innovative thinking.

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design (both to the existing buildings as well as to the new ones to be constructed).”18 “This does not mean,” the committee stated, “that all buildings have to appear the same in design, in fact, quite the contrary is desirable; rather there should be some elements to provide continuity to establish the dignity and kinship.”19 The particular element that the committee decided upon was brick—more specifically a red variety known as “campus brick.” Its use, while not required, was strongly encouraged. (More than one architect, however, balked at the idea.)

Campus brick thus became the primary motif in a style unique to the university that might best be called “University Modernism.” Buildings in this style generally incorporated large panels of campus brick, metal-framed windows (often arranged in narrow vertical bands), and extensive use of concrete as a decorative material particularly in broad fascia along the rooflines.

The earliest example of University Modernism appeared in a complex of buildings constructed in 1964 to house the Business School. Sited near the intersection of the two major malls, “it was suggested that the prominent location of this complex requires that it have a stabilizing effect from all outlooks on the malls.”20 The architect, William Rowe Smith, was encouraged to extensively utilize campus brick in his design “to develop greater campus kinship.”21 In addition, particular attention was paid to a window pattern that could be different from but compatible with the existing buildings on campus.

However, the most significant example of the university’s particular brand of Modernism rose only a few years later just to the west. The sprawling Art and Architecture Center, completed in 1971, was considered an integral element in a grouping of buildings that included

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Even today, the Social and Behavioral Sciences Building stands as a visual icon that defines the edge of campus and heralds the university’s presence throughout the valley.

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the Social and Behavioral Sciences Building to the west and the Marriott Library to the north.

Planners wanted for each building to be unique but for the three also to be viewed as complementary to one another.22 To accomplish this goal, the architects of the Art and Architecture Center, Edwards and Daniels, reinforced the relationships within the group by aligning the complex with the central axis of the library.

Yet they also established a distinct identity for the complex by creating a low, modular configuration of four structures that established a clear visual contrast with the other two buildings. The Art and Architecture Center advanced the basic look of University Modernism through the extensive use of abstraction.

Certain elements (for example, the concrete columns on the east and west facades) were repeated, establishing a sense of regularity, a pattern. But other elements, such as windows,

appeared irregularly, investing the structures with a contrasting, almost random, quality.

Eventually, campus brick became the accepted norm, appearing on buildings with a diversity of uses and designs, including the School of Social Work, the College of Law, and the HPER complex. However, as the design committee had proposed the standard of campus brick it had also allowed for exceptions: “special purpose buildings, or buildings at special focal points of the campus.”23 The most notable exceptions were also probably the most striking buildings of the postwar period: the Merrill Engineering Building, the Marriott Library, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Building (although even the latter would incorporate panels of campus brick on its ground floor to integrate it with other buildings).

The earliest of these examples, the Merrill En-

A committee convened to plan the new library asserted that it “must express the strength of this institution . . . Since the new library will be the heart of the campus, it must express

Faced with the limitations of the site—squeezed between the Library to the north and the Art and Architecture Center to the south—going

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Rising in stark contrast to the library only four years later, the Social and Behavioral Sciences Building would establish its own iconic presence as the tallest building on campus. During the 1960s, high-rise buildings were all the rage on college campuses. Preferable, still, were ones constructed of concrete. (One university planning memo noted that “concrete is a material of strong design influence in present period.”31) Not surprisingly, the university chose in the late 1960s to construct its own concrete high-rise, inspired by examples at Harvard, MIT, and even the Salk Institute.32 However, the new Social and Behavioral Sciences Building’s size was not merely a response to architectural trends, for it had to consolidate three departments (Psychology, Sociology, and Speech Pathology and Audiology) that had previously functioned out of different buildings.

As with other university buildings of the period, the plan for the Social and Behavioral Sciences Building was based in the programming requirements specified by each department.33

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While Gustavson’s sleek, low-slung statement of industrial Modernism immediately assumed iconic status, another building of even greater significance would soon rise at the center of campus. As much as it had affected any other university function, the university’s growth following World War II had impacted the library.

Not only had enrollment more than doubled, so too had the library’s collection. When planning for a new library commenced in the 1950s, the concept for the building expanded not only to accommodate the rapidly growing collection but also to incorporate a broader range of uses not found in traditional libraries (such as an audio-visual department). This more expansive concept was called the “Learning Center.” Given its overarching set of functions, it became clear that the library would become the focal point for the entire university, particularly with its location “at the very core of the academic area,” which gave it “pivotal significance in the academic scheme and scene.”27

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Designed by Lorenzo S. Young and Partners and opened in 1967, the Marriott Library was a prime example of how Modernist ideas had evolved to incorporate a broader set of architectural principles. One of the most influential adaptations was known as New Formalism, whose proponents sought to soften Modernism’s austere qualities by reintroducing elements from Classical architecture. With its symmetrical elevations, smooth white surfaces, geometric shapes, and—in particular—narrow concrete columns that suggested a Classical colonnade, the Marriott Library would stand as the university’s best example of New Formalism.

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So it was that the Merrill Engineering building, begun in 1959 and completed in 1967, assumed a very nontraditional appearance. It was, in fact, “high tech,” and its materials represented the latest in building technology: aluminum frames, coated glass, even neoprene window gaskets. The high-tech nature of the building was manifested not only in its appearance but in its construction. As the Denver Daily Journal noted in 1962, “the design of the curtain wall posed a solution that would permit entire exterior walls to be removed and relocated as the building phases continued.”26 In the interior, steel-frame floors allowed for comparably easy reconfiguration.

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the character, the warmth and the dignity of this great University.”28 These principles set a standard for a building of monumental scale.

Thus, it had to be “raised out of the ground as much as possible to assure its prominence.”29 It needed to have a “major entrance” on its east side, facing campus.30 And its materials needed to create a striking contrast with those of other buildings on campus, particularly campus brick.

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gineering Building, still stands as one of the university’s most distinctive buildings of any period. Its stark, minimalist appearance was, among other things, an explicit repudiation by architect Dean Gustavson of the standard for campus brick.24 But the basic concept for the look of the new engineering center had actually come from faculty of the College of Engineering, who “set the design [a]esthetic [sic] as that of an industrial laboratory.”25

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One of three dormitories built over a period of ten years, Austin Hall embodied University Modernism with its large panels of campus brick and tall, narrow windows.

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This aerial view of University Village shows the configuration of the apartment buildings in small groupings with a central common space. The second phase of the complex, to the east of Foothill Boulevard (lower part of the image), had yet to be constructed.

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vertical was really the only option available to the architects, Panushka and Peterson, for creating the requisite space. The fact that a tall, concrete building happened to be trendy for higher education was an added bonus. But the Social and Behavioral Sciences Building would also serve an important visual function: standing as it did at the west end of the major east-west mall, it would serve as a “focal point” envisioned by the university’s design committee. While not necessarily an explicit goal of the architects, the Social and Behavioral Sciences Building’s visibility from throughout the city also fulfilled an ideal expressed in the late 1950s by the university’s design committee that “someday a high-rise element visible from the entire City . . . will be constructed near the library as a symbol of higher education.”34 The building’s uniqueness lay not just in its size. To this day, nearly fifty years after its completion, it is the one of a handful of all-concrete

buildings on campus, a style of Modernism commonly referred to as Brutalism. During the design process, planners and architects considered using cast stone or campus brick as infill materials for the solid panels between the windows, but ultimately decided that concrete was best suited to “the character of the design.”35 In order to diminish the building’s monolithic presence, Panushka and Peterson adopted irregular window patterns that suggested the same concepts of abstraction present in the Art and Architecture facades.

The Social and Behavioral Sciences Building exemplified the postwar university’s ability to respond innovatively to the demand for space for all types of university activity. But as acute as the demand was for research labs and classrooms and library stacks, it was even more acute for dorm rooms. Carlson Hall, completed in 1938, had raised dorm occupancy to a grand total of 300 students, enough to accom-

modate less than 10 percent of the enrolled students prior to the war. As a stopgap measure immediately following the war, the university brought in surplus military barracks from various sites (including internment camps) from around the western U.S. Called “Stadium Village,” they provided rudimentary housing for over 1,000 people.

But Stadium Village did little to alleviate the housing shortage, especially as enrollment continued to grow. Fortunately, planners had considered the need for housing by designating territory for dormitories at the outer edge of the concentric-ring plan. In particular, “the entire corner of the campus south and east of Ballif Hall to Wasatch Boulevard and Hempstead Road” was set aside for student housing.36 By 1966, three new dorms—Ballif, Van Cott,

The apartment units were small and spare, configured in clusters with shared park and play space

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The frame of the Special Events Center’s dome was made of wood. At the time, it was the largest such structure in the world.

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and Austin—would occupy the site. All three were distinctly Modernist in their form and in their materials. Of the three, Van Cott Hall provided what by this time was an almost retrospective nod to the International Style, particularly with its panelized wall system, a popular building approach that had evolved from the simple design principles of the International Style. Ballif Hall was notable for its form. Its six wings were composed in a series of three connected “Vs.” A lower common area structure sat between the westernmost “V” and the other two. Clad in brick, it was three stories tall with a flat roof. Austin Hall comprised three separate identical blocks connected by covered breezeways. A small common-area building was centrally located among the three structures. Due to the slope of the site, the dormitory structures projected from the hill. Where they did so, a small porch was created that was lined by round, white concrete columns.37

However, building dorms to accommodate a rapidly growing student body was not just a matter of numbers. The task was complicated by a more specific but nevertheless significant demographic change. As the Salt Lake Tribune noted in 1960, “before World War II, a married student on a university campus was an oddity.”38 After the war, however, the population of married students at the University of Utah grew at a faster rate than that of single students. Although most of Stadium Village was devoted to married-student housing, it was inadequate. Even with the substandard quality of the facilities, waiting lists extended for as long as two years.

As the university was planning and constructing new dorms on campus, it also undertook the planning, design and construction of a “village” at the northwest corner of what are now Foothill Drive and Sunnyside Avenue. Over

While married students represented a constituency requiring a particular type of housing, there was yet another specific demographic that also required dedicated dormitories: medical students. With the completion of the new Medical Center in 1965, demand had grown for related facilities, including housing for the students of the School of Medicine. The lack of housing near the Medical Center had “affected morale and recruiting,” because residents and interns living off campus were isolated either from their family when they were working or from their patients when they were home or they were not readily available during emergencies and evening work.41 In addition, interns and residents were, in increasing numbers, married, necessitating construction of housing other than standard dormitories.

The architectural program proposed for the “Medical Plaza” completed in 1971 included a mix of high-rise towers and low-rise townhouses. The towers would contain one and two-bedroom apartments while the townhouses would contain three-bedroom units. The design by Salt Lake architect Burtch Beall included two, identical, fourteen-story towers. Clad in cam-

In 1969, the university opened that new arena, the Special Events Center, a circular structure with a circumference of 350 feet and a domed roof. The Houston Astrodome, completed four years earlier, had defined a particular style of Modernist architecture—that incorporated, in particular, the domed roof—that set the standard for sports arenas across the country for years. But the circular form wasn’t just trendy.

It had significant functional advantages over a more traditional rectangular arena: unobstructed views from all of the 15,000 seats; symmetrical spans requiring structural components that could be uniform in size and shape; and (correspondingly) a repeated use of components that

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At this point, it might have seemed as if the university had addressed all types of building needs: classrooms, labs, dorms, even social gathering spaces. But there was still a significant unmet need within the undergraduate community. As much as any other university activity, athletics found itself in the postwar era struggling to make the most out of outdated infrastructure. A 1957 assessment proclaimed that “there are perhaps no more inadequate physical education facilities at any state university in the nation than at the University of Utah.”42 But athletics, like research, was assuming a greater prominence in the life of the university, and the rapid growth in enrollment revealed the limitations of existing facilities.

Einar Neilson Fieldhouse, for example, had served as the university’s arena, but its capacity was limited to 2,100 reserved seats, less than a third of the university’s enrollment by 1945– 1946. As well as responding to the university’s own internal demands, however, a new arena needed to respond to National Collegiate Athletic Association standards, including a prohibition on games in off-campus facilities.43

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Constructed almost entirely of concrete, the townhouses stood two stories tall, extending east to west as two lines of row houses. Moving west, each progressive house stepped horizontally slightly to the south and vertically slightly lower.

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University Village reflected the adoption of Modernist architectural ideas in what might be termed a “vernacular” application. That is, the essential visual values of Modernism translated, for better or for worse, into a universal architectural style that found its way into the design of a diverse set of building types. For architects and builders across the country had discovered an unanticipated benefit to Modernist construction: that it could be inexpensive. So it was that the low cost of building University Village was passed along in the form of low rents for married students—much to the chagrin of private landlords.40

pus brick, each was defined by narrow concrete columns and a broad concrete cap that projected slightly from the building, creating a termination for the building to reinforce its visual effect as a high rise.

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a period of ten years, between 1960 and 1970, University Village would grow to a complex of over fifty buildings on both the west and east sides of Foothill Drive. The apartment units were small and spare, configured in clusters with shared park and play space that was representative of the garden apartment complexes prevalent during the middle of the twentieth century. One of the explicit design goals, in fact, was that the complex “maintain a park like atmosphere.”39

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As noted by university architect Martin Brixen, the classical façade of the Pioneer Memorial Theater seemed somewhat incongruous—in style and in scale—with the rest of the building.

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reduced the cost of materials.44 Designed by the Salt Lake architectural firm of Young and Fowler (which also designed Marriott Library and the College of Law), the Special Events Center was unique in that the frame of the dome comprised laminated timber segments rather than, say, steel, making it at the time of its completion the largest “clear-span” wood dome in the world.45 The Special Events Center was the anchor of a new athletics complex called the “Physical Education, Sports and Special Events Center” at what was then close to the southeast boundary of campus. The complex included the arena as well as four buildings—known collectively as the “HPER” buildings—to house recreational activities, including a natatorium. The location of the complex was convenient, because it was adjacent to the student dormitories (Ballif, Austin, and Van Cott); thus, “the facilities could

be used after normal teaching hours by both men and women students living on campus.”46 The sprawling configuration of the complex was deemed to be more efficient than consolidating all the activities in a single building. There was, in addition, what might be called a cultural concern about the complex’s configuration: that putting all the activities under one roof might create a structure that “would completely overpower anything else on campus,” thereby diminishing the identity of the university as a place of learning.47 The Special Events Center was therefore placed at the outer edge of the complex to ensure that, given its size, it did not compete with Marriott Library, the most significant building on campus. The four HPER buildings—HPER East, HPER North, HPER West, and the Natatorium—were placed adjacent to the university’s large east-west mall thus acting as a visual buffer between those two buildings.

But the idea for a new theater on campus wasn’t itself new; it had been conceived as early as the 1940s. It would not be just any theater, however. The new campus theater was to be a replica of the Salt Lake Theater constructed in 1861 at the corner of State Street and 100 South and demolished in 1928. The reason? The LDS church had long sought to bring back the beloved structure. So in the 1950s, church leadership approached the university with a proposal for a new theater and (more to the point) the money to build it.

This task—replicating the Salt Lake Theater— might have seemed relatively simple on its face.

But changes in theater technology and design pointed to a completely different style of build-

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The HPER complex, with its various buildings devoted to various kinds of athletic activities, reflected the fact that, as the university had grown in the postwar era, it had become increasingly specialized. The demand had escalated for more buildings that could house more activities—learning, research, athletics, et al— that were, in turn, more specific, particularly as the university strove to position itself as a premier educational institution.48 This need for modern, specialized facilities extended beyond research and teaching to the university’s cultural life. So it was that in 1957 President Olpin declared that the existing theater, Kingsbury Hall, was “inadequate as a center for the dramatic arts,” having been “primarily designed as a lecture hall.”49

ing than the traditionalist structure envisioned by church leaders. The functional parameters of contemporary theater asked for a building that was significantly different in character.

The stage and “flyspace” (where scenery was stored and moved) of necessity had to be substantially larger than the seating area and, in particular, the proposed Greek Revival façade, resulting in an “inconsistency with the mass of the building.”50 The large scale demanded by new theater technology simply was out of proportion with the smaller scale of the historic design. Thus the theater’s architects, Harold Burton and Howard Barker, found themselves in the late 1950s caught between the university’s understandable desire for a modern (and Modernist) theater and the LDS church’s ultimatum that the new building replicate the Salt Lake Theater. As Burton himself described the dilemma: “You couldn’t have a replica and a modern theater.”51 The design process was made even more complex by the fact that the university’s design committee that was overseeing it included university president Ray Olpin; university vice presidents Homer Durham and Paul Hodson; the chair of the Board of Regents; the director of the Utah State Building Board; the chair of the university’s Buildings and Grounds Committee; the director of the university’s Planning and Construction Department; the dean of the School of Architecture Roger Bailey; and consulting architects William Wurster and Robert Royston. Also actively involved, of course, were leaders of the LDS church.

Among all these parties there was substantial disagreement whether the theater’s architecture should be based on “historic” or “modern” design ideas. The product of the occasionally prickly design process, dedicated in 1962, was a curious hybrid with the Greek Revival façade “tacked on” (as university architect Martin Brixen put it) and flanked by Modernist windows and smooth, flat walls of cast stone. It’s known today as the home of Pioneer Memorial Theater Company.52 At the same time that Pioneer Memorial Theater was being completed on the campus’s west side, the university’s largest postwar structure was rising along the school’s expanded eastern boundary. The Medical Center that would be

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That idea of compatibility was carried through to the design of the HPER buildings themselves.

Adopting the elements of University Modernism, they were relatively small and simple in form and materials, particularly in their extensive use of campus brick. In addition, many of their functions were located underground, diminishing their visual presence. The exception was in the three-story Natatorium, which adopted an entirely different form and materials.

Constructed of concrete and glass, it opened up to the rest of the complex. Stylistically, the Natatorium was particularly significant, because it displayed the characteristics of Brutalism— concrete-based construction—an architectural style that was (and still is) rare at the university, the other prime example being the Social and Behavioral Sciences Building.

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Fortunately, the university had acquired the necessary space—once again from Fort Douglas. This property was well removed from the existing campus, sitting along the east bench.

Ironically, the first building in the new medical center would be unassuming, incorporating only “the essentials, but no frills . . . declared by those who have seen it to be a model structure from the standpoint of utility.”54 Appropriately, the Cancer Research Center, would be dedicated only to research. Completed in 1951, the Cancer Research Center was designed by Ashton, Evans and Brazier as something of a cornerstone for the new Medical Center, eventually being absorbed into it.

That structure would rise eight years later on a site along Salt Lake City’s east bench to the east of the new campus. Constructed in phases, it was finally completed in 1965. It was huge, encompassing more than 500,000 square feet.

Clad in campus brick, it adopted Modernist lines: in particular, a horizontal profile accentuated by bands of windows set off above and below by porcelain-enamel panels, a panelized system that was a fashionable treatment of the period. Its most notable feature, however, was a balcony supported by slender white columns and faced with a screen of perforated white

concrete that extended from its south entrance around along its west side—a distinctly New Formalist element.

