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Thomas Caldwell Adams: The Man and the Lake
Thomas Caldwell Adams: The Man and the Lake
BY ROY WEBB
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 1965, WAS NO DIFFERENT from any other late fall day to Thomas Adams. As was his custom, he drove to the crumbling Saltair resort on the shores of the Great Salt Lake to continue studying ways to restore the aging pleasure palace. For many years he had been a lone voice urging restoration of the resort; indeed, he was one of the driving forces behind the effort. His persistence and sound engineering background had gradually won over supporters in the community. But with the Great Salt Lake at its lowest recorded level it looked as though the very forces of nature that had doomed the resort in the first place— the fall in lake levels that left the huge structure high and dry—might now mean an end to Adams's efforts to restore it to its former glories.
The next day, Florence U. Bollschweiller, Adams's secretary, was puzzled when he failed to appear at the usual time at his office in the Union Pacific building annex. She knew that he spent practically all his spare time at the resort or out on the lake in his boat. But still, he was usually punctual, as engineers are wont to be. According to the note he left at the office before he went out to Saltair, he would be in at his usual time on Monday; not notifying her that he would be late was unlike him. She called his home, but there was no answer. When the office clock struck noon and he still had not shown up, she reached for the telephone to call her husband. Something was definitely wrong.
It was not the first time that Thomas Caldwell Adams had caused people to shake their heads in worry, frustration, or sometimes, anger. Throughout his long and varied engineering career he and his controversial and strongly held convictions were often a source of concern to his friends, associates, students, and colleagues. He was an outspoken advocate of the causes he believed in—what he believed in thereby became a cause—and an outspoken critic when he felt that something was not in the best interests of the public, the engineering profession, or himself. For example, irreconcilable differences with the University of Utah resulted in a Board of Regents request for his resignation from the university faculty in 1941. His consulting for local and state governments on engineering matters often ended in abruptly terminated contracts, acrimonious exchanges of correspondence, and threatened lawsuits. He disagreed with the city of Salt Lake over its proposal to widen State Street, which he felt might threaten the integrity of the Eagle Gate Monument. He successfully fought a plan by Kennecott Copper to use the Great Salt Lake as a vast dump for mine tailings.
It was this last issue that was closest to his heart. For all his wide-ranging interests in engineering, the Great Salt Lake was Adams's first and foremost love. No matter how far he ranged, he always came back to the lake. Adams was an only child with few living relatives; he never married. But there was always the lake. It was as if that vast body of water was his mistress and companion in times of stress. It was certainly his lifelong obsession. From the late 1920s, when he helped resuscitate the Great Salt Lake Yacht Club, until his death three decades later, no matter how far afield his career might take him, he always returned to the Great Salt Lake. He surveyed it, sailed on it, wrote about it, lectured on it, and defended it against developers. In return it gave him solitude, beauty, and unending fascination.
Adams's lineage might account for both his feisty nature and and his love of the Great Salt Lake.His paternal grandparents were both natives of Ireland who came to America as converts to the LDS church in 1844. They were called to Parowan to "establish an industrial center and metropolis for the southwestern United States" in 1849. In 1882 they were part of the famous group that pioneered the Hole-in-the-Rock route to Bluff, Utah. His mother's family was originally from Canada. Arriving in Utah in 1852, they were immediately sent to Rush Valley and later settled in Tooele. Adams was named after his father, Thomas, who was born in Parowan in 1861. His mother, Emily Maria Caldwell, was born in St. Thomas, a small town south of Tooele in 1869. Thomas and Maria were married in Salt Lake City in June 1899. Thomas Caldwell Adams was born on May 12, 1901, in Salt Lake City. The elder Adams was a respected local attorney, while Mrs. Adams was a member of the General Board of the MIA. When his father died of typhoid fever in October 1905, young Thomas and his mother were left alone. Save for a few remote cousins, his mother would be his sole living relative until her death shortly before his own.
