The First Campsites

The first campsites of the first few days in the valley were:

• Donner Park (990 S. Crestview Drive)
• Campsite of July 22, 1847 - 500 East 1700 South
• Campsite of July 23, 1847 - near Washington Square
• Main party campsite and site of first pioneer fort - Pioneer Park at 300 South 300 West
• July 16, 1847 - Ensign Peak (north of the state capitol)

Within two hours of their arrival at the City Creek camp, members of the vanguard company had begun plowing the ground a short distance to the northeast. After breaking plow points in the dry, hard earth, they dammed the nearby mountain stream and soaked the terrain with the diverted water, marking the beginning of irrigation in the area. Five acres were plowed that day, followed by the planting of potatoes and other seeds the next morning.

Brigham Young and the main body of 147 pioneers arrived in the valley on July 24th, an event now celebrated each year as Pioneer Day. When Brigham Young and his party arrived, they joined a camp that was already alive with the excitement of colonization.

Within a few days, plans were drawn for Great Salt Lake City, named after the salty inland lake which dominated the desert to the northwest. Out from the center of the City, blocks were arranged on a grid pattern in ten-acre squares, separated by streets 132 feet wide — "wide enough for a team of four oxen and a covered wagon to turn around."

Pioneers who wintered in Salt Lake Valley in 1847-48, numbering about 1,700, lived in a log and adobe fort located at the present day Pioneer Park. The year after the arrival of the pioneers, the valley became a territory of the United States.

 A City Takes Shape

Initially, Salt Lake City was ruled by a high council. It was the high council that enacted the first municipal ordinances, ratified in a public meeting on January 1, 1848.

The unexpected discovery of gold in California in 1848 contributed greatly to Salt Lake City’s early growth. The gold rush of 1849 brought a flood of gold seekers through Salt Lake en route to California. These travelers also brought Salt Lake City its first taste of prosperity. As prospectors and speculators raced to the West Coast through Salt Lake City, they brought goods and scarce money with them. Trading became the order of the day. Residents of Salt Lake City supplied the gold rushers with fresh livestock and crops in return for clothing, tools and manufactured goods — treasures from the East Coast.

Congress organized the "State of Deseret" into the Utah Territory in 1850. Salt Lake was incorporated as the City of the Great Salt Lake on January 6, 1851 and became the territorial capital in 1856. With the exception of 1851-56 when Fillmore was the legal capital, Salt Lake City has been the capital of Utah.

 Mining and Railroads Impact Salt Lake Valley

The discovery of lead and silver in Bingham Canyon in 1863 led to the development of mining in the Great Salt Lake City area. Hundreds of copper, silver, gold and lead mines were opened in nearby canyons. Gigantic smelters were later built to refine the ore. Some mine owners built large, gracious homes along South Temple, once known as Brigham Street. It was around this same time that Great Salt Lake City officially changed its name to Salt Lake City.

In 1869, workers laid tracks for the nation’s first transcontinental railroad system. The work was completed by driving the Golden Spike at nearby Promontory Summit. Utah was now connected to the East and West. After dignitaries drove the golden spike, interurban transportation built the Wasatch Front into a metropolitan area from Cache to Utah County. Rail service boosted Salt Lake Valley’s economy by opening new markets for its farm and mining products.

The following year the locally built Utah Central Railroad connected Salt Lake City with the Union Pacific transcontinental junction in Ogden. The connection was completed on January 1, 1870. Eventually the miners, farmers and bankers coalesced to form the foundation of the city’s present day economy. The construction of new factories, foundries and smelters bore witness to the increasing importance of manufacturing. During the following decade, many roads were built from Salt Lake City in all directions to booming mining regions. The Salt Lake City Street Railroad Company initiated a mule-drawn streetcar system in 1872.

 Prosperity and Problems

The pains of rapid urban growth began to take its toll on Salt Lake City’s environment. Salt Lake City’s population increased 116 percent between 1880 and 1890 from 20,800 to 44,800. The cost of City lots doubled between 1886 and 1891. In 1889, the Salt Lake Rapid Transit Company installed an electric railway. Electric lighting and telephones had arrived by the late 1880’s as well. Between 1890 and 1930, the addition of nearly 100,000 more people strained the City’s amenities and services.

Although the city had constructed water mains and a settling tank in City Creek Canyon by 1884, the existing system generally fed municipal hydrants. Many people still drew their culinary water from open ditches or wells. Salt Lake’s streets were rated among the dirtiest in the West in 1890. During inclement weather, people sloshed through mud and filth. Citizens suffered from recurrent epidemics of typhoid fever, flushed into homes and businesses from open-vaulted privies, and from smallpox and tuberculosis, caused by inadequate vaccinations and sanitation. In an initial sanitation effort in 1890, contractors laid sewer pipe along five miles of Salt Lake’s 275 miles of streets in a district bounded by North Temple, Second East, Fourth South and First West.