The Skaggs Pharmacy building reflected an eclectic blend of architectural styles. The classroom and lobby structures displayed references to the International Style with their geometric forms, bands of windows, and lack of applied ornamentation. Yet the contrast of large panels of campus brick and large blocks of concrete, particularly on the lecture hall structure, was representative of University Modernism.

The third major building on the medical campus—the College of Nursing Building—was completed in 1969. By this time, the Medical Center and the Skaggs Pharmacy Building created a definitive context within which the new nursing school would have to fit. Discussions about its design focused on whether it should emphasize a horizontal or vertical profile and how that profile would relate to that of the Pharmacy building. The final design by architect John Clawson favored verticality, particularly in the lines of the tall brick columns that

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The first of the other buildings, the Skaggs Pharmacy Building, appeared only a year after the completion of the Medical Center. Its architects, Richardson and Richardson, adopted a low-slung, modular concept that comprised three different but connected structures. At its south end stood a three-story classroom structure. A two-story lobby and office structure ran north. A lecture hall—clad entirely in campus brick—ran along the west side of this structure.

In order to reinforce the lobby’s significance, the recommendation was made to make the approach from the mall that connected the various medical campus buildings as prominent as possible. Hence, a large plaza east of the building was incorporated in the design.56

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The Medical Center was the anchor of a new medical campus would eventually include several other significant buildings. As each was added, its individual architectural identity was carefully balanced with the overall character of all the buildings collectively.55 Even though the medical campus was essentially a place apart from the main campus, campus brick was used extensively in all its buildings, most notably the Medical Center itself.

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completed in 1965 would, perhaps more than any other building, demonstrate the extent to which the university was expanding—academically and architecturally. The development of the Medical Center had actually been set in motion prior to the war when the medical school had transformed from a two-year to a fouryear curriculum. At that time, however, it was operating out of nineteen different buildings that were in such poor condition that “accreditors threatened to shut down the university’s College of Medicine if improvements weren’t made.”53 In addition, the university’s teaching hospital was located at the Salt Lake County General Hospital at 2100 South State Street, several miles from campus. These conditions— and the diverse set of programs associated with the medical school—created a clear demand for a facility with the capacity to house a hospital, clinical medicine, teaching, and research. The structure that responded to these needs would be the university’s largest facility of the postwar period, larger than the Marriott Library and Special Events Center put together.

The huge Medical Center combined a trendy panelized window system with campus brick and a stylized balcony that drew from New Formalism.

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Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah

extended the full five stories and the narrow vertical windows framed by the columns. To reinforce the building’s horizontal form, one of the consulting architects recommended that the roof profile be “thinned.” The College of Nursing Building was something of a Modernist hybrid in that it displayed elements of both New Formalism and University Modernism.

Its New Formalist elements were found in the symmetry of its facades and its Classical lines accentuated by tall brick columns, while University Modernism was found in the prevalence of campus brick.

With the completion of the College of Nursing Building, the medical campus presented an eclectic mix of Modernist architectural ideas.

The last of the campus’s postwar structures, the Eccles Health Sciences Library, would extend this stylistic diversity even further. Appropriately, it would be the last building construct-

ed during this extraordinary period of growth and change at the university, because its design, created by Edwards and Daniels, communicated something of an endpoint of Modernist thinking at the university.

Comprising cubes of various shapes and materials, the Eccles Health Sciences Library stood as a perhaps the university’s boldest statement of the Modernist concept of abstraction. Its basic form—an “L” shape—was itself somewhat irregular. But the architects created a visual puzzle along the library’s main (west) façade alternating blocks of concrete of various sizes and shapes and panels of campus brick. Given its visual complexity, the Eccles Health Sciences Library represented a fitting closing to the eventful years between 1945 and 1975.

Those years were indeed transformative. They were a time in which the University of Utah ex-

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Unfortunately, however, buildings from the midcentury period have generally been perceived to lack the same architectural significance as their peers from before World War II. Approximately 50 percent of the university’s midcentury buildings have been either significantly modified or demolished. The list of demolitions includes two of the three structures of the Business complex; Ballif, Van Cott, and Austin halls (the postwar dormitories); and half of Milton Bennion Hall. Most unfortunate, however, was the demolition in 2016 of Orson Spencer Hall, one of the most significant buildings not only from the post–World War II era but of the university’s entire architectural history.

These losses point out the challenge for the university in sustaining its mid-century architecture. While they may not elicit the same feelings as the more traditional style buildings of Presidents Circle, they nevertheless tell an important story—individually and collectively—and provide the campus with an architectural diversity that energizes the environment for teaching, learning, and research.

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Paul W. Hodson, Crisis on Campus: The Exciting Years of Campus Development at the University of Utah (Salt Lake City: Keeban, 1987), 315–16.

Ibid., 276–77.

“University to Ask $6,426,000 For Building Program,” Green River (UT) Journal, January 19, 1956.

Martin Brixen, “Long-Range Planning at the University of Utah,” September 10, 1958, box 1, fd. 14, University of Utah Architect and Campus Planning Office Records, 1948–1974, ACC 296, University Archives and Records Management, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereafter JWML).

Notes of university planning meeting, April 28, 1966, box 1, fd. 10, Deputy Administrative Vice President for Planning and Construction Records, 1964–1970, ACC 237, University Archives and Records Management, JWML. While this perspective was voiced in a number of sources, it was best expressed by university president James Fletcher at the groundbreaking for the new library in October 1965: “From the viewpoint of the faculty and students,” said Dr. Fletcher, “this is the most important building that will be built on this campus.”

“Rites Launch Work on U. Library,” Salt Lake Tribune, October 7, 1965.

Lavor K. Chaffin, “Bumps, Detours Point to U. Progress,” Deseret News, September 8, 1969.

EDA Architects, The University of Utah Central Campus Precinct Study: Final Draft November 2014, 3–5, obtained from Eric Browning, University of Utah Campus Planning Office, July 2015.

John Lyon Reid, letter, September 6, 1968, Facilities Planning and Construction Office Records, 1934–1979, ACC 416, University Archives and Records Management, JWML. “USAC Speeds Building,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 16, 1949.

“History,” Weber State University, accessed February 16, 2017, weber.edu/AboutWSU/History.html; Brigham Young University, “Building Inventory, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, January 2017,” accessed February 21, 2017, plantwo.byu.edu/space/building_inventory.pdf.

Anne Palmer Peterson, Years of Promise: The University of Utah’s A. Ray Olpin Era, 1946–1964 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2009), 53.

Hodson, Crisis on Campus, 51.

“For Greater Knowledge,” Deseret News and Telegram, June 4, 1953.

Robert H. Woody, “U College of Mines Finally Realizes A ‘Dream Building,’” Salt Lake Tribune, October 3, 1971.

Bailey’s Modernist philosophy was manifested in the curriculum and faculty that he assembled for the School of Architecture, as recalled in a series of interviews with Utah architects who attended the school.

Those interviews are accessible at Salt Lake Modern, www.slmodern.org.

Utah Alumnus 30, no. 4, May 1954, 3.

“A Review of the Planning and Construction Program at the University of Utah,” March 30, 1959, box 1, fd. 14, Campus Planning Office Records, 1948–1974.

Notes on Design Committee Proceedings, June 17,

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tion of a new arena, a collaboration of various civic groups was planning construction of a new arena to be located somewhere in downtown Salt Lake City. There was some consideration that the university could conduct athletic events in that arena.

Young and Fowler Associates, “Design Statement— Special Events Center—U. of U.,” September 6, 1966, box 59, fd. 1, Facilities Planning and Construction Office Records, 1934–1979.

“Clear Span Wood Dome for Sports Center,” in a promotional publication for Timber Structures, Inc., undated, box 60, fd. 1, Facilities Planning and Construction Office Records, 1934–1979.

Martin Brixen, letter, September 23, 1958, box 1, fd. 14, Campus Planning Office Records, 1948–1974.

University of Utah Sports and Special Events Center Board Minutes, January 26, 1966, box 58, fd. 7, Facilities Planning and Construction Office Records, 1934– 1979.

During President Olpin’s first five years alone, five new colleges were established while existing colleges were adding new departments. See Peterson, Years of Promise.

“Proposed Memorial Theater Would Resemble Famed Structure,” Utah Daily Chronicle, January 9, 1957.

Hodson, Crisis on Campus, 202.

University of Utah Design Committee Minutes, February 6, 1959, box 2, fd. 3, Campus Planning Office Records, 1948–1974.

Martin Brixen, letter, March 27, 1959, Campus Planning Office Records, 1948–1974.

Peterson, Years of Promise, 80.

“Cancer Research Building To Open Tuesday at U.,” Salt Lake Tribune, April 12, 1951.

This goal was cited in various planning documents for both the Skaggs Pharmacy and College of Nursing buildings.

Jim Romney, memo, January 20, 1964.

This was the conclusion of a survey of post–World War II buildings at the University of Utah that was conducted in 2015. Specific designations are found in the “Multiple Property Building Form” (September 2015) that can be accessed in the survey materials located at the University of Utah Office of Campus Planning or at Preservation Utah (previously the Utah Heritage Foundation), both located in Salt Lake City, Utah.

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Visit history.utah.gov/uhqextras for additional information about modernism on campus.

1958, box 1, fd. 14, Campus Planning Office Records, 1948–1974.

University of Utah Department of Planning and Construction Design Committee Notes, May 12, 1961.

Ibid.

The relationship between these three structures was discussed in various planning memos but was most clearly expressed in a letter from George S. Daniels (of Edwards and Daniels) dated September 28, 1965, and a memo from Panushka and Peterson (the architects of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Building) dated September 29, 1965. Both sources are located in box 1, fd. 8, University of Utah University Architect and Campus Planning Records, 1950–1971, ACC 353, University Archives and Records Management, JWML. John Lyon Reid, letter, October 23, 1967, box 10, fd. 6, Facilities Planning and Construction Office Records, 1934–1979.

“Minutes of the University Design Committee, June 18, 1958, box 2, fd. 3, Campus Planning Office Records, 1948–1974. Gustavson’s disdain for brick was also noted in a profile in “Flyer? Architect? Both Dreams Fulfilled,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 8, 1961.

University of Utah Department of Planning and Construction Design Committee Notes, June 18, 1958, box 2, fd 3, Campus Planning Office Records, 1948–1974.

Denver Daily Journal, October 5, 1962.

Hodson, Crisis on Campus, 244.

Committee for Planning Learning Center and Library Minutes, February 2, 1962, box 9, fd. 5, University Architect and Campus Planning Records, 1950–1971.

Jim Romney, memo, October 10, 1963, box 9, fd. 5, University Architect and Campus Planning Records, 1950– 1971.

Ibid.

Bruce Jensen, memo, February 1, 1971, box 10, fd. 3, Facilities Planning and Construction Office Records, 1934–1979.

Ibid.

Hodson, Crisis on Campus, 121–22.

Martin Brixen, “Long-Range Planning at the University of Utah, Martin Brixen,” September 10, 1958.

“Report on Behavioral Science Tower Concrete Exterior Finish,” December 4, 1970, box 10, fd. 3, Facilities Planning and Construction Office Records, 1934–1979.

“Architectural Program, Residence Hall,” October 1957, box 6, fd. 3, University Architect and Campus Planning Records, 1950–1971.

All three dormitories were demolished in 2006.

The Changing Campus,” Salt Lake Tribune, November 16, 1960.

John Munson, “Orientation and visual appearance of Married Student Housing as related to the Research Park,” memo, July 9, 1970, box 18, fd. 16, Facilities Planning and Construction Office Records, 1934–1979.

Even before construction began on University Village’s first phase, the Salt Lake Real Estate Board passed a resolution opposing its development, stating “that it is public housing and in direct competition with private industry.” “Realtors Protest U Housing,” Utah Daily Chronicle, February 2, 1956.

Robert Ensign, memo, October 5, 1965, box 11, fd. 10, University Architect and Campus Planning Records, 1950–1971.

“1957 Program,” Campus Planning Office Records, 1948–1974.

At the time that the university was planning construc-

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Even though the buildings of this period may not seem historic, many are significant architecturally. Of the ninety or so structures built between 1945 and 1975, fifteen have been determined to be “significant”; that is, in and of themselves, they merit consideration for designation to the National Register of Historic Places based on their architectural value.

Another eighteen have been determined to be “contributing,” meaning that they contribute to the historic character of the university—particularly as distinctive examples of university architecture of the postwar period.57

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perienced a radical change in its architecture that altered the character of campus from that of a staid teaching institution to that of a progressive research institution. New forms and materials brought a Modernist palate to the design of new buildings that stood in stark contrast to the ornate buildings constructed in the university’s early years.

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“The greatest good for the greatest number in the long run.” With these words, Gifford Pinchot articulated the philosophy of the United States Forest Service, a philosophy that would be a factor in shaping the young agency’s architecture. As the Forest Service’s first chief, Pinchot was in charge of managing the nation’s forests and watersheds to ensure longterm availability of timber, rangeland, and other resources. His mission had roots in the late 1800s when growing concern over timber depletion prompted several actions. In 1875, the American Forestry Association was formed, and upon that group’s lobbying, the Division of Forestry was created in the United States Department of Agriculture in 1881. A decade later, the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 allowed the president to designate public lands as forest reserves and President Benjamin Harrison established the country’s first federal forest reserve, the Yellowstone Park Timberland Reserve. The act led to Utah’s early reserves, often created in response to written petitions of locals seeking protection of rangeland and watersheds. The Uintah (1897), Fish Lake (1899), and Payson (1901) forest reserves were the first in the state.

Fire lookout structure on the Uinta National Forest, 1929. The Forest Service built few fire lookouts in Utah. Most were makeshift platforms on poles or in trees. Other lookouts were situated on undeveloped locations on mountain peaks or on top of buildings such as the Walker Bank Building in Salt Lake City.

— U. S. Fore st Se rv ice

The Department of Interior’s General Land Office managed the reserves until 1905 when, with Pinchot’s urging and President Theodore Roosevelt’s support, responsibility transferred to the Forest Service, a new agency in the Department of Agriculture.1 Chief Pinchot overhauled the forestry workforce with a new cadre of foresters and range managers who passed civil service exams. Designated as forest rangers and forest guards, these men—for they were all men at first—surveyed boundaries, estimated timber cuts, classified land areas by vegetation and topography, counted cattle and sheep, and oversaw logging operations and grazing

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BUILDING THE FOREST SERVICE IN UTAH:

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Utah is in the Forest Service’s Intermountain Region (Region 4) which includes Nevada, southern Idaho, southwest Wyoming, and small areas of California and Colorado. In Utah, five Forest Supervisors oversee the Ashley, Dixie, Fishlake, Manti-La Sal, and UintaWasatch-Cache national forests.

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activities. The work required them to spend most of their time traversing the forest reserves—renamed national forests in 1907—on horseback for days or weeks at a time. Initially, most rangers relied on tents or the hospitality of ranchers or homesteaders for lodging. Utah ranger J. W. Humphrey, for example, lived with his family in “a hog-proof enclosure” covered with a tarpaulin in 1906.2 Living and working conditions improved gradually as the Forest Service constructed buildings, roads, trails, and other permanent improvements to support three goals: fire protection, administration of forest uses such as grazing, and the development of forest resources.3 This article examines one category of improvement, the administrative site, and the influences on its location, design, and construction in the Intermountain Region and specifically in Utah.4 It demonstrates how national, regional, and local forces contributed to four phases of ar-

The ranger usually located his permanent, year-round station in a place with agricultural potential (for pasture and garden), a water supply, ready access for mail delivery or telephone communications, and near a trail or road.8 Improvements often consisted of a dwelling that also served as an office, a horse barn, a corral, and a pasture. Secondary structures such as cellars, woodsheds, and pit latrines were common. Less developed administrative sites—seasonal guard stations and pastures for overnight camping—were important for summer fieldwork. They were in remote areas within a day’s horseback ride of each other. Historical accounts indicate a day’s ride on national forests to be about twenty miles but this varied with topographic conditions. Guard stations usually had a small, sometimes crude, cabin and a pit latrine. Some had shelters, corrals, and pastures for the guards’ horses.

During the agency’s first decades, rangers received minimal guidance on laying out administrative sites, partly due to a lack of design professionals in the agency. Consequently, spatial

Even when money was allocated to building construction, Congress limited expenditures to five hundred dollars per cabin, a constraint that bought only rudimentary structures. Although the spending cap rose in following years, it continued to be a factor that affected building design and construction, particularly its size and materials. The funding cap did not include the cost of moving a building so forest person-

Utah’s first ranger cabins were vernacular or folk structures best described by floor plan and form rather than by style.

Utah’s first ranger cabins were vernacular or folk structures best described by floor plan and form rather than by style. The most common types were one- or two-room buildings with gable or hip roofs made of locally available materials and with little or no ornamentation.

Some had minor details such as exposed rafter tails that made subtle references to the Bungalow and Arts and Crafts movements. Most were painted brown with white trim and a moss green roof, a color scheme that dominated ranger stations in Utah and throughout the Intermountain Region in the 1910s and 1920s.

Many were tenuous structures with inadequate roofing materials, no milled siding, and unstable foundations (if any) that provided minimal

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The earliest rangers—often locals with some construction experience on their farms and ranches—were responsible for erecting buildings at their stations.13 As formally trained foresters with little or no proficiency in construction filled these positions, the Forest Service increasingly relied on contracts to erect administrative facilities. The Washington Office began providing guidance after Pinchot established a central Engineering Section in 1906 and each region subsequently set up engineering divisions.14 In 1908, the Washington Office issued building plans with materials lists for nineteen dwellings, two bunkhouses, two storehouses, and four barns.15The plans, which were optional for rangers’ use, foreshadowed the adoption of mandatory standard plans for the Intermountain Region. Forest Service officials relied on the 1908 plans for several ranger residences in Utah, some of which still stand, including the Indian Canyon Ranger Station just south of Duchesne and the Koosharem Ranger Station on the Fishlake National Forest.

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nel often recycled buildings and salvaged materials, practices that have continued for over a century.10 The lucky rangers who received funds for cabins were instructed to build them of logs with wood shingle or shake roofs when possible.11 This promotion of wood, a product of the national forests, was not always cost effective or possible. In Utah, it was often cheaper and faster to build cabins with sawn lumber from local mills. On rare occasions, rangers constructed buildings of stone because logs or sawn lumber were not readily available or easily transported.12

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The first phase of construction began in 1905 when Pinchot, issuing instructions and policy in a series of Use Books, directed rangers to construct cabins and fenced pastures where needed to carry out their duties. He also encouraged the use of abandoned settlers’ improvements and addressed the reservation of land for supervisors’ headquarters, ranger cabins, pastures, and other sites.6 Initially, the process was relatively informal. The ranger submitted a “Report on a Proposed Administrative Site” that described the character of the terrain and any improvements. His forest supervisor approved and forwarded it with a simple map to the regional forester for final approval.7 The Washington Office instructed supervisors and rangers to give administrative sites locally inspired names. In Utah, most ranger stations were named after geographical features (Indian Springs, Meadow Gulch), nearby settlements (Widtsoe, Castleton), and people (Chepeta [sic], Wild Bill). Others referred to flora and fauna (Elkhorn, Gooseberry) while some took peculiar names (Jubilee, Bulldog, Babylon, Yogo).

relationships exhibited a utilitarian focus with water sources, roads, and pasturage dictating building placement. Landscaping was minimal, and site features were usually limited to fences and the required flagpole. Once built, ranger stations received little maintenance because funds were limited and often went to boundary fences, trails, and telephone lines. Many forest supervisors and rangers operated from their own houses or rented commercial buildings.

