The Sanpete Cooperative Saw Mill was one of the self-help projects established to combat the depression of the thirties. Utah State Historical Society collections.
Sanpete County between the Wars: An Overview of a Rural Economy in Transition BY J O H N S. H . SMITH
IJLACK THURSDAY, THE COLLAPSE of the stock market in October 1929, did not initiate economic decline in Utah. Because of sharply increased demands for agricultural products and nonferrous metals during World War I, the Utah economy had expanded in those areas and had begun to develop a moderate industry based on the processing of primary products. But the recession that followed in the early twenties dealt harshly with Utah, since raw material economies are particularly sensitive to what are technically known as "inventory" depressions.1 The main problem lay in the fact that the expansion of mining in Utah had, with its fluctuating prices and production cycles, wedded Utah to the inherent instability of eastern competitive capitalism. In agriculture, the local-market economy that had enabled Utah to survive previous depressions had been unwisely expanded in 1918 and 1919 in precisely Dr. Smith is a historian in the preservation research office at the U t a h State Historical Society. His article was prepared as part of a National Endowment for the Humanities lecture series focusing on Utah's regional distinctions and characteristics. ' R o l a n d Stucki, Commercial Banking in Utah, 1847-1966 (Salt Lake City: Bureau of Economic and Business Research, University of Utah, 1967), p. 4 1 .