Air pollution was a leading problem for the City. Although the City Council passed an ordinance to regulate the burning of soft coal in 1890, it was seldom enforced. Some people believed the smelter smoke had damaged foliage in Liberty Park and the surrounding residential areas. In 1908, Mayor John Bransford suggested that smoke reduction presented one of the most pressing needs of the City. The area from Murray to Salt Lake City was called the "smoke belt." Farmers complained of damage to their crops and livestock from smelter smoke pelted onto their fields and animals by wind and rain. The farmers met with the smelting companies, Salt Lake County Commission and Board of Health. After receiving no satisfaction, the farmers took the case to court. In 1905, the farmers were granted an injunction against five smelting companies. Most of the central Salt Lake Valley smelters closed or relocated.

In 1915, the city, the U.S. Bureau of Mines and the University of Utah formed a research agreement to study the smoke pollution problem. The Bureau of Mines conducted extensive research and completed a report. As part of the cooperative effort, members of the Salt Lake Council of Women conducted a door-to-door survey in the city to determine the types of fuels and furnaces used by residents. The report from Bureau of Mines estimated that an expenditure of $15,000 for two years would largely rid the city of smoke troubles; subsequent events would show that the cost and time were grossly underestimated. Utah had become one of the nation’s most active mining centers and by 1919 Salt Lake Valley had become the largest smelter district in North America. The smelters added unhealthy fumes to the coal-generated smoke from railroads, homes and businesses.

In 1921, the city adopted an ordinance to implement the plan outlined in the report from the Bureau of Mines. Throughout the year, officials and leaders campaigned to gain support for smoke abatement. Monitoring showed that a year of effort had reduced smoke from commercial sources by 50 percent during 1921. One hundred businesses had overhauled their heating plants and the city began urging households to rebuild or replace their furnaces. Clean air efforts continued through the remainder of the 1920’s.

Between 1888 and 1931, Salt Lake City negotiated a series of exchange agreements and water rights purchases. Workers built reservoirs to supply additional water from Emigration, Parley’s and Big Cottonwood Canyons.

On January 4, 1896, President Grover Cleveland’s proclamation marked Utah’s admission as the 45th state in the Union, with Salt Lake City as its capital.

Salt Lake City began to assume its present character in the early 1900’s. The State Capitol and many other historic buildings were constructed. Electric trolleys, garaged at Trolley Square, were installed to transport people living in the Avenues, Capital Hill, Liberty Park and Sugarhouse areas to downtown.

Copper, lead and silver mining boomed in Bingham Canyon during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. Mining companies built large smelters to refine the rich ores. Salt Lake City prospered and grew rapidly.

In Salt Lake City, prostitutes enticed their clients on Commercial Street, Franklin Avenue, Victoria Alley and Main Street in the center of town. Embarrassed by this display in the downtown area, an experiment with a regulated vice district was established between 1908 and 1911. Moving prostitutes from the center of town, city government contracted with Dora B. Topham, who reigned over Ogden’s prostitute business under the pseudonym "Belle London," to operate a complex of cribs in a vice district that ranged between Fifth and Sixth West and First and Second South.

 Beautification and Improvements

Beginning in 1906, groups of men and women who loved their city believed in the prospect of changing cities into beautiful and livable urban paradises. People in Salt Lake responded to a large number of problems by organizing into volunteer associations. The Civic Improvement League was formed to work on social, cultural and environmental matters. The improvement league urged the Mayor and Council to remake the city into a beautiful and functionally planned urban place. In April 1906, Mayor Ezra Thompson and the improvement league jointly announced plans to convert a number of Salt Lake’s streets into beautifully landscaped boulevards by paving them with macadam, planting parks in the median strips and abutting the streets with curbing. This was the first citywide cleanup campaign and the beginning of a citywide beautification movement.

Numerous women’s clubs in Salt Lake City led to the organization of the Salt Lake Council of Women which acted on important issues such as libraries, parks, Girl Scouts, public health, city beautification, smoke pollution, women’s legislation and social welfare. Under the auspices of the Salt Lake Council of Women, a citywide cleanup campaign took place in 1912. The members approached the City Commissioners, who agreed to clean up and repair streets if the women promoted the cleanup of private property.

As early as 1916, women in the city had begun to complain about uncovered garbage cans. By the early 1920’s, city officials came to believe that covered garbage cans were an absolute necessity for public health. That accomplished, the Salt Lake Council of Women began efforts to get the city to transport the garbage in covered vehicles as well. The city had a rudimentary system for garbage disposal. Households had to separate their garbage into edible and non-edible units. Then, using one "covered nonleakable garbage wagon" and anticipating the purchase of six more, the city transported edible garbage to local animal feed companies; non-edible waste was used as fill in road construction. Incineration of garbage was considered too expensive. With so few garbage wagons to dispose of ash and garbage for 140,000 people, the system broke down rapidly. Garbage and ash cans often remained on the streets for days at a time. Accidents and mischief scattered garbage and ashes along the streets, contributing to the filth, ugliness and disease.

In early 1914, the city undertook an unprecedented campaign of paving and improvement. Virtually every week during 1914, one of the local civic improvement leagues, groups of neighbors or individuals appeared before the City Commission to lobby for new street paving, curbs, gutters, sewer and water hook-ups. Few went home empty-handed.