Orrin C. Snow, supervisor of the La Sal National Forest, leased rooms in the Cooper Martin building on Moab’s Main Street beginning in 1906. John Riis, the son of noted social historian Jacob Riis, succeeded him in 1908 and recalled ranger Rudolph Mellenthin’s attempt to beautify the office by painting its walls with “a beautiful panorama of the snow-capped La Sals, the lower mesas and Dry Valley with a lone cow puncher, head bowed, riding across the hot waste lands.” Visiting ranchers, claimed Riis, “sat open mouthed before it.”9

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chitectural development from 1905 to the mid-1960s.5

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shelter against the weather.16 They were a significant improvement over the tents in which some families lived, even during winters, but conditions were far from luxurious. A national inspection in 1920 of 310 ranger stations determined only forty-six had running water and three had bathtubs. Subsequent efforts to upgrade the ranger’s living and work environments included installation of water supply systems, removal of offices from living rooms, and provision of cellars.17 While day-to-day work spurred the construction of ranger dwellings, offices, and barns, another activity spawned a new building type that evolved during the first decades of the Forest Service. A severe fire season in 1910, notorious for many deaths and thousands of burned acres in Montana and northern Idaho, prompted Congress to pass the 1911 Weeks Act, which directed attention and funds to fire suppression infrastructure. Telephone lines were some of the first improvements constructed since timely reporting of fires was critical for early suppression. The Forest Service also built roads, firebreaks, and trails to facilitate fire control

work. The most iconic improvement, however, was the fire lookout structure.

Initially, fire guards who staffed the network of lookouts on high peaks lived in tents or small cabins and often used trees to gain unobstructed views. Some trees had structures that were “no more than a platform on poles, or a ‘Crow’s Nest’ in the top of a high tree, reached by spikes set in the trunk.”18 The lookout as a building type advanced in the early 1910s after Coert DuBois, a regional forester in California, wrote the first fire plan in the country. He took his plan a step further in 1914 when he produced a report titled Systematic Fire Protection in the California Forests. DuBois proposed that a one-room cab measuring no more than twelve feet square could serve as the lookout man’s home, office, and workroom. DuBois also endorsed the Chicago-based Aermotor Company’s design for lookout towers that placed the observer above a high tree line. Constructed of seven-foot-by-seven-foot cabs on steel or wood towers, the structures were for observation only, with lookout personnel occupying a separate cabin at night. The Aermotor Company,

Koosharem Ranger Station, 1925. The dwelling (right) was built ca. 1910 following Plan No. 12, one of several standard plans issued by the Forest Service’s national office in 1908. The set offered many options. Some buildings were square or rectangular with one to three rooms, while others had complex plans with T-, L-, or U-shaped footprints.

They could be of log or frame construction with board-and-batten or drop siding. Roofs were typically front-, side-, or cross-gabled, although some buildings had hip roofs. Porches were full- or partial-width and inset. Windows were fairly uniform, consisting of four-over-four or six-over-six configurations, as were exterior doors (four-panel) and roofing (wood shingles). Materials lists specified beadboard ceilings and walls for most dwellings.

— U. S. Forest Service

manufacturer of windmills and military observation towers, supplied the cabs and towers to the Forest Service until at least the 1930s.19 Lookout design enjoyed several more refinements. In 1917, DuBois proposed a fourteenfoot-by-fourteen-foot live-in cab with a ribbon of single-pane windows on all sides and a fire alidade to identify the fire’s location, in the center. Known as Plan 4-A, the design provided comfortable quarters and replaced the twelvefoot-by-twelve-foot cab. By 1921, the Intermountain Region had adopted it as a standard lookout and issued the floor plan with a bill of materials that included paint for brown exterior walls, a moss green roof, ivory white trim, and an interior of ivory white, light tan, or gray.

Paint colors for lookouts and other administrative buildings would receive even more attention in the Forest Service’s third phase of architectural development, which emerged after the

Wall Street crash of 1929.

The Great Depression precipitated a dramatic escalation of construction activity on the national forests. As the nation experienced grim economic conditions, President Roosevelt implemented “make work” programs as part of his New Deal. Several programs directed substantial funds and large labor pools to federal and state agencies. The existence of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) from 1933 to 1942 corresponded with a distinctive period of architectural advances for the Forest Service. As the agency received oversight of hundreds of CCC enrollees and extensive funding for building construction, it hired scores of engineers, architects, and landscape architects. This professional cadre introduced two important trends: an emphasis on site planning and landscape design, and the evolution of separate architectural identities for

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The North Cottonwood Ranger Station is a rare example of a masonry ranger station in the Intermountain Region.

The two-room structure, completed in 1914, is about ten miles due east of Monticello, Utah.

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Dozens of the Plan 7 guard station and its variants were built throughout the Intermountain Region during the New Deal era.

— U. S. Fo re st S e r vi c e

each region.

The stimulus for well-designed sites and distinctive architecture in the Intermountain Region came from Utah native George L. Nichols (1896–1972) who joined the Forest Service as a draftsman in 1924. As the Intermountain Region’s first architect, he was involved with the construction or redevelopment of hundreds of ranger stations, guard stations, and other administrative sites.20 Before his retirement in 1956, he created scores of standard plans that, in a departure from the agency’s emphasis on decentralization through delegation of authority to forest supervisors and rangers, were mandatory for all national forests within the region:

Only standard or special plans sent you from the Regional Office shall be used.

Approved plans and specifications must be followed in detail without variation.

Changes in floor plans, design, finish, etc., shall not be made in the field except upon specific approval by the Regional Forester or his duly authorized representatives. Recommendations for such changes must be supported by conclusive evidence as to why the change is necessary. 21 Nichols’ Building Construction Manual, issued in 1933 and expanded in 1935, outlined site planning principles and set forth a hierar-

The stimulus for welldesigned sites and distinctive architecture in the Intermountain Region came from Utah native George L. Nichols

Groben’s emphasis on regional identity, local materials, and context led most regions to adopt standard plans. A survey of the six western Forest Service regions illustrates the stylistic variety of buildings that emerged during the New Deal period.24 Offices and houses following Park Rustic principles were common in the Rocky Mountain Region. These buildings, often considered the showpieces of a ranger station, relied on large-diameter logs, irregularly laid stone, and other Rustic features.

Similar constructions were found in ranger stations of the Pacific Northwest Region. Often labeled “Cascadian,” the influences of the Rustic style are apparent if not exaggerated in the combination of materials, heavy timbers, and massing. The Pueblo Revival style dominated in the Southwest Region’s ranger stations. In Utah and the rest of the Intermountain Region, George L. Nichols created a portfolio of stan-

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Nichols’ construction manual mirrored the work of W. Ellis Groben, a consulting architect who influenced Forest Service architecture by promoting a higher quality of design and encouraging the use of standard plans. He advocated the idea of an agency identity while allowing for flexibility in design and materials to conform to regional styles and environments.23 His Principles of Architectural Planning for Forest Service Administrative Improvements, published in 1938, brought together technical information and design guidelines that reflected Groben’s architectural training and personal preferences. He discouraged drop siding and imitation log siding because the former gives a “miniature, toy-like appearance” and the latter looks “too uniform.” He also disliked wood siding wider than eight inches and the “disturbing and unsightly” appearance of “X” and “Z” bracing on garage and barn doors. Groben recommended local materials and paint schemes made of several shades of the same color, although “delicate colors” were to be avoided inside buildings used primarily by men.

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fifty feet from each other. The manual also addressed driveways, walks, and site features and provided standard plans for signs, gates, cattle guards, and tire barriers. This level of detailed instruction for the development of ranger stations and guard stations produced remarkably similar groupings of administrative buildings throughout the Intermountain Region.22

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chy for the placement, size, and amenities of structures. When laying out stations, agency officials were to consider appearance, natural setting, exposure (south facing was recommended), drainage, accessibility, fuel, shade, shelter, water, and pasturage. The selection of guard stations should also consider viewsheds, as a forest guard often served as a fire lookout or smokechaser. The manual provided sample site plans that carefully considered vehicular access and circulation, image, and building relationships. The house, as the most important building, was to be in a prominent location.

As the second most important building, the office was to be visible and accessible to the public. To create a pleasing arrangement, the manual recommended positioning buildings at right angles to, but not lined up with, other structures on the site. The house, garage, woodshed, cellar, and other frequently used buildings were grouped closely together, while others were set at the rear of the site with the malodorous barn being furthest away. Housing for temporary men was to be placed away from the ranger’s house for reasons of privacy. To reduce fire hazards, buildings were to be at least

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Most exterior doors had five horizontal panels and no glass, although front doors had one or four panes of glass or occasionally a fanlight.

Large doors on barns, garages, and warehouses had “X” or “Z” bracing that presented a visually distinctive appearance, especially when painted a contrasting color. Windows were often six-pane sliders, although six-over-six double-hung or six-pane casement windows were common, particularly on residential buildings.

Shutters, louvered on the lower half, had a pine tree cut into the upper panel.25

Nichols custom designed several Rustic style fire lookouts for specific Idaho sites. For most locations, however, he relied on a plan from the Northern Region, headquartered in Missoula, Montana. In 1933, he traced and later published in his manual that region’s L-4 lookout, a fourteen-foot-by-fourteen-foot cab that could be placed on a foundation, a one-story substructure, or a tower. Officials with the Ashley National Forest chose that design, designated in the Intermountain Region as Plan 80, for the Ute Fire Lookout, and the Civilian Conservation Corps constructed it near Manila in 1937.

Restored in 2014, it is the only remaining Forest Service fire lookout tower in Utah.

The reliance of Nichols on a limited palette of materials, details, and colors contributed to an architectural look that made Forest Service facilities easily identifiable. He deemed log structures appropriate in conifer settings, which applied primarily to the national forests in Idaho and Wyoming. Frame structures were best for areas of broadleaf vegetation and in places where neither conifer nor broadleaf trees were predominant. The latter was usually the case throughout Utah where frame buildings were generally clad in novelty siding, with cove and double-drop (also known as “waterfall”) as the most common profiles. Shiplap siding with a partial log profile, often called Shevlin siding after a mill in Bend, Oregon, was also popular.

At least in the Pacific Northwest Region, the number, placement, and design of the pine tree were often inconsistent with that region’s specifications. CCC crews seemed to use the logo as a means of expression and frequently cut, applied, forged, and carved it on shutters, gable ends, porch pediments, mailboxes, and latch plates.26 The consulting architect Groben urged restraint in 1938: The pine tree, as a painted insignia, gig-sawed out of wood or in other decorative forms, has become a recognized Forest Service emblem. Refrain from employing pine trees of different sizes in the same composition to eliminate the “old and young” or “father and son” conflict that always results in design when using the same motif at difference scales. The pine tree emblem should be used sparingly. The effect created by their repeated use in the same building is very unfortunate, resulting in their loss of all Forest Service significance. 27 The Intermountain Region’s Building Construction Manual discontinued the use of dark brown stain formerly used on the region’s facilities and provided four standard color schemes with variations for log and frame structures.

Predominant vegetation, exposed rock or earth, and/or adjacent buildings dictated the

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Many of the plans he developed from 1933 to the mid-1940s contrasted with some of Groben’s principles. He clad most of his buildings with drop, novelty, or imitation log siding, and he unabashedly used “X” and “Z” bracing on garages, barns, and other utilitarian structures.

Nichols’ designs for garages, barns, and other utilitarian buildings have few architectural details but his dwellings and offices reflect the influences of Period Revival styles popular in Utah during the first half of the twentieth century. The Colonial Revival style is apparent in Plans 1 and 8, while the “temple front” porches of Plans 4, 5, 7, and 51 allude to the Neoclassical Revival style. The Plan 53 dwelling is a Minimal Traditional home with vague Tudor Revival references.

Foundations were usually of poured concrete, but locally available stone was sometimes used with skilled labor. Wood shingles or shakes covered roofs; plaster or composite board such as Nu-Wood or Firtex finished interiors. Floors were varnished tongue-and-groove wood strips. Linoleum covered kitchen and bathroom floors when funds were available.

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dard plans that included offices and dwellings with Neoclassical Revival and Colonial Revival influences.

Plan 1 dwelling at the Great Basin Experiment Station near Ephraim. Standard plans were sometimes reversed and the natural setting often dictated exterior finishes and color schemes.

— U. S. Forest Service

appropriate scheme. For example, log buildings in conifer settings were to be light or medium brown stain with medium brown or red stone paint. The roof could be green or medium brown stain. Frame structures near aspen, maple, or cottonwood trees were to be painted light gray with white trim and a green roof. The color scheme for structures in towns—white with Nile green trim and green roof—became iconic for Forest Service buildings in Utah. To insure consistency in color, the regional office in Ogden purchased and mixed all paints and stains; local purchases were not permitted.

Interiors also had standard colors that varied with the function of the building. Lookout interiors were an olive green shade that, while recognized as a depressing color, maximized absorption of light to prevent harmful reflections and eye strain. Dwellings and offices were to have light green, colonial ivory, light tan, buff, or cream-colored walls. Woodwork could be varnished or painted with pearl grey, light tan, Nile green, seafoam green, old ivory, colonial

ivory, orchid, or gloss white paint.

Nichols’ influence on architectural assemblages, primarily ranger stations and guard stations, helped brand the Forest Service in the Intermountain Region. The employment of tidy, modest buildings with green roofs, along with the pine tree logo, standard signage, and a wood flagpole, created a vignette that people readily associated with the agency. Nichols also played a role in the construction of a few buildings that did not fit within this identity.

The first stemmed from his efforts to relieve an overcrowding problem. Regional staff in Ogden had occupied the Kiesel Building at the corner of Lincoln Avenue and 24th Street since 1909, but by the late 1920s the leased space was considered too small. Nichols began designing a four-story headquarters in late 1928, revising his plans several times over the next two years as Forest Service officials worked with various parties to secure funds. In 1931, with the support of Senator Reed Smoot and

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the Ogden Chamber of Commerce, the Forest Service received an appropriation of $300,000 to construct a new building. Leslie S. Hodgson and Myrl A. McClenahan, local architects experienced with commercial design, developed Nichols’ preliminary plans.28 The St. Louis firm of Murch Brothers Construction began erecting the building on January 10, 1933, and completed it the following January at a cost of $235,869.29 The multi-story brick edifice, located at the southeast corner of Twenty-fifth Street and Adams Avenue, epitomizes the Art Deco style with its emphasis on vertical lines, stepped ornamentation, and abstract motifs.

At more than 52,000 square feet, its size and style depart from typical Forest Service buildings constructed in Utah during this period. It also joins the 1937 Ogden High School and 1939 Ogden Municipal Building to form a trio of notable Art Deco buildings designed by Hodgson and McClenahan.

Tidy, modest buildings with green roofs... created a vignette that people readily associated with the agency.

Nichols was also involved with the design and 1939 construction of four repair centers in Salt Lake City, Cedar City, Boise, and Reno to accommodate major overhauls of the CCC’s

large equipment.30 He oversaw a team of designers that drew plans for several buildings, including a large automotive repair shop and a utility building that departed stylistically and

The original design drawings for the Cedar City Central Repair Shop included monumental entrances and Art Deco details that were eliminated from the constructed building. This shop is one of two that still stand.

— U. S. Forest Service

materially from the region’s standard designs.

Their most prominent features were industrial sash windows, concrete or stucco-finished exterior walls, and semi-arched roofs formed with bowstring trusses. The designs draw from Modernist architecture and represent a departure from the historicism of the Period Revival styles favored by Nichols. Such a shift was a logical choice for the industrial nature of the work inside and the need for large, open spaces with good lighting.31 The central repair shops successfully accommodated CCC enrollees and, later, military personnel who repaired and maintained trucks and other large equipment.

Only two of the four centers exist, both in Utah.

World events determined the third phase of architectural development, a phase marked initially by inactivity and then by a program of adaptive use and relocation. The declaration of war on Japan in December 1941 heralded the end of work relief programs and associated construction. The CCC was disbanded in 1942 and the federal government implemented

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Plan 1 dwelling at the Kendall Ranger Station in Wyoming. Standard plans were sometimes reversed and the natural setting often dictated exterior finishes and color schemes.

51 measures to support the war effort by restricting the use of construction materials, reserving mineral and timber resources for military use, and channeling labor and funds to the armed forces. While Forest Service building construction had slowed in 1940 and 1941, it effectively halted in 1942 for the war’s duration. The loss of design professionals also hampered the agency’s construction program as many joined the military or secured jobs in the private sector. Those who remained were assigned to critical work such as the Emergency Rubber Project, and some even served as district rangers.32 These factors forced remaining personnel to focus on maintenance, reuse, and rehabilitation of existing facilities.

Nichols continued to serve as the regional architect during this time. Anticipating increased building activity after the war—or perhaps to fill time during this slow period—he developed additional standard plans and, in 1946, issued Engineering Handbook, Building Construction Section to replace

The 1950s saw renewed vigor in administrative site development, although it would never reach the zenith of the New Deal era. As the Forest Service entered the second half of the twentieth century, it prepared for an ambitious building program that was symbolic of the nation’s relative prosperity. During this fourth architectural phase, many district-level personnel

Turner witnessed the introduction of Operation Outdoors, a Forest Service initiative to address burgeoning recreational growth. After World War II, public lands increasingly became a refuge for city dwellers who had higher incomes and more leisure time than earlier generations.

In one decade, recreation visits to national forests increased 213 percent, from 26 million in 1949 to 81.5 million in 1959. The Forest Service struggled to meet accelerating public demand for amenities and services. The National Park Service sought to address similar challenges by implementing Mission 66 in 1956. The tenyear program came with congressional appropriations to sustain and expand the nation’s parks by managing circulation, repairing and constructing infrastructure, providing appropriate facilities, and educating the public about resources. In 1957, the Forest Service inaugurated Operation Outdoors, a five-year program to improve recreation services for increasing numbers of visitors, as well as to address growing public opposition to the visual impacts of clearcutting. Less officially, the initiative was

As Sarah Allaback so thoroughly examines in Mission 66 Visitor Centers: The History of a Building Type, the National Park Service began designing facilities that centralized services and exhibits for park visitors in the early 1950s.

The visitor center consolidated previously scattered activities and, by carefully coordinating building placement with circulation routes, managed the flow of visitors through a park.

The Park Service planned to construct 109 of them during its ten-year Mission 66 initiative using modern, mass-produced building materials. By adopting prevailing architectural styles with a reliance on steel, concrete, and glass, it created what Allaback calls “Park Service Modern” architecture. This design aesthetic allowed the fifty-year-old organization to demonstrate its progress into the postwar era by providing efficient and clean buildings. Working with consultants known for their modern designs, the Park Service defined the visitor center as a building type and influenced other agencies, including the Forest Service, to shift away from the rustic and revival architecture of the early twentieth century.37 The Forest Service identified the visitor center as an important component of its Visitor Information Service (VIS) program, a national initiative implemented in 1961 to offer a wider array of visitor services, such as interpretive trails, demonstration areas, vista overlooks,

The Red Canyon Visitor Center is a stunning piece of architecture perched dramatically above the Green River. The Forest Service hired Ogden architect Thair Blackburn to design the building with a request that he use forest materials such as wood and stone. He obliged by incorporating rocks collected from the site and glue-laminated timber beams. Breaking from traditional forms, Blackburn designed a grid-based square building with a hyperbolic paraboloid roof. Also known as a saddle roof, it has a convex curve on one axis and a concave curve on the other, much like a PringlesTM potato chip. The wings of this bird-like form rise upward to expose two large expanses of glass, one serving as the entry and the other facing a jaw-dropping view of Red Canyon and the Green River. Two layers of two-inch-bysix-inch tongue-and-groove decking form the roof, which springs from two anchorage points.

Blackburn, who had not designed a structure like this before, built a model to make sure it

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Officials in Ogden, anticipating a 98 percent increase in recreational visits by 1962, heartily supported Operation Outdoors.36 They created positions for recreation staff officers, hired more landscape architects, and began funding recreation construction projects. The Regional Office also issued a revised Recreation Handbook in 1957 to provide landscaping plans, extensive lists of plants, and standard designs for camp stoves, picnic tables, toilets, and other recreation features. While Operation Outdoors focused on recreation sites, neither it nor the Recreation Handbook discussed visitor information services beyond displays and amphitheaters. They certainly made no mention of visitor centers, a new building type introduced by the National Park Service and adopted with some tailoring by the Forest Service.

wayside exhibits, guided walks, campfire programs, and personal contacts. The Intermountain Region formally implemented its VIS program in 1962 and acquired two distinctive buildings, the Redfish Lake and Red Canyon visitor centers, as a result.38 The Washington Office determined each region would have one or two major visitor centers initially, with plans for an eventual hundred and fifty visitor centers nationwide. In 1961, the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center in Alaska opened as the Forest Service’s first building of this type.

The second, the 1962 Redfish Lake Visitor Center in Idaho’s Sawtooth National Forest, was the first in the Intermountain Region and in the lower forty-eight states. The Journal of Forestry highlighted the “attractive building, constructed of stained plywood and cut stone.” The Red Canyon Visitor Center, constructed in the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area in 1964, is the region’s second and only other visitor center from this era.39 These and other early Forest Service visitor centers differed from the Park Service’s Mission 66 visitor centers in their focus on interpretive services. The Redfish Lake and Red Canyon buildings highlighted scenic attractions, accommodated educational exhibits, and provided interpretive programs, but administrative functions remained at forest headquarters and district offices.

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After a long and productive career, Nichols retired from the Forest Service in 1956. His successor, William R. Turner (1918–2006), studied engineering at Brigham Young University and graduated in 1941 from Utah State University with a degree in civil engineering. He worked in private industry and for government agencies before joining the Forest Service in 1956.34 Turner was an engineer, not an architect, but with the assistance of draftsmen Cal Spaun and Al Saunders, he created a new set of buildings plans that often were evolutions of Nichols’ postwar designs. They kept the simple forms and massing while integrating several features characteristic of modest midcentury architecture: lap siding with a wide exposure, flush doors, and one-over-one double-hung windows. Their houses had a rectangular layout with small entry porches, attached single-car garages, and picture windows. The designers drew from the Ranch style that many new homeowners favored by the 1950s, but with cost-conscious materials and few stylistic embellishments, the Forest Service dwellings often resembled tract homes.

the agency’s competitive response to the Park Service’s Mission 66 enterprise.35

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Nichols’ preparations for postwar construction were in vain, as the Forest Service focused on rebuilding other infrastructure when the war ended. To compensate for paltry building budgets, agency officials throughout the Intermountain Region acquired Army surplus equipment and buildings, including two Quonset huts at the Salt Lake City central repair shop. Nichols adjusted to the exigencies of postwar development by creating a program of building relocation to accommodate changing facility needs. The lack of in-town housing for a returning workforce was of particular concern. He oversaw the transfer of underutilized buildings from rural stations to populated areas, including the relocation of dwellings and garages from the Ashley National Forest’s Elkhorn Ranger Station to Roosevelt and from the Fishlake National Forest’s Delano Ranger Station to Beaver. Buildings from the Tony Grove Ranger Station in Logan Canyon relocated to Brigham City and Preston, Idaho.

On the Dixie National Forest, a barn from the Green Ranger Station became an office at the Panguitch Ranger Station.33

moved to new Ranch style homes and offices, welcoming them as more modern, spacious, and progressive than those of the previous era.

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the 1935 Building Construction Manual. His new house plans followed emerging design trends that emphasized comfort, efficiency, and informal, one-story living. These types of dwellings were relatively cheap thanks to shorter plumbing lines and heating ducts, the elimination of stairs, and compact plans.

Informal spaces omitted hallways while combining functions in one room (living/ dining room, family room/kitchen), and carports, attached garages, and built-in storage became increasingly prevalent. Shallow roof overhangs, a lack of ornamentation, and a reliance on mass-produced materials resulted in thousands of houses later dubbed “Minimal Traditional.” Nichols’ designs reflected this style and marked a distinct shift away from traditional Period Revival styles toward a mid-century modern ethic.

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— U. S. Fo re st S e r v i c e

The Red Canyon Visitor Center is a stunning piece of architecture perched dramatically above the Green River.

would work. He described it as an architectural form of “strength and simplicity.”40 The media expressed interest in the Red Canyon Visitor Center’s “very uncommon” design, claiming it demonstrated the “sudden revolutionizing and updating” of Forest Service architecture.41 Blackburn earned his degree in architectural engineering from the University of Colorado in 1951. The program emphasized Internationalists such as Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, Rudolf Schindler, Marcel Breuer, and John Lautner, but Blackburn found inspiration in Frank Lloyd Wright’s organic architecture and its connection to landscape.42 Organic architecture, summarized simply, emphasized design that responded to and respected the nature of the site, the needs of the client, and the nature of materials. Following Wright’s lead, Blackburn and other architects broke from the strict dictums of modernist architecture, espe-

WEB EXTRA

For digital reproductions of Forest Service architectural plans and manuals dating from 1935 to 1940, see history.utah.gov/uhqextras.

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The Forest Service is a four-tier organization with the top tier and headquarters (“the Washington Office”) in Washington, DC under the leadership of the chief.

At the second level, nine geographic regions led by regional foresters each encompass several national forests in one or more states. A forest supervisor is in charge of a national forest—the third tier—which is divided into ranger districts headed by district rangers.

The hierarchy’s delegation of decision-making authority at each level grew from Pinchot’s insistence on a decentralized agency. See Harold K. Steen, The U.S. Forest Service: A History (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976), 76–78.

Jay Melvin Haymond, “History of the Manti Forest, Utah: A Case of Conservation in the West” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 1972), 48.

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Report of the Forester for 1911 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912).

Administrative sites are locations designated or developed to accommodate Forest Service personnel and livestock. They initially included ranger stations, guard stations, fire lookouts, and administrative pastures but came to include visitor centers.

This study is based on an analysis of primary and secondary sources—building and site plans, historic photographs, land records, correspondence, oral histories, and personal interviews—and is supported by field surveys of 1,278 historic Forest Service buildings on 383 administrative sites in five states.

USDA, Forest Service, The Use of the National Forests: Regulations and Instructions (Washington, DC: 1905),

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Through these four phases, Forest Service administrative sites and buildings evolved under influences that reflected the agency’s mission, national events, economic factors, local building traditions, typology, and identity through design. In recent decades, other considerations have molded the agency’s architectural design: security concerns, information technology systems, energy-efficiency and sustainability directives, and stricter building codes. Another is the Forest Service’s adoption in 2001 of a “Built Environment Image Guide,” which seeks to re-establish regional architectural identities based on natural and historical contexts. The guide may never generate the kind of success enjoyed during the construction heyday of the New Deal period, but it plays a role in the ongoing evolution of the Intermountain Region’s architectural history.

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The Red Canyon Visitor Center was not a revolution for the Intermountain Region. Rather, it was an anomaly and a bookend for the fourth phase of architectural development that ended as other influences—the Vietnam War, oil embargoes, a national recession, downsizing of the design workforce—led the agency to rely more on prefabricated structures, temporary buildings, and other cost-effective construction in the late 1960s and early 1970s.44 The first phase, from 1905 to the early 1930s, saw the construction of vernacular structures to support Forest Service rangers working in remote areas.

Spending limits for these buildings often resulted in substandard conditions, but agency leaders in Washington sought to ameliorate the situation by providing engineering guidance and developing building plans. The agency entered a second architectural phase when New Deal programs, particularly the CCC, funneled labor and money to the Forest Service. The national and regional offices responded by hiring architects and landscape architects who elevated the quality of site planning and building design.

These professionals, including George Nichols in the Intermountain Region, produced designs tailored to regional landscapes and materials.

World War II marked the beginning of a third architectural phase by halting construction and forcing a limited post-war program of salvage and relocation of administrative facilities. The country’s prosperity in the 1950s mirrored the start of a fourth phase as construction funds became available and regional officials adopted a second round of standard plans that consisted of cost-conscious but comfortable houses and offices for Forest Service personnel. Continuing through the early 1960s, this construction period provided a short window for innovative structures to accommodate burgeoning num-

bers of recreationists thanks to Operation Outdoors and the associated Visitor Information Services program.

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cially the International style, and explored new forms and materials. Forsaking flat roofs, they experimented with butterfly, umbrella, and airplane roofs. Eduardo Catalano was one of the first to try out the hyperbolic paraboloid roof, a striking shape he employed in 1955 on his own house in North Carolina. Portland architect John Storrs received accolades for his use of seven hyperbolic paraboloids for the Forestry Pavilion at the 1959 Oregon Centennial Exposition. Funded by the Oregon forest industry, it utilized forest products to span 24,000 square feet with only seven supports.43

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41 “New Overlook Building Has Unique Feature,” Vernal (UT) Express, October 8, 1964, 11.

42 Thair Blackburn, interview by author, February 1, 2010.

43 “Centennial Pavilion Drive Nearing End,” Eugene (OR) Register-Guard, December 30, 1958.

44 Ferguson, “Guide to the Historic Administrative Buildings,” 110–11.

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everyone for it is the symbol of a fine ideal, and the very word ‘forest’ carries an instinctive appeal to every normal human being” (USDA, Forest Service, “Alumni Bulletin, 1921,” 31).

Elizabeth Gail Throop, “Utterly Visionary and Chimerical: A Federal Response to the Depression” (M.A. thesis, Portland State University, 1979), 43–44.

W. Ellis Groben, Principles of Architectural Planning for Forest Service Administrative Improvements ([Washington, DC]: USDA, Forest Service, Division of Engineering, 1938), 56.

The preliminary plans have not been located so it is unknown if they were similar to Hodgson and McClenahan’s final design.

George L. Nichols, “Our Building: A Records of Events and Facts of Interest,” April 1956, photo album, Accession No. R4-1680-1992-0100-02, R4 History Collection.

The central repair centers are a result of a struggle for control between CCC Director Robert Fechner and representatives of the CCC advisory council, particularly the War Department. See Conrad L. Wirth, Parks, Politics, and the People (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980) and John A. Salmond, The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933–1942: A New Deal Case Study (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1967).

Anne Oliver, “Historic American Buildings Survey, Cedar City Automotive Central Repair Shop (CCC Central Automotive Repair Shop),” HABS No. UT-139.

Iverson, “Landscape Architects and the USDA Forest Service.”

George L. Nichols, “Moving Forest Buildings in Region 4,” Accession No. R4-1680-2009-0382, R4 History Collection.

Grosvenor, Architecture of the USDA Forest Service, 207–208.

George A. Garrett, “Six Decades of Growth,” in American Forestry: Six Decades of Growth, edited by Henry Clepper and Arthur B. Meyer (Washington, DC: Society of American Foresters, 1960), 23; Iverson, “Landscape Architects and the USDA Forest Service.”

USDA, Forest Service, Operation Outdoors: Part 1, National Forest Recreation (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1957), 11.

Sarah Allaback, Mission 66 Visitor Centers: The History of a Building Type (Washington, DC: National Park Service, 2000), 17, 22–33.

Floyd Iverson, Regional Forester, to Forest Supervisors and Assistant Regional Foresters, August 2, 1968, Accession No. R4-1680-1992-0052-01, R4 History Collection; USDA, Forest Service, Intermountain Region, “Visitor Information Services, Regional Plan, 1978,” 6, Accession No. R4-1680-1992-0052-13, R4 History Collection.

“Third Forest Service Visitor Center Established,” Journal of Forestry 61 (July 1963): 554–5. This article identifies a visitor facility in Missoula, Montana, as the Forest Service’s second visitor center. However, this was not a dedicated building but a space in the Smokejumper-Fire Laboratory, which had the primary function of training smokejumpers and supporting wildland firefighting research. See also Chris Rabich Campbell and Douglas McBrayer Campbell II, “The Mendenhall Glacier Visitor Center: An Historic Assessment Report, January 1993,” R4-1680-2013-0217, R4 History Collection.

Thair Blackburn, interview by author, January 28, 2010.

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Evaluation of the CDF Building Inventory, California Department of Forestry Archaeological Reports Number 17 (Sacramento: California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Archeology Office, December 1994).

See also John R. Grosvenor, A History of the Architecture of the USDA Forest Service (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1999), 96.

For biographical information and list of professional work, see Kathryn Burnside, George Lee Nichols: Regional Architect, Region 4 (Ogden, UT: USDA, Forest Service, Intermountain Region, 2006).

USDA, Forest Service, Region Four, Building Construction Manual ([Washington, DC]: Government Printing Office, 1935), BP-11.

In 1935, the landscape architect Albert D. Taylor toured four Forest Service regions as a consultant and prepared a report that included recommendations for laying out administrative sites. Many of his suggestions aligned with those of George L. Nichols. Taylor also urged the agency to hire landscape architects and by 1937, the agency employed seventy-five of these professionals with most working on recreational and administrative site development. See Albert Davis Taylor, Problems of Landscape Architecture in the National Forests: Report to U.S. Forester’s Office on Trip of Inspection Through Some of the National Forest Areas in Regions 2, 4, 6, and 1 (1935), 76; and Wayne D. Iverson, “Landscape Architects and the USDA Forest Service” (paper presented to the USDA, Forest Service Inter-Regional Landscape Architects Workshop, Tucson, Arizona, May 21, 1990), not accessioned, R4 History Collection.

Groben was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and L’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He served as chief architect for the city of Philadelphia before becoming a consulting architect for the Forest Service around 1933.

See W. Ellis Groben, Principles of Architectural Planning for Forest Service Administrative Improvements (Washington, DC: Forest Service, Division of Engineering, 1938); Janene M. Caywood, Theodore Catton, and James R. McDonald, Evaluation of Region 1 Forest Service-Owned Buildings for Eligibility to the National Register of Historic Places (Missoula, MT: Historical Research Associates, 1991); Clyde P. Fickes, Region One Handbook, Construction and Maintenance of Forest Improvements ([Missoula, MT?]: USDA, Forest Service, Region One, 1935); Ralph J. Hartley and James Schneck, Administering the National Forests of Colorado: An Assessment of the Architectural and Cultural Significance of Historical Administrative Properties (Lincoln, NE: Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Midwest Archeological Center, 1996); T. W. Norcross, Acceptable Plans, Forest Service Administrative Building (USDA, Forest Service, Division of Engineering, 1938); Elizabeth Gail Throop, “Utterly Visionary and Chimerical: A Federal Response to the Depression” (M.A. thesis, Portland State University, 1979); John Ferguson, “A Guide to the Historic Administrative Buildings of the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region, 1905–1970,” February 28, 2011; and Richa Wilson, Within A Day’s Ride: Forest Service Administrative Sites in Region 4, 1891–1960 (Ogden, UT: USDA, Forest Service, Intermountain Region, 2004).

In 1921, the chief directed use of the familiar pine tree logo, often associated with the New Deal era, on stationary, publications, and forms. The shield incorporated a “lone pine tree [that] should be known to

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72; USDA, Forest Service, The Use Book (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), 25.

In 1906, Pinchot created three geographical inspection districts headed by chief inspectors. The following year, he reconfigured them into six inspection districts.

Chief Inspector Raymond E. Benedict, working from Salt Lake City, administered District 4, which included Utah, western Wyoming, eastern Nevada, southern Idaho, and northern Arizona. Another reorganization in 1908 transformed the inspection districts into field headquarters headed by district foresters and moved the District 4 headquarters to Ogden, the Forest Service’s supply depot for all districts. The Forest Service later changed the term “district” to “region” to differentiate them from ranger districts, and district foresters became regional foresters. The latter title is used throughout this article to avoid confusion.

USDA, Forest Service, The National Forest Manual (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1912), 52.

Grand Valley Times, October 19, 1906, 1; Charles S. Peterson, Look to the Mountains: Southeastern Utah and the La Sal National Forest (Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 1975), 129; John Riis, Ranger Trails, reprint edition by Les Joslin (Bend, OR: Wilderness Associates, 2008), 57–58.

USDA, Forest Service, The National Forest Manual: Regulations and Instructions ([Washington, DC: Government Printing Office], 1928), 66-A. USDA, Forest Service, The Use Book (1906), 108.

Forest Service policy continued to promote the use of forest materials in following decades. The agency’s construction manuals and handbooks recommended wood and wood-based products such as fiberboard and linoleum in its buildings. Wood roof shingles and floors remained the norm through the 1960s.

USDA, Forest Service, The Use of the National Forests ([Washington, DC: Government Printing Office], 1907), 33.

J. J. Byrne, “Brief History of Engineering in the Forest Service,” in USDA, Forest Service Engineering Staff, The History of Engineering in the Forest Service (A Compilation of History and Memoirs, 1905–1989) (Washington: USDA, Forest Service, 1990), 3.

USDA, Forest Service, Field Program for August 1908, 44; USDA, Forest Service, Bills for Material Accompanying Standard Plans for Buildings on Ranger Stations (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1908).

For example, one forest inspector writing about the recent construction of a ranger dwelling in Laketown, Utah, said, “The thousand dollars was exhausted before the house was entirely finished, particularly the room for the office is not lathed or plastered and is too cold for winter use” (C. N. Woods to District Forester, June 27, 1923, File: “G-INSPECTION – Cache 1909–1925,” USDA, Forest Service, Lands Status Office, Ogden, Utah).

Steen, U.S. Forest Service, 170; USDA, Forest Service, District Four, “Alumni Bulletin, 1921,” 44, Accession No. R4-1680-1992-0050-01, Forest Service Region 4 History Collection, Ogden, Utah (hereafter cited as R4 History Collection).

James B. Adams, “Use of Telephones on the National Forests,” delivered before the Telephone Society of New York, February 16, 1915, 35, Accession No. R41680-1992-0031-06, R4 History Collection.