In 1914 and 1915, the city tried to exterminate disease-bearing rats and flies by offering bounties to children. Ten cents was offered for each dead rat and 100 flies delivered to the Board of Health. Salt Lake children organized clean-town clubs in each school district, subdividing themselves into squads responsible for exterminating vermin in their neighborhoods.

In connection with beautification and improvement efforts, various groups lobbied city government to improve existing playgrounds and open new facilities. The city’s first designated public playground for children was established in 1910. Improvements were made to the playgrounds at Liberty and Pioneer Parks during 1912. Groups also lobbied for adult recreation. In 1914 a plan was presented to the city for a municipally owned golf course. The plan failed due to lack of support. The first municipal golf course opened in 1922 at Nibley Park.

Urban lifestyles emerged that demanded amenities similar to those in other cities. Calder’s Park, located at the present site of Nibley Park Golf Course, together with the original Salt Palace, located at Ninth South between State and Main, hosted a carnival, some of the city’s first motion pictures, bicycle races and other sporting events. Revelers took the railroad to Saltair on the southern shore of the Great Salt Lake to visit a Moorish pavilion designed by Richard Kletting and to dance, swim, ride the giant racer and socialize.

Between 1900 and 1930, the city’s population nearly tripled; increasing from 53,531 to 140,267. City parks — including a nature park in City Creek Canyon — were built, sewer systems and street lighting installed and streets were paved.

 The Economy Plummets

As with the rest of the nation, Salt Lake’s economy plummeted following the stock market crash in 1929. Many Utahns sank into poverty between 1929 and 1933. Utah’s annual per capital income fell to a minuscule $300 in 1933. The value of products from Utah’s mines dropped 80 percent from $115 million to $23 million. By 1932, farm income plunged from $69 million to $30 million. As the bottom fell out of markets for the products processed from Utah’s mines and fields, employee income in manufacturing plummeted from $23 million to less than $10 million in 1933. By the winter of 1932-33, Utah’s unemployment rate was nearly 36 percent. In November 1932, a survey of the Southgate neighborhood in eastern Salt Lake City showed that more than 60 percent of the heads of households could not find work. Survey results for Salt Lake City’s westside showed more than half of all workers had no jobs.

Local governments seized tax-delinquent homes and farms; banks and loan companies foreclosed on mortgages. Frustrated by the depressed economic conditions and angered by foreclosures, farmers and townspeople congregated in the streets in February 1933 to block sheriff’s sales in Salt Lake City. Irritated by the protesters, the sheriff called out the fire department to hose down the crowd and police threw tear gas to disperse the gathering.

Following a suggestion from President Herbert Hoover, various communities organized unemployment committees. A group organized by Salt Lake Mayor John Bowman inventoried food and fuel and cooperated with the L.D.S. Church in making a citywide house-by-house unemployment survey. Boy Scouts collected food and clothing. Coal companies donated fuel to heat homes of the unemployed. City agencies cooperated with the Community Chest (predecessor of the United Way), county welfare, churches and private businesses in delivering food, clothing and coal to the needy.

 The Economy Fights Back

From an unemployment high of nearly 36 percent in 1932, Utah’s unemployment had dropped to six percent in 1936, largely because of the employment that year of 30,000 people on public works projects in a labor force of 175,500. Public works projects included building national forest campgrounds, reclamation projects, painting murals at the State Capitol, constructing buildings, laying sewer and water pipes and restoration of water sheds. Between March 1933 and January 1937, the federal government spent more than $158 million in Utah. From 1933 to 1939, federal expenditures in Utah amounted to $342 for each woman, man and child. The total amount spent on public works and relief ranked Utah twelfth per capita in the states.

The Great Depression brought construction to a standstill, but the boom sounded again during World War II. Demands for metals in World War II (1939-1945) brought new prosperity to Salt Lake City’s mining industry. Many war industries and military installations revitalized the economy. War workers and soldiers spent their money in the city’s restaurants, ballrooms, theaters and shops. Pressure for housing in Salt Lake City became almost unbearable. The price of food, clothing and housing grew by one-third between 1941 and 1946. Businesses demanded and received higher prices in spite of rationing, price controls and quotas.

World War II produced a mixed experience. Economic and political transformation had ushered Utahns into a new land of prosperity, social dislocation, adventure, death and mystery. No matter how much they wanted to, they could never go back.

Industrial expansion continued after the war and the city’s population reached 189,454 by 1960. The population of Salt Lake City dropped during the 1960’s, mostly because of a trend toward suburban living. Several commercial and service centers were built in the suburbs, drawing businesses and residents away from the downtown area.

Salt Lake’s downtown area expanded in the 1970’s. New businesses and shopping malls were built; classic older buildings were renovated. Citywide beautification projects generated vitality and activity in the downtown community.

Salt Lake City continued to grow in the 1980’s. Development included the Salt Palace Convention Center expansion, the Salt Lake International Center, the University of Utah Research Park and the Triad Center.

The 1990 Census figures reported a population of 160,000 for Salt Lake City. During the 1990’s, Salt Lake City has experienced a rise in the number of permanent residents. The population estimate for July 1, 1997 was 172,178 people.

Encyclopedia Britannica, 1973