Mark V. Thornton, A Survey and Historic Significance

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utah drawings from the western regional architecture program collection, UNIVERSITY OF UTAH, 1982-2016

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studying the unstudied:

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They say timing is everything, and certainly this is the case with my career in architectural history. I was finishing my graduate studies at Indiana University’s Folklore Institute just as the first wave of federal historic preservation funding hit during the mid-1970s.1 A good deal of the money was directed toward identifying existing resources, since most state historic preservation office (SHPO) staff members had little or no idea what they had in the way of buildings, significant or otherwise. Surveyors were needed, and, because the demand was great, even folklorists could get hired. I got a summer job surveying the old buildings of Bloomington, Indiana, and found that both in terms of temperament and skills, the work suited me well.2

Meng “Matrix” Li, Katja Lund, and Kate Hovanes recording a miner’s workshop/garage in Park City for the Vernacular Architecture Forum conference held in Salt Lake City in June 2017.

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It may seem an odd fit, folklore and architectural survey, but again there is the timing thing—the meeting of a particular need at a particular point in time. SHPO surveys were intended to be comprehensive. That is, they had to include all the buildings in any given area, not just a special few judged to be superior in design and pedigree. Architectural historians had studied this latter group—the elite or high style segment of the landscape—but had largely ignored the more commonplace vernacular buildings that constituted the bulk of what had to be surveyed. To be honest, at the time no one really knew much about vernacular architecture be-

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Figure 2. Survey notes for Spring City, Sanpete County, summer 1978.

Another thing making folklorists good preservation surveyors was our comfort with formal analysis. Architectural historians mostly concerned themselves with style, which they defined as the sum of the overall appearance of a building. Folklorists, however, came at it differently, focusing on building type. This emphasis on typology resulted from the simple fact that most folk buildings lacked the design complexity found in academic architecture and so it was natural to concentrate on more elemental and enduring features like floor plans and construction technologies rather than external ornamentation. Instead of talking about the Greek or Shingle styles, for instance, we dealt with hall-parlor and side-passage houses.

And it was this affinity for building types and typological classification that proved useful in the new statewide surveys since the majority of buildings, being so plain, did not fit easily into the available stylistic categories. We had to find

The point is, however, no matter the scope or pattern of distribution, these kinds of ordinary buildings have several things in common. First, since no one has studied them little information exists in libraries and archives, making fieldwork necessary. And second, because they do not measure up to the high style canon, they are usefully approached from a formal, typological angle. Which is what I did when I started surveying for the Utah SHPO. I made up a field survey form that included formal characteristics, height, and materials, and then began stopping to quickly measure floor plans or other details on those buildings I had not seen before (fig. 2). Certain folk house types such as the single-cell, hall-parlor, and center passage had been previously identified, so fitting examples into these categories was not difficult. Others, mostly those drawn from popular sources, proved more elusive since they had escaped investigation. Ultimately, what emerged was a set of new types that now are generally accepted throughout the country. The cross-wing, sidehall, two-part commercial block, double-loaded apartment are among the main building types that have now been analyzed and named.7

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Shifting from folk architecture to the more expansive vernacular proved easy enough. Folk refers not so much to a specific kind of building as it does the process of design and construction. Folk buildings are those that follow traditional plans, where the know-how is passed on orally or through observation rather than by written sources. Vernacular as a concept is much the same, referring to ordinary nonacademic buildings but dropping the traditional requirement: vernacular buildings include both folk and popular forms, with popular including designs that come from printed materials like stylebooks, pattern books, and magazines. Both folk and vernacular forms have a strong community identity in that they are the product of shared values about how buildings should be designed, built, and used. The community may be small, consisting of a single village or town, a larger region, or even be national or international in scope, but wherever there exists a consensus in architectural appropriateness and use, you’ll find vernacular buildings.6

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By its very nature, folk architecture lay outside the normal reach of architectural historians. It was common (architectural historians were looking for the uncommon); it followed customary rules of design (they valued innovation); and it was generally associated with the lower classes (rather than the wealthy and urbane clientele they preferred). So it was left to others, first local historians and later, as the discipline slowly took shape and professionalized, folklorists. The imperative driving much early folklore research was the need to record the last vestiges of a vanishing preindustrial rural culture, and this meant doing fieldwork: going out into various communities with notebooks, cameras, tape recorders, and tape measures to document everything from legends to ballads to buildings. Folklorists were collectors, and this commitment to gathering in situ data was still very much alive when I arrived on the scene during the early 1970s.4

other ways of classifying them, and falling back on features like plans provided an answer.5

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yond the fact that there was a lot of it, and it wasn’t covered in any of the existing architectural histories and stylistic guidebooks. Where did these buildings come from? What would we call them? How would we judge their historical significance? Such questions might have put off those focusing on matters of taste and connoisseurship, but for folklorists it was business as usual. We were used to studying the unstudied.3

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Figure 3. Section drawing of a miner’s workshop/garage on Daly Avenue, Park City. What appears from the outside to be a simple (and now derelict) garage on closer inspection turns out to have a number of intriguing features, including large walls made from reused framing timbers from the mines and a conceptually sophisticated (if makeshift) kingpost truss. Pencil-on-velum rendering by Matrix Li, January 2016.

As work progressed, it also became obvious that certain types were associated with different chronological periods. During the neoclassical period, for example, rectangular plan houses like the hall-parlor and I-house were popular. When Victorian asymmetry prevailed, the cross-wing, side-passage, and pyramidal types—all more irregular and sculptural—surfaced. Then when modernism arrived, the foursquare and bungalow house types dominated.

By the mid-twentieth century, the “mid-century” ranch house reigned. These connections allowed for a remarrying of style with type, which gave surveyors a more comprehensive system for describing what they were seeing in the field. The “style-type” approach we devised for the Utah survey may have been the first such classification system in the country, and eventually it was codified in a guidebook that my colleague Peter Goss and I produced for the Utah SHPO, which remains in use today.8

I began teaching at the University of Utah’s School of Architecture in the mid-1980s, where, working with Peter Goss and deans Robert Bliss and Carl Inoway, we put together both a preservation curriculum, which leaned heavily toward the survey and interpretative part of the preservation process, and a research program, the Western Regional Architecture Program (WRAP), designed to delve further into the larger western vernacular landscape. A National Endowment for the Humanities grant in 1990 funded our first efforts, and led to the creation of an annual (well, mostly annual) summer field school that I ran in the years between 1993 and 2010. We had previously undertaken two field projects, both funded by the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. The first, in 1985, looked at the intersection of occupation and religion in the Mormon ranching community of Grouse Creek, 9 and the other, in 1991, on Italian-American architecture in Utah

So why draw (see fig. 1)? It takes a great deal of time and effort to gain access to privately owned buildings, and then there is the actual recording process—measuring, making drawings from the measurements, and then preparing final inked sheets—which is labor intensive and often means traveling from your office, classroom, and comfort zone. Answering this question is not difficult, however: when it comes to studying the unstudied, fieldwork (which again, primarily means doing measured drawings) is really the best way to understand a building, a set of buildings, or an entire historic landscape. It is through drawing that you begin to see how a building or place was conceived, how intentions were translated into reality, what kinds of spaces were valued, what kind of technologies were available, and what kinds of remodeling and rebuilding took place (fig. 3).

The drawing process is grounded in questions.

Everything you note down necessarily leads to a question.

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WRAP field schools were conducted throughout the West, but because of proximity and the richness of resources, Utah remained our primary target. Summer projects were carried out in the Sanpete Valley in 1993 and Brigham City in 2008, but I also used the fieldwork approach in my own vernacular and western architecture classes. We devoted semester-long studies to the architecture of pre-railroad Salt Lake City, early Mormon polygamy, housing at Fort Douglas, the railyard at Ogden, and the skiing landscape at Alta, in Little Cottonwood Canyon. I will admit that I was most interested in the earlier buildings, those dating to the nineteenth century, because these are the ones I knew best. I will say, however, that many students also looked at more modern buildings (one did fieldwork on strip mall churches and another post-war cul-de-sac architecture), but it was the early western landscape that received most of our attention.

The drawings in this article are representative examples of my Utah fieldwork, from my time as a SHPO surveyor to the WRAP period at the University of Utah.12 Each entry shows how a building, systematically recorded and studied, can yield information not only about the history of architecture in Utah but also about past people and the material worlds they inhabited.13 At its best, Why did the builder do this?

And not that? Why this kind of plan? What other possibilities were there? How did people use the spaces? Why this choice of materials and not others? The drawings that follow, then, focus on how buildings, properly studied, can be read like other kinds of historical documents for social and cultural meanings. The drawings are, we must remember, only a means to an end.

Hopefully they are interesting and pleasing to look at, but it is their role in “doing history” that must remain paramount in our minds. It is rewarding to look back at over three decades of fieldwork and see how much we accomplished.

There is still, however, more to do. I hope these short visual vignettes will inspire others to continue preserving a record of the state’s early architecture.

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and Nevada.10 I used the basic research model employed in these surveys for the university’s field school: we would formulate a research question, usually based on what the study of the built environment could tell us about, say, early Mormon polygamy, life in a railroad town, the ranching industry, or land use patterns on Indian reservations, and then test it in the field with empirical evidence, which chiefly consisted of measured drawings of representative buildings and sites, supplemented by photography, archival research, and oral history interviews.11

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65 Abraham Coon Family House, 1580 West Clark Street, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County

Edward Frost Family House, Grouse Creek Road, Grouse Creek, Box Elder County

These drawings of the Abraham Coon family house show the difference between field (top) and finished (bottom) sheets. Field sheets are pencil on graph paper and include measurements and descriptive notations. The finished sheets may be hand-drawn, putting ink on mylar (film), or digitally produced, using one of a number of CAD programs. The house is early, dating to around 1850, and was documented in May 2004 by students in my summer field school class. Josh Hansen did the notation and final digital sheet. A cross-section drawing like this is used to illustrate the basic construction features of an early adobe building. Note that the front section, built first, has common rafters nailed to a wooden board (plate) that rests on top of the adobe wall, while the rafters in the (slightly) later rear addition are carried by large horizontal purlins (circles). These were the two main systems for roofing masonry houses during the settlement period.14

This small log house, part of a ranch complex in the community of Grouse Creek in the northwestern corner of the state, was recorded by Carol Edison, Debbie Randall, and myself as part of the summer-long study we conducted there in 1985. James Gosney, an “ink man extraordinaire,” turned the field sheet into this finished drawing. Although late—the house was probably built sometime in the late 1880s for second-generation Utahn Edward Frost and his family—it helped us understand the “pre-shingle” roofing methods used by the first white settlers in the Salt Lake Valley. Note how the log purlins are covered with rough sawn boards (aspen or juniper poles are often used as well), which are then covered with strips of river willow, and finally the whole thing packed with clay. The key to the system—and the main thing we learned from drawing the Frost house—is the board along the eaves that acts as a kind of dam or bulwark, holding the sod roof in place.15

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Ethan Pettit Family House, 2060 North 2200 West, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County Samuel Baker Family House, 150 West 200 North, Mendon, Cache County During my first years working for the Utah SHPO, I focused on settlement-period buildings like this one in Cache Valley. Easily the most common house found throughout the state (and region) during this time was the hall-parlor, a type consisting at its most basic level of two rooms, one slightly largely than the other that served as an all-purpose kitchen and living room, with the smaller one serving as a bedroom (probably for the parents). When they could afford it, a family would add a third room to the rear for the kitchen, which freed up the main room as general living space. The Mendon house of the Samuel Baker family is indicative of this pattern: it was built around 1870 as a two-room hall-parlor house, and then later, probably in the 1880s, the elaborate porch and rear kitchen wing were added. The Bakers were early converts to the LDS church from upstate New York. I did the fieldwork in May 1982, and Jim Gosney inked the sheet in August 2016 for this article.16

We documented the Pettit house in the fall of 2006 as part of my vernacular architecture seminar. Although from outward appearances it seems a fairly standard two-story hall-parlor house from the late 1860s or early 1870s, it had a number of curious features. For one thing, its siting was odd, since it is located outside the city limits, and all good Latter-day Saints were supposed to live in the city. Also its bricks are too large. They are the size of adobes but have been fired, probably on-site since they lack the hard outer glaze of regular brick. And finally, the house has a stair-passage hall inserted into the smaller of the two rooms. Houses of this size generally have the stairs tucked into a corner of the main room, to preserve space. Here, however, they take up about a quarter of the whole house, although there is a nicely sculpted handrail at the top of the stairs, which is shown in the drawing. The Pettits might have located out on the Jordan River because Ethan worked as a market hunter, “gunning� ducks and geese for sale in various Salt Lake City outlets. Nicolas Brady and Dallas Nelson did the main fieldwork, with Dallas digitizing the final sheet.17

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Randersknecht Barn, 150 North 200 East, Providence, Cache Valley One of the things a drawing can do is show how a building was used, which is particularly important in barns, where a simple plan and elevation, like that pictured above for the Beckstrom barn, illustrate form but not function.

Diagraming how a building works, then, is an important part of the fieldwork process, as is shown in this diagram of the Randersknecht barn in Providence. This large gambrel-roof building dates to the 1930s and is typical of what we call “improvement era” barns that were constructed, often with help from spe-

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Beckstrom Family Barn, Spring City, Sanpete County This drawing represents another typological study, although here we were looking at barns rather than houses. Early Mormon house lots invariably contained a barn to shelter the family’s valuable animals, which included both saddle horses and work teams, and perhaps a cow or two. In the years between about 1880 and 1920 the most common Utah barn is what geographer Richard Francaviglia named the Intermountain Barn because of its widespread occurrence throughout the region. The type is identified by the presence of a large rectangular haymow and shed-roof side stables to either one or both sides. The haymow is usually open above the ground level, which is enclosed with horizontal logs or, as in this example, vertical wooden planking. Animals in the side stables needed protection from the weather, so these

were built with stone, log, or stud-walls infilled with adobe or brick. The Beckstrom barn is late—it was built by Francis Black just after World War II—but is significant as a testament to the design’s tenacity over time. When something works, Spring City locals told us, why change it? Cory Jensen recorded the barn and produced this drawing during the 1993 summer field school.18

cialists from agricultural colleges like Utah State University, to help farmers and dairymen improve the efficiency, hygiene, and profitability of their operations. In the drawing you can trace the movement of hay via a Jackson Fork from the wagon to the bi-level lofts and then to either horses or cows waiting below, the whole thing meant to streamline the feeding process.

Jack Brady and Evan McCullough did the fieldwork for a project funded by a contract from the Mountain West Center, Utah State University. The final drawing is by Jack Brady.19

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Centerfield Meetinghouse, U.S. Highway 89, Centerfield, Sanpete County

Parowan Meetinghouse, Parowan, Iron County Given the dominant role religion played in the Mormon settlement of Utah, the lack of systematic research on LDS meetinghouses (either early or late) remains a mystery. This situation may be changing, but until the work of a new generation of Mormon historians begins to surface, the available literature in this area will remain extremely thin. One exception is a fine master’s thesis on the LDS meetinghouse in Parowan by Alan Barnett. Barnett’s study looks at the building’s history (it was the town’s second meetinghouse, replacing in the

1860s an earlier 1851 edifice), design (its double door arrangement was slightly anachronistic since the practice of separating sexes during worship was beginning to lose favor during the 1860s), construction (its expansive roof, shown here, was supported by a unique combination of both queen and king post trusses—the king sitting on the queen in this case), and meaning (how the Mormon social order was defined and maintained by the building’s form and use).

The fieldwork and final inked drawings are by Alan Barnett.20

Drawings can also demonstrate how a particular building (or landscape) evolved through time, like in this life history diagram of the LDS meetinghouse in Centerfield. As Shaun Harrison and Steven Fredley were drawing it back in 1998, they discovered that it had gone through a number of significant changes.

Originally there had been a log chapel (upper left in the drawing), built in 1882. The ward membership, however, quickly outgrew this building and in 1886 replaced it with a larger one of stone (top right). This new meetinghouse followed an aisled-hall design popular in all Mormon towns during the settlement

period. Later, however, a new style of meetinghouse emerged that was more clearly identifiable as a religious building (it had either a steeple or a tower) and was large enough to accommodate classrooms and recreation spaces as well as a sanctuary. So in 1897 the Centerfield building (lower left) was enlarged and given a fancy Victorian-era bell tower. This iteration had curtains that were drawn to close off sections of the main hall so they could be used as Sunday school classrooms. Finally, in the 1950s (lower right) the building was modernized: the tower was stripped away, a stylized doorway with a pediment was added, and the original rear section was turned into classrooms. James Gosney inked the field sheets in August 2016.21

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73 Southern Pacific Railroad Trestle No. 1, Golden Spike National Historic Site, Promontory, Box Elder County We worked several summers doing mitigation documentation for the National Park Service. One contract involved recording an abandoned trestle on the transcontinental railroad grade outside of Corrine.

The trestle dated to 1889 and was a replacement for an 1869 stone culvert that had filled in with silt. Jack Brady, with the help of James Gosney and Craig Paulsen, did the fieldwork in the summer of 2004.

His drawing reveals the intricacy of the single-span timber frame structure, which was based on a standard-plan design provided by Southern Pacific (by the 1880s the SP had taken over the Central Pacific operation) engineers. The main elements of the trestle are visible in the elevation (top) and deck plan (bottom) drawings, although decades of repairs make the reading (and the fieldwork) difficult. By the 1930s the trestle was itself replaced by a new one, and the whole line abandoned in 1941.22

Shotgun House, 138 Woodside Avenue, Park City, Summit County Architectural historians interested in reading buildings for social and cultural meaning often direct their attention to architectural communities—the totality of buildings in a given place and time. Both the extraordinary and the ordinary elements in the landscape are better understood in relation to the larger whole that is the community under investigation. This inclusive approach led to the recording of this small miner’s house in Park City, which I drew in the summer of 1982 while working for the Utah SHPO. It stands on the other end of the spectrum from the large mansions that silver

(and later copper) bought for the mine owners along Salt Lake City’s Brigham Street, and reminds us that class remains an important factor in shaping our historic landscape. The house is typical of miners’ housing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The drawing details its two-inch board walls that are simply nailed together without an internal frame, and while drawing it I could not help but wonder what it was like to live in it during a harsh Park City winter. Again, James Gosney inked my field sheets for this article.23

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Office and Bunkhouse, Alliance Mine, Park City, Summit County The industrial landscape is a community all its own, as we have seen with the miner’s house above. We must remember that the hills above Park City were once dotted with mine portals, head frames, and mills, as well as offices and bunkhouses like this one at the Alliance Mine. It is a simple balloon frame building that probably dates to the early 1900s. The original section, on the west (left) side of the drawing, is thought to have been a bunkhouse for Alliance miners and mill workers. An office was added on the east, and judging from the similarity in construction, it probably came only shortly later. The new

section has a vestibule that opens into an adjacent room that might have been a payroll office. The fieldwork and CAD drawings are from 2006 and are the work of Jon Oderda and Matt Swindel, who discovered this building while mountain biking on the Park City trails. They found they could mix work and pleasure. Not a bad idea.24

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Sometimes drawings can just be for fun, and this is largely the case with these renderings of the Exchange Building in Ogden. When we first saw it—we were studying the industrial west side of Ogden as a class project during the spring of 1998—we just had to draw it. After all, it is not every day that you get to see animal head capitals on a set of columns! In the first decades of the twentieth century, Ogden had become the largest livestock market west of Denver, handling hundreds of carloads of cattle, sheep, hogs, and horses each day. At the center of the stockyards was this administrative building, finished in 1931 and designed by a prominent Ogden architectural firm. Perhaps the architects thought it a nice touch, adding the cattle, sheep, hog, and horse heads to the columns to recognize the contribution (and sacrifice) the animals made to the prosperity of the city. The fieldwork is by Ben Rogers and Bryan Parker, the final inked drawings by Bryan Parker.25

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Exchange Building, Ogden Union Stockyards, Ogden, Weber County

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Wilson Sheep Camp, Ogden, Weber County If you drive around rural Utah enough, you are bound to see wagons like this parked by the side of the road, usually surrounded by a band of sheep, a sheepherder, and a sheep dog. The inspiration for the design probably came from European gypsy camp wagons, which have a similar shape and plan. It is unclear how the transfer from the old to the new world occurred, but the design’s suitability to the western sheep industry is undeniable: the high clearance and compact accommodation made such wagons ideal for housing herders in remote mountain and desert locations.

A stove is located just inside the door, either to the right or left, with benches and cabinets

Watson Shelter, Alta, Salt Lake County along each side of a narrow “living room” that leads to a bed placed full-length across the back. The first camps were placed on wagon beds and often called “bow tops” because they had canvas stretched over a bent wooden frame. By the 1920s a number of companies like the Ahlanders of Provo (who made the famous “Home on Range” camps) had sheet metal tops.

Companies like the Wilsons of Midway introduced more modern and versatile sheep camp wagons, which can cruise at highway speeds as well as negotiate the high backcountry, in the 1970s. The Wilson camp shown in this 2004 drawing by Catherine Tucker is typical of the newer models.26

When I first started doing fieldwork in Utah, my documentation methods were rather primitive. Most of what I know about drawing came from my friends in the Vernacular Architecture Forum, but I learned a great deal too from Salt Lake City architect Burtch Beall. Burtch had taught both design and architectural history in the University of Utah’s Graduate School of Architecture before opening his own practice. I knew that in the 1960s he had directed a comprehensive Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) project on Utah’s historic buildings, so I asked him to help me teach several of my first documentation classes. He drummed basic HABS drawing techniques into both

my students and me, and I have him to thank for not only raising the artistic standards of our drawings but also providing the expertise around which I built the WRAP. This drawing of the Old Watson Shelter at Alta comes from one of the first courses Burtch and I taught together, in 1992. The fieldwork and inking are by Richard Hall. The building was constructed in 1939 by Civilian Conservation Corps workers as a warming hut for skiers at Alta. The intricate truss, sort of a braced king post, is constructed around the massive stone fireplace and remains one of my favorite examples of the builders’ craft (or craftiness) in the West.27

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79 Verde Bake Oven, Spring Glen, Carbon County Duke Frank Hogan, Mexican Water, San Juan County The Frank homestead is located in the Mexican Water District just north of the Utah–Arizona border. Like most Navajo homesteads, it consists of numerous structures, including both modern houses and traditional hogans, like the one shown here. The circular hogan is the traditional Navajo dwelling and comes in two main varieties, both referencing in their mounded shape mountains sacred in Navajo mythology. The first is the “male” or forkedpole hogan, which is conical, and the “female” version, which is constructed of stacked logs with a more rounded, dome-like shape. The Frank family hogan is the female version, and was constructed in 1995 by Duke Frank and Jack Tsosie following a customary design: the plan is circular with the door facing east toward the rising sun (to catch the blessings of the first light); a ceremonial fire pit is placed in

the center; a series of vertical earth-fast cedar posts support a roof of corbelled logs that rise toward an open smoke and ventilation hole. The corbelled structure is then packed with adobe clay to give the completed building a domed appearance. These field drawings are by Steph Crabtree and Mathew Duncan and were part of their regular classwork in January 2013.28

The dome-shape design is also used for outdoor bake ovens like this one on the Antonio and Marie Verde home lot in the mining town of Spring Glen. The Verdes came from the Calabria region of southern Italy where such ovens (forni) were commonly used for baking bread. The oven sits on a base of cut stone. The bricks are laid in circular courses corbelled to create the dome, which is then covered with a sealing coat of plaster. Cedar or juniper would be burned in the oven and then the ashes raked out, leaving the bricks hot and ideal for baking bread. Like many Italian immigrants, the Verdes produced a great deal of their own food: their lot is distinguished by a large garden, a canning shed, a chicken coop, and a wine cellar (where sausage was also stored), as well as this outdoor oven. The drawing is by Susan Anderson and was part of the work we did for the American Folklife Center’s study of Italian folkways in the West.29

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Over the years one of my main research interests has been the architecture of the Scandinavian immigrants who came to Utah during the second half of the nineteenth century. Their influence (and particularly that of the Danes, who composed the majority) on early Utah building practices is considerable. One thing you do not see here, however, is the timber-frame construction found all over Denmark. This building technique consists of a box-like wooden frame in-filled with fired or clay bricks, and for various reasons—a shortage of wood and the growing fashionableness of brick—it survived the Atlantic crossing only in a few instances, like this small carriage house in Mount Pleasant. The framing here is typically Danish. The corner posts are mortised or rabbeted into the top plate and bottom sill; vertical studs are fit into shallow trenches notched into both the top and bottoms of the horizontal girts; angle braces are fitted into the outer bays, and the whole frame then in-filled with adobe. This building probably dates to the 1890s and was built by local Danish carpenters for John H. Seely, a prominent local sheep man. Cory Jensen first documented the building in the fall of 1997; additional fieldwork came later from me and Meng “Matrix” Li in the spring of 2016. James Gosney inked the field sheets for this article.

The equation of Utah with Mormons tends to deny the presence here of other religions.

Many people are surprised to learn that there were three early Jewish congregations in Salt Lake City, and each built its own synagogue.

The first was Congregation B’nai Israel, which was formed in 1881. The congregation observed an Orthodox style of worship until 1883, when it joined the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the reform movement. In 1885, those who wanted B’nai Israel to follow Orthodox practices split off to form a new congregation, Congregation Montefiore. A final divide occurred after 1915 when a group from the Montefiore congregation composed of Russian and Eastern European–born Jews formed an Orthodox congregation, Shaarey Tzedek.

In 1919–1920, this congregation built a synagogue in a largely Yiddish-speaking enclave on Salt Lake City’s southwest side. Following Orthodox principles, the synagogue had three levels (see page 84). On the main floor was the sanctuary with the Ark, a cupboard where the Torah was kept, placed on the east end and a raised Bima, a reading platform, placed in the middle. Male seating was found to both sides.

Upstairs was a gallery for the women in this gender-segregated congregation, while the downstairs was reserved for classrooms. Shelly Brady did the fieldwork and produced the CAD rendering of the building in fall of 2006.31

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Congregation Shaarey Tzedek Synagogue, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County

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John Sherrif Family House, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake County Every now and then we find a gem, and the fireplace mantle in this house in Salt Lake City’s Avenues District is just that. The front part of the house was built for the John Sherrif family after 1882 and it is a good example of the side-passage house common in American cities throughout the nineteenth century. After 1898 it was extensively remodeled—the brick walls were covered with stucco, a neoclassical front porch added, and a new rear kitchen wing constructed. It may be that this mantle dates to the remodeling, since its elaborate tile work is dramatically different from the cast iron, marbleized ones in the rest of the house. The later date seems appropriate for the scene depicted in the tiles. Featured are the busts of two figures,

John Albert Scorup Family House, Bluff, San Juan County presumably a mother and father, dressed in Elizabethan costume. Their faces turn inward, gazing at the domestic scene that takes place in the center panel. Here, a female figure (mother, nurse, or nanny) sits quietly knitting, while three children engage in constructive play. It is an innocent portrait of everyday life that nevertheless held meaning for Victorian-era families: home was a sanctuary, managed by the mother, whose role was to safeguard the children and prepare them for the perils of adulthood in the outside world. Historians call it the “cult of domesticity,” and it is nowhere better represented than in the Sherrif house mantle. The fieldwork is mine (I once lived in the house) and James Gosney did the final (artful) inking.32

For some reason, architectural historians shy away from drawing more modern buildings like this large Victorian house in Bluff. They might think such buildings lack the local connection found in preindustrial designs, or that their inspiration comes from popular magazines and pattern books, or that their many bays and turrets make them hard to measure. Yet our experience suggests that while these buildings may represent national rather than local values, they continue to be designed and built in much the same way as older, traditional ones. They also tell us much about the nation’s expanding information network, which allowed a rural cattleman like Al Scorup to know of new architectural fashions and put them to use in the Utah

backcountry. The house is a fine example of the Victorian Eclectic approach to design, incorporating a variety of decorative features into a slightly modified version of the side-hall plan house (compare to the Sherrif house above). It was completed in 1904, the work of two local craftsmen, Nick Lovice and Ed Thompson. As a student in the Design Build Bluff program, Larry Curtis did the fieldwork and initial pencil-on-vellum drawings in 2004, which were inked by James Gosney for this article (see page 85).33

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The National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) had been passed earlier, in 1966, but it took time to implement. The basic idea was to create historic preservation offices in each state that would be responsible for monitoring federally funded activities and their impact on historic resources. Identifying properties “significant to the nation’s history” through statewide surveys was an important first part of the preservation process.

William J. Murtagh, Keeping Time: The History and Theory of Preservation in America (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Songs, 2006).

Henry Glassie and Bettie-Jo Glassie, “The Implications of Folkloristic Thought for Historic Zoning Ordinances,” in Dick Sweterlitsch, ed., Papers on Applied Folklore (Bloomington: Folklore Forum Bibliographic and

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Special Studies, No. 8, 1971).

Overviews of folkloristics can be found in Robert Georges, Folkloristics: An Introduction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) and Rosemary Levy Zumwalt, American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

The folkloristic model for architectural investigation was largely established by Henry Glassie in a series of articles and books from the 1960s and 1970s. See Henry Glassie, “The Types of the Southern Mountain Cabin,” in Jan Harold Brunvand, The Study of American Folklore: An Introduction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), 338–70; Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1969).

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Thomas Carter and Elizabeth Collins Cromley, Invitation to Vernacular Architecture: A Guide to the Study of Ordinary Buildings and Landscapes (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 1–7.

The first issues of Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture are filled with typological studies from all parts of North America.

Thomas Carter and Peter Goss, Utah’s Historic Architecture, 1847–1940: A Guide (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press and Utah State Historical Society, 1988).

Thomas Carter and Carl Fleischhauer, The Grouse Creek Cultural Survey: Integrating Folklife and Historic Preservation Field Research, Publications of the American Folklife Center, No. 13 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1988).

Thomas Carter, “The Architecture of Immigration: Documenting Italian-American Vernacular Buildings in Utah and Nevada,” in Ties and Attachments: Italian-Americans in the West, ed. by David Taylor and John Williams (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1992), 94–111.

The WRAP field school sessions led to a series of inhouse publications. See, Tipis to Square Houses: Early Architecture on the Crow Indian Reservation (Billings: Montana Division of Parks and Recreation, 2005); Polygamy in Lorenzo Snow’s Brigham City: An Architectural Tour (Western Regional Architecture Program Publication No. 10, 2005); Of Work and Romance: A Survey of Utah Barns (Western Regional Architecture Publication No. 9, 2004); Home Off the Range: Basque Boarding Houses in the American West (Western Regional Architecture Publication No. 8, 1998); Building by the Railyard: The Historic Commercial and Industrial Architecture of Ogden, Utah (Western Regional Architecture Program Publication No. 7, 1998); Military Accommodation: Architectural Adaptation at Three Wyoming Forts (Western Regional Architecture Program Publication No. 6, 1997); Contested Space: The Above and Below Ground Landscape of Idaho’s Coeur D’Alene Mining District (Western Regional Architecture Program Publication No. 5, 1997); Overlays of History: the Historic Architecture of Fort Douglas, Utah (Western Regional Architecture Program, Publication No. 4, 1996); Enterprise and Ingenuity: The Gascon Ranch of Mora County, New Mexico (Western Regional Architecture Program, Publication No. 3, 1995); A Way of Seeing: Discovering the Art of Building in Spring City, Utah (Western Vernacular Architecture Program Publication No. 2, 1994); and Designed for Work: The San Jacinto Ranch of Elko County, Nevada (Western Vernacular Architecture Program Publication No. 1, 1993).

The entire WRAP collection is housed in the Special Collections section of the University of Utah’s Marriott Library. My thanks to Greg Thompson and Elizabeth Rogers for giving it a home and patiently waiting for me to sort it all out.

See Thomas Carter and Bernard Herman, “Introduction: Toward a New Architectural History,” in Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture, IV (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 1–6.

For more information on adobe construction in Salt Lake City, see Laurie J. Bryant, A Modest Homestead: Life in Small Adobe Homes in Salt Lake City, 1850–1897 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2016).

Carter and Fleischhauer, The Grouse Creek Cultural Survey.

See Thomas Carter, “Samuel Baker House,” Nation-

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19 20

21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30

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al Register of Historic Places Inventory-Nomination Form, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah.

See Ethan Pettit Diaries, 1855–1881, Ms0180, Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah.

See Thomas Carter and Roger Roper, Of Work and Romance: Discovering Utah Barns (Salt Lake City: College of Architecture and Planning, University of Utah, 1999).

See Lisa Duskin-Goede, Historic Barns of Northern Utah: A Self-Guided Driving Tour (Logan, UT: Bear River Heritage Area, 2004).

See Alan Barnett, “We Must Do Right and Be Guided by the Priesthood: A History of the Parowan Meeting House and Its Role in the Mormon Community, 1860– 1869” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1994).

See Thomas Carter, Building Zion: The Material World of Mormon Settlement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 209–239.

See Robert M. Utley, Golden Spike National Historic Site (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1969).

Deborah Lyn Randall, “Park City, Utah: An Architectural History of Mining Town Housing, 1869 to 1907” (master’s thesis, University of Utah, 1985).

See Raye Carleson Ringholz, Diggings and Doings in Park City (Park City, UT: privately published, 1983).

See Jalynn Olsen, Building by the Railyard: The Historic Commercial and Industrial Architecture of Ogden, Utah (Salt Lake City: Graduate School of Architecture, University of Utah, 1998).

See Nancy Weidel, Sheepwagon: Home on the Range (Glendo, WY: High Plains Press, 2001).

See Duane Shrontz, Alta, Utah: A People’s Story (Salt Lake City: Two Door Press, 2002).

Stephen C. Jett and Virginia E. Spencer, Navajo Architecture: Forms, History, Distributions (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1981).

See Carter, “The Architecture of Immigration,” 94–111.

See, Thomas Carter, “Danes,” in America’s Architectural Roots: Ethnic Groups That Built America, edited

by Dell Upton (Washington, D.C.: Preservation Press, 1986), 118123.

See, Phil Neuberg, “Congregation Shaary Tzedek Synagogue,” Structure-Site Information Form, Utah State Historic Preservation Office, 1985.

See, Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: a Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).

See, Neal Lambert, “Al Scorup: Cattleman of the Canyons,” Utah Historical Quarterly 332 (Summer 1964), 301-320. See also, Thomas Carter, Traditional Design in an Industrial Age: Vernacular Domestic Architecture in Victorian Utah,” Journal of American Folklore 104 (Fall 1991): 419-442.

Utah Drawn

an exhibition of rare maps from the early 1500s through statehood

Utah State Capitol 4th Floor Gallery Through Late Summer 2017 The Utah State Historical Society and its partners are pleased to announce an exhibition of forty historical maps depicting the region that became Utah from its earliest imaginings by European cartographers to the modern state boundaries.

Original maps exhibited are from the private collection of Stephen Boulay, with additional maps from the Utah State Historical Society, LDS Church History Department, L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Brigham Young University, Special Collections at the J. Willard Marriott Library, and the American West Center at the University of Utah.

Public welcome. For a preview of these maps, visit the online exhibit produced by the Utah Historical Quarterly at history.utah.gov/utahdrawn.

The Utah State Historical Society publishes the Utah Historical Quarterly, the official journal of Utah history since 1928. For more information and to become a member, visit history.utah.gov/quarterly.

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A refrigerated railroad car at a Salt Lake City depot, April 1916. The type of ventilator and refrigeration cars shown here were particularly effective in shipping produce but were also commonly used to ship meat. They used a combination of ice blocks and vents at the top of the car. The ice would cool the air, which would then sink, and warm air would rise and flow out of the vents.

88 The Ogden Union Stockyard started out as just a few stock pens near the Weber River and the Ogden rail yard in the 1910s and rapidly grew into a sprawling complex of corrals, specialized barns, auction arenas, and the headquarters of the Ogden Livestock Exchange. By the late 1920s, it had become the largest stockyard operation west of Denver, and several hundred thousand animals made their way through the facility each year. The stockyard site became a demonstration of industrialization and Progressive Era agriculture with the layout of the yard as a reflection of advancing concepts of workflow, the integration of the rail system for the mass transport of livestock, the close coordination with the meat packing industry, and the extensive incorporation of new technologies to facilitate sanitation.

In the fall of 2014, the former Ogden Union Stockyard site was a collection of demolished (and partially demolished) buildings, crumbling pavement, decaying fences, and mounds of military surplus items from its use as a storage location. It scarcely resembled the

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The Last Word in Stockyard Construction: The Rise and Fall of the Ogden

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A Park City, Utah, butcher shop, 1905. The men in white apron and overalls are Willard Bircumshaw (left), Jim Rasband, and Joe Brandel. Such butcher shops had a limited capacity to butcher large numbers of animals, yet they were also the primary source of fresh meat for urban Utahns in the 1800s.

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The development of the stockyard complex in Ogden drew heavily on the lessons learned elsewhere in the nation.

once-bustling livestock operation it had hosted for decades. Only the historic Exchange Building remained intact, though it, too, had seen far better days. Yet, amidst the rubble you could almost hear faint echoes of lowing cattle, bleating sheep, and hard-working livestock handlers.

Standing among the archaeological remains of the expansive yard, the telltale remains of the site’s epic past were still discernible: the different pens assigned to different species of livestock, the stamped concrete pathways along which the animals had once been herded, the double-decker loading chutes used to efficiently load and off-load thousands of head of livestock to and from waiting trains.

Plans to redevelop the stockyard site as a business park prompted an array of historical and archaeological studies to document the physical remains before they were gone and gather information about its history absent in the

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Ogden Packing and Provision Company, circa 1915. Most of the buildings in this photograph are still standing.

— USH S

An aerial image of Ogden Union Stockyards from 1932 Ogden Livestock Digest. Note the double-decker loading chutes (near center-left) and the newly completed exchange building (center-bottom). The original caption notes the “close relationship between transportation and yarding facilities” and the “modern office facilities for those doing business on this market.”

— Courtesy of Og den City

written record. While some of the history of the stockyard and its glory days has been documented and while personal memories of the livestock auctions and social occasions that occurred there remain, little has been written about why the stockyard came to be and why it looked the way it did.1 The Ogden-area livestock industry progressed hand-in-hand with the meat packing industry.

Prior to the industrialization of meat packing, the butchering of animals typically took place at home, on a local farm, or at a butcher shop.

Prior to the early 1900s and due to a lack of effective methods to keep processed meat cool during long-distance transport, most fresh meat available in the urban areas of the West came from local animals or those transported live from other areas of the country and butchered nearby. Canned meat was also available, but it was far less preferable to fresh meat and

largely relegated to use by remote or itinerant workers, such as sheep and cattle herders.

Shipping live animals by rail was a costly endeavor and one fraught with financial inefficiency. For instance, prior to the 1890s, the average death rate among livestock during rail transport was 6 percent for cattle and 9 percent for sheep.2 Couple this mortality rate with the fact that roughly 60 percent of the body mass of sheep or cattle was considered inedible or unusable by American standards and the actual financial return on the consumable portion of any given animal was relatively low. This financial inefficiency spurred the development of refrigerated train cars that could ship only the edible or saleable product—the meat—rather than the entire animal. Although the first refrigerated railroad cars appeared in the 1850s, their reliance on blocks of ice limited their usefulness and effective traveling distance. Not until the

late 1870s and early 1880s, more than a decade after the transcontinental railroad connected Ogden to the rest of the nation, did Swift and Company develop the first truly functional refrigerated cars that could transport processed meat products to urban consumers.3 As William Cronon writes, “the refrigerated railroad car . . . was a simple piece of technology with extraordinarily far-reaching implications.” These cars, along with the expansion of the rail system through smaller interurban railways, formed the basis by which the livestock and meat packing industries would change from small-scale, seasonal ranches to large-scale, regional centers supplying consumers year-round across large distances.4 The Ogden Union Stockyards became one of the primary centers of this type serving the Intermountain West.

The development of the stockyard complex in Ogden drew heavily on the lessons learned elsewhere in the nation. In the decades after

the Civil War, Chicago rose as the livestock distribution center of the country. This was due in large part to the many railroad connections in the city, as well as to the role the city played in distributing supplies to soldiers via rail during the war. From Chicago, livestock would be shipped directly to eastern states or herded via stock drives to secondary distribution points, such as Kansas City, where special stock cars transported the live animals westward via rail.

During the stock drives, some of which crossed more than 1,200 miles, livestock commonly lost a substantial percentage of their body weight resulting in lower sale prices for live animals.

Along with the problems associated with animal death, injury, dehydration, and malnutrition that arose in the course of this long-distance transport came a social and economic backlash pushing railroad companies to provide better conditions for animals. This prompted railroad companies to invest not

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The Union Stock Yards of the Chicago were, for all intents and purposes, the birthplace of the industrial slaughterhouse. The first largescale slaughterhouse and meat packing plant was constructed adjacent to the Chicago yards in 1867 by the Armour brothers (of Armour Hot Dog fame) and was a dramatic change from the smaller warehouse-style plants that had existed up to that point.6 The modern slaughterhouse, with its moving assembly (or disassembly) line, was not only a pragmatic solution to using new technology to increase cost efficiency and production but also a way of removing the act of butchering from the view of the general public—something that had become a concern in

It was also amidst all of these technological advancements that the Ogden Union Stockyards came to be. Not surprisingly the impetus for the establishment of the yards came from members of the meat packing industry. Specifically, a group of Ogden area businessmen—the majority of whom where officers of the Ogden Packing and Provision Company—incorporated the stockyards on July 29, 1916. The new establishment was called the Ogden Union Stockyard Company and had among its initial incorporators W. H. Wattis, Fred J. Kiesel, S. S. Jensen, James Pingree, Lars Hansen, and Lester P. Whitlock.9 The stockyard company started with a capital investment of $250,000.10 The founders of the stockyard had spent the preceding decade building up their meat packing operation east of the Weber River and north of Twenty-fourth Street. The initial plant of the Ogden Packing Company (later the Ogden Packing and Provision Company) was completed in 1906, but expansion of the facilities started almost immediately.11 The plant included a small stockyard, located to the south, where local ranchers sold and traded livestock and from which the company purchased animals for slaughter.12 By 1917, when the Ogden Union Stockyard officially opened, the Ogden Packing and Provision Company was reportedly “the largest meat packing plant west of the Missouri River.”13 Its capacity at that time was enormous, more than local ranchers could supply through the small stockyards located there. This resulted in the company not only leading the way to establish the Ogden Union Stockyards across

In 1920, the stockyards were reportedly handling up to ten thousand head of livestock in one day.

Beginning in 1919, several of the founders of the stockyard, in an effort to boost the profile of the yard and to increase the number of animals brought to the yard and available to the meat packing plant, established the annual Golden Spike National Livestock Show (sometimes referred to as the Livestock Exhibition). As a secondary benefit, the show was to be used to showcase local livestock and “finishing” techniques and to further encourage ranchers of the intermountain region to continually improve the breeding lines of their herds. The show was a rousing success with trainloads of animals being brought in from the western United States to compete for awards. An auction was added to the show almost immediately.

In 1920, the stockyards were reportedly handling up to ten thousand head of livestock “in one day without confusion,” which spoke to the organizational efficiency of the facilities.22 Six livestock commission firms were said to

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The first phase of the stockyards opened in April 1917 and, within a few months, the new yards had become a bustling center of a burgeoning local livestock industry. Numerous railroad companies built spur lines to the stockyards to claim a piece of the financial action in transporting animals to the yards and meat products away from the packing plant, but it was the Union Pacific that garnered the lion’s share of the rail traffic; the Denver & Rio Grande Western provided more limited service to the yard.18 Ultimately, seven rail lines reportedly converged at the stockyards and packing plant, and “trainloads of cattle, sheep, hogs, and horses [were] arriving every day to be placed on the Ogden market.”19 The Ogden Standard Examiner described the facilities as “the finest stockyards in the entire west,” praising the concrete flooring, drainage, and sewage and water system.20 Even the Utah Industrial Commission annual report heralded the advanced design of the stockyards in its 1918 report, saying the Ogden facility was “a yard which is about the last word in stockyard construction.” 21

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Contracts for the construction of the first part of the new stockyards were let in late October 1916 to James Stewart and Company, a St. Louis–based firm that was in the midst of construction on a massive expansion of the adjacent Ogden Packing and Provision Company plant.15 The initial contract was for $50,000. Within a few days, the grounds of the seventy-acre stockyard were graded, and concrete floors for buildings and pens were being poured. Within the yard, stamped concrete in different patterns marked paths or walkways where livestock were herded to and from the loading chutes along the north side of the yard and through the middle of the yard and to the scale house, pens, and specialized livestock barns. The paving, combined with an elaborate system of sewer drains and piped water, was implemented with the express purpose of facilitating the cleaning of the yard to improve animal welfare and general yard conditions. These were seen as the most modern of touches, touches that were touted by the Ogden Standard Examiner as

“more modern than those of Chicago.”16 Nearby, the new packing plant buildings, also made of reinforced concrete, were seen as the “latest word in packing house construction” and were heralded for including separate dining and rest rooms for female employees.17

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The concept of the large-scale mechanized slaughterhouse reached Ogden just after the turn-of-the-century. In 1906, the Ogden Packing and Provision Company was established, opening its doors as a state-of-the-art facility with the newest in technology and the facilities to accommodate the increased focus on food safety that derived from the recently passed Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.8

the river but also in launching a concerted campaign to encourage ranchers to increase their herd sizes (particularly for hogs)—even going so far as to purchase and distribute brood sows throughout the West and advancing payments to ranchers to allow them to expand their herds.14

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In 1865, a consortium of nine railroad companies, all of which had started small-scale meat packing operations around Chicago, consolidated their efforts in the Union Stock Yards.

The massive yard, which included transport pens, a feedlot, slaughterhouses, and meat packing plants, eventually covered 475 acres.5 The concept behind the facility was that live animals would be transported by various means to the yard from local or regional sources that were not too distant—thereby minimizing weight loss and fatalities—and finished meat products would be shipped out of the yard to all parts of the country. By processing animals at the yard and shipping only the edible products across greater distances, profit margins could be greatly increased. The Chicago Union Stock Yards became a model of both what worked and what did not for subsequent stockyards built across the country, including the Ogden Union Stockyard.

Europe and the United States as an affront to civilized sensibilities. By the 1880s, the mechanized slaughtering associated with the Chicago stockyards had spread throughout much of the country and changed the meat packing industry to one of mass-production.7

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only in newer railroad stock cars that provided feeding and watering facilities but also in small yards along their routes where livestock could be temporarily off-loaded. More traditional feedlots were established at large rail hubs where livestock could be “finished” or fattened up with high-calorie feed before sending them to market. Soon the rail companies recognized that packaging the various aspects of the meat industry in the same location would bring tremendous economic return, and they began creating subsidiary companies that dealt in all manner of livestock transport, slaughtering, butchering, packaging, and meat distribution.

One of the earliest large-scale examples of this was the Union Stock Yards of Chicago.

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An aerial image of the stockyard from 1940, looking southeast. The yard largely sits empty in this photo, in part due to the decrease in activity caused by the Great Depression.

— C our te s y o f Web er St a t e Un i vers i t y S p e c i a l C olle ct ion s

be operating out of the yards at that time, and the Hansen Livestock and Feeding Company had established a facility nearby where they employed “scientific methods of feeding” to increase animal weight prior to sale.23 By 1922, the Ogden yards had become one of the largest western markets for cattle, hogs, and sheep, necessitating the construction of a new $30,000 exchange building to house the yard administrators and the growing number of commission firms operating there. These included the firms of Merrion and Wilkins, W. R. Smith and Son, Lowell and Miller, Peck Brothers, John Clay, the Producers Livestock Marketing Association, L. L. Keller, the Farmers Union, the Ogden Auction, and the Alex Patterson Commission Company.24 Amidst the growth of the stockyard, the Ogden Packing and Provision Company reorganized in 1924 as the American Packing and Provisioning Company.25 At that time, the company

bought control of the stockyards, an ownership they retained until 1935. Under the ownership of the American Packing and Provisioning Company, the stockyards saw one of its greatest periods of improvement and expansion. In 1926, at a cost of $100,000, the company constructed the grand Golden Spike Coliseum, which was designed by the noted Utah architect Leslie Hodgson and housed an auction arena, dance floor, conference room, offices, and a restaurant.26 The construction of the building, which reportedly took only forty-five days, was necessitated by the success of the annual livestock show and the numbers of visitors attending each year.27 Funding for the new building came in part through money given to the cause by the Ogden Chamber of Commerce and the Weber County Commission.28 In 1930, still under the ownership of the American Packing and Provisioning Company, the rail and loading chute network was expand-

ed to accommodate the daily activity of 200 carloads of cattle, 250 carloads of sheep, 150 carloads of hogs, and 100 truckloads of mixed livestock; the Hodgson-designed Sheep Barn was also constructed at this time.29 The loading area included double-decker chutes that reflected the need for the increased loading and off-loading efficiency of an industrial stockyard. The following year, 1931, the Art Deco–style Exchange Building, also designed

by Hodgson, was completed, and the yard itself was expanded to 75 acres that encompassed 30 acres of pens, barns, railroad switches, and 45 acres of buildings, parking, weigh scales, and other facilities.30 A 1932 edition of the Ogden Livestock Digest, a publication of the livestock show housed at the yards, noted that both the yard and the shows held there had a greater purpose than merely availing themselves of the latest technologies and increasing profits for meat packers. It argued that the show, along with the accompanying yards, was intended to promote advanced methods of feeding livestock that would, in turn, promote sales of local feed and higher local livestock prices based on more robust animals.

Following the passage of a law by the U.S. Con-

Concurrently with the 1947 expansion of the stockyards, the adjacent American Packing and Provisioning Company embarked upon its own $300,000 upgrade, erecting a four-story addition to its plant to increase the slaughter of locally procured sheep from one thousand to ten thousand a week.32 Most of these animals came directly through the adjacent Ogden Union Stockyard. Two years later, in 1949, Swift and Company bought out the American Packing and Provisioning Company. The final round of known improvement at the stockyard occurred in 1954, making the stockyards the largest single facility west of Denver.33 Shortly after the final expansion effort, the stockyard operation began a slow but inevitable decline toward obsolescence. By the 1960s, annual sales through the yard had declined to an average of roughly $42 million, less than half of what it had been in its heyday. Perhaps ironically, it was largely technological advancement—the thing that had essentially created the stockyard in the first place—that ultimately led to the demise of the Ogden yard. Advance-

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The stockyard experienced a downturn during the years of the Great Depression, seeing an 86 percent decrease in the number of animals passing through the facility between 1930 and 1933. The operations struggled through the ensuing years until the market returned to levels greater than before the Depression during World War II; the peak year of operations in terms of numbers of railroad car loads of livestock unloaded and reloaded at the yard was 1945. With the financial boom created by the wartime demand for meat, the Denver Union Stockyard Company began again to invest in the expansion of the Ogden stockyards. A 1947 Ogden Standard Examiner article noted that the “last of 80 sheep pens being constructed at an expenditure of about $80,000 will be finished within a week” and would have “concrete floors, sewers, mangers, watering troughs and other fittings that can be used the year round.”

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gress in 1935 prohibiting packing houses from owning or having financial or legal interest in stockyards, the American Packing and Provisioning Company sold the Ogden Union Stockyards to the Denver Union Stockyard Company, which operated the facility until it closed in 1971.31

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Shortly after the final expansion effort, the stockyard operation began a slow but inevitable decline toward obsolescence.

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Commission agents operating out of the yard officially closed their operations in December 1967, leaving only local and direct sales to sustain the stockyard. The Ogden Livestock Show and auction continued for a few additional years but with only a fraction of attendees they had once known. The stockyard was officially closed by the Denver Union Stockyard Company on January 31, 1971.34 The nearby meat packing operation, which was then under the ownership of Swift and Company, shuttered its operations in 1970, shortly after the demise of the stockyard’s main operations. With these final closures, the once-bustling Ogden Union Stockyard slipped into the realm of memories.

1

2 3 4 5 6

Donald Strack, “Ogden Stockyards and Meat Packing Industry,” Utah Rails, accessed February 2, 2017, at utahrails.net/industries/livestock-ogden.php; Miriam B. Murphy, “The Rise and Fall of Ogden’s Meat Packing Industry,” History Blazer, June 1996; Jalynn Olsen, Building by the Railyard: the Historic Commercial and Industrial Architecture of Ogden, Utah, Western Regional Architecture Publication no. 7 (Salt Lake City: Graduate School of Architecture, 1998).

Lewis H. Haney, A Congressional History of Railways in the United States, vol. 2 (New York: Nobel Press, 1908).

Swift and Company, The Meat Packing Industry in America (Chicago: Swift and Company, 1920).

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).

“The Birth of the Chicago Union Stock Yards,” Chicago Historical Society, accessed August 6, 2014, chicagohs. org/history/stockyard/stock1.html.

Robert A. Slayton, Back of the Yards: The Making of Local Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 1992.

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

CA RR

CHI L DERS

We now have many studies of that exotic subject known as rural America, including J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy (New York, 2016), George Packer’s The Unwinding (New York, 2014), Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas’s Hollowing out the Middle (Boston, 2009), and Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? (New York, 2004).

Each tries to explain Red America, but all are anecdotal and temporally shallow, especially Frank’s, whose title is more a rhetorical device than a discernment of people and place. Such shortcomings are emblematic. Americans have grown comfortable with not knowing each other, at least until presidential elections. Then, as November 8, 2016, illustrated yet again, a country full of strangers wallow in bewildered panic or drink from an ever-more toxic well of schadenfreude. The problem transcends ignorance: we no longer acknowledge the legitimacy of anyone who thinks or lives differently.

This is why Leisl Carr Childers’s The Size of the Risk, along with Katherine Cramer’s The Politics of Resentment (Chicago, 2016), is necessary reading. The main difference between these books is that while Cramer gives voice to a Wisconsin demographic that matters in state and national elections, Carr Childers zeroes in on a people who almost no one sees. The Great Basin is not simply Flyover Country; for most Americans it is and ought to be terra incognita. Carr Childers explains how this came to be, and why our historical and geographical amnesia is integral to the cultural chasms that plague the West and the nation.

The argument spans seven chapters on the local impact of grazing, military, recreational, and equine policies. The key issue is the rise and uneven consequences of multiple-use policy in federal land management. Carr Childers’s narrative is thinnest in terms of early settlement

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Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015. x + 314 pp.

Cloth, $34.95

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and grazing history. She foregrounds a set of settler tales to explain how several families arrived in the Great Basin in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The biographies are crucial for contextualizing the impact of later policies, but more could be done to link people to broader currents. Readers need to know how many people came, stayed, and left; why tensions emerged between settlers and distantly controlled railroad, mining, and grazing companies; and what they changed. The historical sweep is key to understanding why Great Basin residents distrusted concentrated power long before the BLM.

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Histories of Multiple Use in the Great Basin

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BOOK REVIEWS & NOTICES

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Amy J. Fitzgerald, “A Social History of the Slaughterhouse: From Inception to Contemporary Implications,” Human Ecology Review 17, no. 1, (June 2010): 58–69.

These acts shaped the design and construction of subsequent stockyards, feed lots, and slaughterhouses across the nation to improve sanitation and animal welfare.

J’Nell L. Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards: Livestock Hotels (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2005).

“Big Packing Plant,” Ogden Standard Examiner, March 6, 1916.

Murphy, “The Rise and Fall.”

Strack, “Ogden Stockyards.”

Murphy, “The Rise and Fall.”

O. J. Stillwell, “O. J. Stillwell Reviews Ogden’s Development as a Livestock Center during the Past Four Years,” Ogden Standard Examiner, February 14, 1920; Murphy, “The Rise and Fall.”

“Contracts Let for the Construction of Stock Yards across River,” Ogden Standard Examiner, October 28, 1916.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Strack, “Ogden Stockyards.”

“Latest Picture of Union Stock Yards and Ogden Packing Yards,” Ogden Standard Examiner, May 12, 1917. See also, Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 146.

“Latest Picture of Union Stock Yards,” May 12, 1917.

Utah Industrial Commission, Report of the Utah Industrial Commission for the Period of July 1, 1917–June 30, 1918 (Salt Lake City: F. W. Gardiner, 1918).

Stillwell, “O. J. Stillwell Reviews,” February 14, 1920.

Ibid.

Jesse S. Richards, “A History of Ogden Yards,” Ogden Standard Examiner, December 31, 1922; Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 147; Strack, “Ogden Stockyards.”

Donald Strack, “Major Rail-Served Industries in Ogden,” Utah Rails, accessed May 30, 2016, at utahrails. net/ogden/ogden-industry.php.

Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 146; Wayne L. Balle, Ogden Union Stockyards, Historic Site Form, 1992, on file at the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, Salt Lake City, Utah.

“Ogden’s New Livestock Show Coliseum,” Ogden Standard Examiner, January 2, 1926. “$15,000 Given for Coliseum,” Ogden Standard Examiner, September 29, 1925; “Grants $5,000 to Coliseum,” Ogden Standard Examiner, January 3, 1926.

Balle, Ogden Union Stockyards; Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 147.

Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 147.

Strack, “Ogden Stockyards.”

Strack, “Ogden Stockyards.”

Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 147.

Ibid., 148.

The book develops a much sharper focus with the advent of federal regulation of grazing in the 1930s. As Carr Childers notes, rancher opinions divided on the Taylor Grazing Act and the Grazing Bureau. Some rushed to organize grazing districts while others resisted with all their might. District 6, Nevada’s last grazing district, is a poignant tale because ranchers accepted it in 1951 only because they thought it would prevent more intrusive regulation. They were mistaken. Beginning with World War II, the military appropriated great swaths of public and private rangeland to practice bombing and to test nuclear weapons. Carr Childers documents the impact of these takings and the legacy of radiation fallout, ably linking family experiences to the Downwinder scholarship. Local marginalization deepened across the decades as administrations, Congress, and agencies accommodated one recreational or aesthetic demand after another. This is how multiple use became a disruptive force. Reformulation of rancher-dominated grazing boards as advisory boards with recreational standing was another means of diminishing local ranchers’ access to lands they depended upon for their livelihoods.

The most original contributions come in the last chapters on Great Basin National Park and feral horse and burro herds. Preserving basin and range country and protecting free-roaming equine herds were never policy slam dunks,

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ments in long-haul trucking minimized the need for centralized stockyards at a regional level and resulted in the dispersal of operations to a larger number of small yards located off the nation’s railroad system. Trucks had a much broader distribution range than rail cars since they were not limited to the routes of railroad lines. This flexibility made it possible for live animals to be trucked directly to local feedlots and slaughterhouses, bypassing grand, centralized facilities such as the Ogden Union Stockyard. It also took the distribution of meat products out of the control of railroad companies and livestock commissions—which had acted as brokers between buyers and sellers—and made it possible for ranchers to deal directly with buyers. By the mid-1960s, this fundamental shift in how meat products were distributed across the country relegated the Ogden Union Stockyard to local use, which proved insufficient to sustain the vast complex.

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The disparity between political rhetoric and scientific evidence in western contests over the federal domain—between what advocates and policy makers claimed and what good research revealed—is why The Size of the Risk matters for understanding what Richard White two decades ago called “the current weirdness in the West.” Spend any time with this book’s careful dissection of how “each successive variation of multiple use . . . placed the burden of risk on those who relied on public lands the most” (17), and it is impossible to ignore the inequities visited upon people who lived in the Great Basin.

Maps drive home this point by illustrating a federal domain increasingly fragmented by proprietary claims that constrained and impoverished residents. The federal domain is indeed a geography of displacement, and one need not be a fire-breathing states’ righter to see here the sometimes dark, dumb, and

— J OSE P H

E .

TAY LO R

I I I

Simon Fraser University

The Mormon Church and Blacks: A Documentary History E D I T E D A N D

BY

MAT T H E W

N E W E LL

G .

L.

H A R R I S

B R I N G H U R ST

Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 232 pp. Cloth, $85.00; Paper, $25.00; Ebook, $22.50

Racial identity is not only a construct of the imagination; it is a lived construct, experienced in our social relationships, at home, work, and church. Matthew Harris and Newell Bringhurst, in their documentary volume The Mormon Church and Blacks, retrace the making of Mormonism’s racial identity as it existed at the nerve center: the decrees and fiats of its upper eche-

The story that Harris and Bringhurst tell is not one of the disempowered black Saints but of the evolution of power structures that have restrained Mormonism’s black members. Harris and Bringhurst revisit well-known documents, such as Brigham Young’s speech on slavery be1

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Now Is The Time To Talk About What We Are Actually Talking About,” New Yorker, December 2, 2016.

2

See Russell Stevenson, For the Cause of Righteousness: A Global History of Blacks and Mormonism (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford, 2014); Stevenson, “‘We Have Prophetesses’: Mormonism in Ghana, 1964–1979,” Journal of Mormon History 41 (Summer 2015): 221–56; W. Paul Reeve, Religion of a Different Color (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); Quincy Newell, “The Autobiography and Interview of Jane Manning Elizabeth James,” Journal of Africana Religions 1, no. 2 (2013): 251–70; and Max Mueller, “Black, White, and Red: Race and the Making of the Mormon People, 1830–1880” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2015).

Any documentary volume requires selectivity in a hope of approximating representativeness; the selection process demands that certain details not make the final print. In this regard Harris and Bringhurst have done an admirable job, choosing documents that convey the zeitgeist of the times. But on occasion they neglect noteworthy details. While Brigham Young’s February 1852 speech is to the public codification of the race-based priesthood and temple restrictions, this statement represents the evolution of Brigham Young’s thinking. When in the spring and summer 1847, black convert William McCary attempted to have (and, occasionally, succeeded in having) sexual liaisons with several married and unmarried white Mormon women at Winter Quarters, a mob organized to expel him and his white wife, Lucy. The incident gave Parley P. Pratt a pretext for delegit-

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The story that emerges from the documents Harris and Bringhurst compiled reveals not only a story of race but how dogmas circulated in speeches, backroom conversations, and folk sayings become hardened pillars of Mormonism’s institutional character. But Mormon leadership could never settle on an explanation; as Harris and Bringhurst show, Mormonism’s racial dogmas were subjected to sustained theologizing, analysis, discussion, and debate among church leaders. Their midrashim ran the gamut: whether Brigham Young maintained that blacks descended from Cain or B. H. Roberts posited that ethnicity was the product of premortal conditions, Harris and Bringhurst show the fractures running through the foundations of Mormon racial structures. They also provide an excellent cache of documents revealing how Mormon leaders have endeavored—with varying degrees of success—to leave behind the legacies of Mormonism’s racial theologizing, including documents detailing an aborted plan to officially apologize for the restriction’s implementation.

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The Harris and Bringhurst volume enters an existing scholarly conversation, but much of this conversation has been focused on either acknowledging the very existence of the black Mormon experience or analyzing and dismantling the contours of the priesthood and temple restrictions. In a past generation, Lester Bush, Newell Bringhurst, and Armand Mauss performed the sterling work of historicizing the restrictions, demonstrating that Mormon claims to its stasis and predictability did not accord with the documentary record. With W. Paul Reeve’s groundbreaking volume on the racialization of Mormons and Quincy Newell’s scholarship on Jane Manning James, an early black Latter-day Saint woman, and my own volume on comparative black Mormonisms, we come closer than ever to having a critical mass of scholarship on black Latter-day Saints.2

fore the territorial legislature in February 1852 and Bruce R. McConkie’s 1958 treatise, Mormon Doctrine. They include Hugh B. Brown’s General Conference comments in support the “full civil equality for all of God’s children” and the correspondence between LDS leadership and African-American convert Jane Manning James detailing her pleadings to receive the highest rituals of Mormon.

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These are among the reasons The Size of the Risk won a Western Writers of America’s 2016 Spur Award. It is beautifully written, balancing sensitive portraits of people with scholarly criticism, and it never devolves into tropes and cant. I love the title, borrowed from an Enrico Fermi memo that rationalized in cold, calculating math the radioactive contamination of nearby ranchers, but as a metaphor it stumbles when extended to cover the general devastation of rural lives. For one thing, the phrase takes too long to explain; for another, the costs of parks, horses, and iodine-131 are not equivalent. What they share, though, is a role in the subversion of Great Basin ranching communities. This book would help urban westerners reconsider how they think about the sparsely populated West, but the people who really need it are rural westerners. It’s not that they don’t know their history, but a book like this illustrates why careful, scholarly analysis is far more useful than the delusional and splenetic rants of the current cohort of rural westerners who attract media attention. We all need a smarter discourse about the federal domain, and Leisl Carr Childers’s The Size of the Risk is a very good start.

lons of governance. As Chimamanda Adichie has observed, “no racism story is ever a ‘simple’ racism story.”1 While the documents Harris and Bringhurst cull from the archives and the annals might strike the outside observer as yet another pile of corporate documents, they reveal a cavalcade of figures displaying the varieties of Mormon racism over the ages. That Utah might be an interesting laboratory for the study of race seems counterintuitive (as of July 2015, its population identifying as “black” amounted to 1.3 percent of the population), yet in recent years we have seen a flourishing literature addressing the peculiar racial situation in the state.

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mean side of environmental advocacy.

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but the concerted efforts of advocates over many decades eventually won the day. Unlike most park and wildlife histories, which tend to flatten social history with partisan views, Carr Childers develops nuanced portraits of local complexity. Residents in and around Ely, Nevada, for example, favored a national park that would attract tourists but not disrupt ranchers and miners. Local debate was less about whether a park would exist than how big it would be and how to compensate losses. The divisions were not over preservation but among rival business interests. Similarly, some ranchers were appalled by the unethical practices of some horse wranglers. Where discussions between these groups broke down was over the role of the range, the legitimacy of wrangling, and the value of horses. Wild horse advocates eventually developed ever more radicalized visions of ranchers and horses. The former were reduced to brutish caricatures, while the latter were reified into racialized containers of European purity. The horses that advocates most cherished, however, were horses of the mind, vestiges of a truly strange kind of wildness with no ecological impact. Horses in the flesh embodied far more muddled genetic and ecological histories. Nevertheless, in the end advocates won the political battle to define horses and burros as privileged species, even though ranchers had the better ecological and economic arguments.

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Harris and Bringhurst have produced not only an excellent volume but also an important one—one that enables students of race or religion in America to unpack, dismantle.

— RUSSELL

ST E V E N S O N

Michigan State University

3

4

Minutes, March 26, 1847, February 14, 1849, in Selected Collections of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2002), disc 1.

Austin J. Shelton, “The Ideology of Blackness and Beauty in America and Africa,” Presence Africaine 79 (3rd Trimeestre 1971): 134. For a more robust treatment of comparative meanings of how Africans came to assume the identity of “blackness” rather distinctive ethnic identities, see Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

So what does Gerlach tell us about Richards?

Surprisingly, the future Olympic champion had only modest experience with sports as a boy, though the time he surely spent frolicking around (and working in) the hinterlands of southwestern Utah, near his hometown of Parowan, must have helped lay the foundation for his tremendous athletic skill. His staunch Mormon upbringing, which stressed “righteousness, sobriety, and godliness” (21), also aided his athletic development. The self-confidence, honesty, and singularity of purpose instilled by his father, a strong-minded man and revered figure in the Mormon church, almost certainly contributed to making Richards, as one journalist wrote, “one of the greatest natural athletes that ever lived” (88).

And what an athlete he was. Despite being a “big, raw-boned lad” (40), Richards possessed a springiness that allowed him to triumph in not only the high jump, but the long jump as well. With his peculiar technique, he simply bounded—semi-upright—over the high-jump bar. Capitalizing on his brawn, he also claimed championships in the shot put and 56-pound weight toss. The unusual combination of power and nimbleness suited him as a decathlete; in 1915, he won the national title. Starring first for Brigham Young University and then Cornell,

Given Richards’s renown, why is so little remembered about him today? Gerlach suggests a host of reasons, including: “America’s lack of interest in Olympic history” (2); the “unglamorous, workmanlike field events” Richards participated in (9); the confusing coverage he received in the press (newspapers, for instance, would sometimes misspell his first name); a truncated Olympic and college career caused

by WWI (the 1916 Berlin Games were not staged; the 1917 collegiate track season—Richards’s last—was suspended); and “inadequate information about his career” and the fact that “his individual statistics have long since been surpassed by a considerable margin” (182).

How people remember Richards is a central theme of the book, and Gerlach skillfully shoulders the responsibility to set straight arguably the most popular story associated with the Mormon athlete. The story goes that just prior to making his triumphant leap at the Stockholm Games, Richards prayed—openly.

Gerlach notes that the tale gained broader currency during the latter decades of the twentieth century, exactly at the moment Salt Lake City was attempting to be a Winter Olympics host city. The story, though, is probably untrue.

Like a historical Sherlock Holmes, Gerlach uses logic, intuition, and a deep knowledge of the past to debunk the tale, theorizing that the story’s durability is mostly owing to the Mormon church’s relatively recent efforts to be accepted by a wider religious and secular audience. Historically speaking, the consequences are significant. Gerlach writes: “[T]he uncritical acceptance of a questionable account about an undocumented Olympic prayer has created a distorted if not false representation of Alma Richards and his historic achievement” (202).

With his work, Gerlach has penned the initial

It is safe to say that the last thing Gerlach would want is to leave the reader with a false impression of the most extraordinary athlete in the history of the Beehive State. That, certainly, is not how Alma Richards should be remembered. Thankfully we have Gerlach’s biography to remind us just that.

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Alma Richards might be one of the most exceptional athletes of the early twentieth century sports fans do not know about. His greatest feat, without question, was winning the high jump competition at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, and if Richards is remembered at all, it is because of this. But as Larry Gerlach makes clear in his discerning and diligently researched biography, Alma Richards, Olympian, the Utah sportsman achieved much more.

Not only did Richards win an Olympic gold medal, he also compiled one of the most noteworthy athletic records during the first third of the twentieth century. All but forgotten today, Richards, Gerlach shows, “is a man well worth knowing” (12).

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book on Richards. That, in itself, is commendable; the historical record on “Utah’s first and greatest Olympian” (218) is frustratingly thin.

Gerlach acknowledges this fact, writing about the figure of Richards he presents in the book: “The ‘inner man’ is a shadowy specter, dimly revealed at times, darkly obscured at others” (11). If there is a criticism of the book, it is that some important questions of Richards’ life go unanswered. But Gerlach is too good of a historian to fill in the gaps with contrivance and guesswork. He simply admits that evidence is lacking, and moves on.

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Richards would often enter several events in meets. On more than a few occasions, he proved to be the deciding factor. During his career he held records in different events. A husband (three times), military officer, father, lawyer (albeit non-practicing), and beloved teacher, he was such a tenacious competitor that he did not retire from sports until his early forties. As an athlete, Richards was lauded from Parowan to Provo, from Los Angeles to New York.

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Trained to be an Africanist specializing in religiosity in Igbo Nigeria, I found myself hoping to see a more sustained discussion of Mormon blackness outside the boundaries of the American experience. They include the famous “7th discussion” delivered by missionaries in Brazil to proselytes who were believed to have African ancestry, but the volume contains but a sprinkling of glancing references (101–102). As a sizable body of scholarship demonstrates, the meanings of blackness throughout the Atlantic world changed and shifted, depending on the socioeconomic and religious context; in 1971, Austin Shelton observed that “there is no nicely defined cultural group of the black.”4

Alma Richards, Olympian

— CHRI S

EL ZEY

George Mason University

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imizing McCary’s ordination to the priesthood based on his Hamitic ancestry. Additionally, Young learned of Enoch Lewis, a black Mormon in Massachusetts, siring an interracial child. In March 1847, Young had allowed for black ordination to the priesthood; by February 1849, Young was dismissing Lorenzo Snow’s concerns about black access to the priesthood by citing their Cainite ancestry.3

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BOOK NOTICES

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Glen Canyon beyond Climate Change P H OTO G R A P H S E S S AYS

BY

BY

P E T E R

P E T E R

G O I N ,

F R I E D E R I C I

BY

J ONATH A N

FOST E R

Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2016. xv + 176 pp.

Paper, $21.95

The Southwest’s iconic Hoover Dam is more recognizable than its associated world-class water parkland, Lake Meade. Whereas we have study after study on the Colorado River and Hoover Dam, Jonathan Foster’s Lake Mead National Recreation Area is among the few to cast light on the water body formed along the river’s course. Foster’s primary focus is on the reservoir as a recreational destination and the varying interests that manage or use it. As managers of the recreational area—the first of its kind—the National Park Service set the course for later water parklands management. Moreover, NPS management of Lake Mead made it difficult for the Park Service to claim the high ground on latter reclamation projects and signaled to the public the significance of the West’s reservoir-based recreation. The strength of the volume is in showing how diverse groups contested management of the reservoir, from federal agencies to special interests, politicians, and recreationists. In its first decades public access and use of the Lake Mead National Recreation Area was relatively unfettered; in more recent years increased water use in an age of drought and climate change has meant more restrictions and limitations on recreation use.

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A History of America’s First National Playground

A New Form of Beauty:

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CONTRIBUTORS

Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016. xv + 184 pp.

Cloth, $40.00

The latest in a series of handsome coffee-table books, A New Form of Beauty captures Glen Canyon in striking scenes. Photographs organized into galleries—Artifacts, Flora and Fauna, Low Water—feature haunting images of a changed landscape as drought forces water to recede below full-reservoir levels.

Text by Peter Friederici accompanies Peter Goin’s photographs. In a series of three brief essays, Friederici reflects on the disquiet of standing face-to-face with drought (and to see unfamiliarity in a landscape thought to be familiar), on water forecasts given realities of climate change, and on the path of acknowledging and even celebrating “our knowledge that we live at the end of nature, that the driver of the Earth’s powerful cycles has become us as much as it is the other thing” (123). In both words and images, this volume meditates not only on the transformation of a manmade reservoir but also on a regional transition and the subsequent realities occasioned by the scarcity of water.

KIRK HUFFAKER has served as executive director of Preservation Utah since 2008.

Since 1998, he has provided assistance throughout Utah to build local preservation leadership, develop policy, and save historic buildings. A native of the Chicago suburb of Wheaton, Huffaker holds a master’s degree in Historic Preservation from Eastern Michigan University. He is the author of Salt Lake City, Then and Now (2008).

BIM OLIVER is a Salt Lake City consultant specializing in the study of Utah architecture of the twentieth century. His book about the changes that occurred along South Temple Street in the middle of the twentieth century, South Temple Street Landmarks: Salt Lake City’s First Historic District, was in January 2017. In 2015, Oliver completed a major survey of post– World War II buildings on the University of Utah campus, which is the basis for his article in this issue.

RICHA WILSON earned a Bachelor of Architecture and a Master of Science in Historic Preservation before joining the Forest Service as its first architectural historian. She wishes

to thank the anonymous reviewers of the Utah Historical Quarterly for their suggestions and insightful comments.

THOMAS CARTER’S graduate studies were in folklore at the University of North Carolina and Indiana University, but he slowly morphed into an architectural historian while working first in the Utah State Historic Preservation Office and then the University of Utah’s School of Architecture. Carter’s publications include (with Peter Goss) Utah’s Historic Architecture, (with Elizabeth Cromley) Invitation to Vernacular Architecture, and Building Zion: The Material World of Mormon Settlement. He is currently professor emeritus at the University of Utah.

SHERI MURRAY ELLIS is an archaeological and historic preservation consultant with more than twenty-five years of professional experience in Utah. She holds a Master of Science in American Studies from Utah State University, with an emphasis on western American history, folklore, and architectural history.

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Utah Lake, though largely neglected in the twentieth century, was for many years an important place for both unregulated and commercial fishing. This undated photo is a scene from an operation probably near the mouth of the Provo River, where fishing was best: working men in fishing boats with nets and poles take a moment to pose for a photograph. Better dressed men look on from the shoreline. In the nineteenth century and earlier, Utah Lake sup-

plied trout, chubs, and suckers in abundance, but by the turn of the century (when this photo was likely taken) most native species had been driven to extinction. Today the dominant fishing species include catfish, walleye, and white bass. As more people have come to realize, the centrality of the lake to the economy and society of Utah Valley makes it a landscape worthy of preservation. USHS