Thomas received his early schooling in Salt Lake City, and attended the LDS High School. Even before he graduated from there in 1918, he had started engineering classes at the University of Utah. He enrolled as a full-time student in the fall of 1918. While doing undergraduate work for a major in civil engineering, Adams supplemented the usual courses with work in geology and electrical engineering and some humanities classes. He was an honor student and member of engineering and honor societies, and he graduated second in his engineering class in 1922. A comment written on an exam by one of his instructors demonstrated the far-ranging interest that would mark his later career and often cause friction with those more inclined to the straight and narrow: "Your other teachers say you could be one of the best students in their class, but you seem to be satisfied to be only a fair student and spread out your energies over other things."
Adams entered Cornell University at Ithaca, New York, in 1922 for graduate studies in engineering. There he studied advanced experimental hydraulics, advanced hydraulic construction, hydraulic power construction—evidence of his fascination with water—and other engineering topics ranging from the economics of engineering design to the design and construction of roads, streets, and sanitary utilities. He was a McGraw Fellow in engineering and a member of the honorary research society Sigma Xi. His master's thesis was, characteristically, titled "Flow of Water in Small Open Flume," but his doctoral dissertation, "The Position of the Engineer in Economic Life," sounded an early note of the philosophy of social responsibility of engineers that Adams would espouse later in life.
After receiving his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1926, Adams took his first job as a practicing engineer in Utah. During his undergraduate years at the University of Utah, he had spent several summers working in the southwestern part of the state for the Department of Agriculture. Now he was once again with the USDA as a drainage assistant, traveling to various parts of the state and later to other states in the western U.S. During his travels he investigated drainage patterns for agricultural and non-agricultural lands. His final recommendations took the form of a report published in 1929, The Drainage of Irrigated Agricultural Lands in Utah.
By that time Adams had joined the faculty of the University of Utah. He started as an assistant professor of civil engineering in 1927, and by 1928 he was already in trouble with the university administration. In April 1930 a letter of admonition from R. B. Ketchum, dean of the School of Engineering, concluded on this ominous and prophetic note: "[Y]our future employment and progress in this department will depend entirely on your general attitude as to loyalty and attention to the work assigned to you." From that point it was mostly downhill for Adams, for he found it increasingly difficult to restrict himself to the set and regulated life of academia. Matters came to head in the fall of 1940 when he was hailed before the Board of Regents and told that he must choose between his position as secretary of the Utah Academy of Arts and Sciences or his faculty position—he could no longer hold both. In his typical acerbic style, Adams dismissed the assertion that he was not spending enough time at the university as "scurrilous accusations . . . backed by gossip, innuendos and threats in good 'axis' style." His outspoken nature and high opinion of his own achievements had long since cost him any allies among his colleagues, and his comparison of the Board of Regents to the Fascist governments then ruling Europe was the last straw. When the board demanded his resignation at stormy session in March 1941, his career as a professor was over. At loose ends, he tried to obtain a commission in the Navy during World War II; failing that, he worked for various wartime agencies. After the war be became a private consulting engineer.
It was shortly after Adams joined the faculty of the University of Utah that he showed his first sign of scientific interest in the Great Salt Lake. In a letter to D. A. Lyon, director of the Utah Engineering Experiment Station at the university, dated April 18, 1931, Adams set out a comprehensive program for surveying the lake:
And that was just what he did in another three pages of singlespaced text. Here was a proposal for the first serious, comprehensive study of the Great Salt Lake since the Stansbury survey more than eighty years before. Adams proceeded to gather equipment, student help, and resources and was ready to start on his survey when he heard that the Utah Engineering Council was studying the possibility of building dikes along the north and south ends of Antelope Island to create a freshwater embayment east of the island. In November 1931 he wrote to George Bacon, secretary of the council, outlining his proposed survey and suggesting that the two projects be coordinated. His suggestion was adopted.
As finally organized, the project was divided into two parts. The survey of the area to be diked for the freshwater lake was conducted by Sumner Margetts, another civil engineer from Salt Lake City. He would investigate the area east of Antelope Island, including the topography of the shores, the inflow of the Bear and Weber rivers, and other engineering aspects of the proposed embayment. Adams would, in his words, ''Control [the] Survey of the entire lake." He would supervise crews surveying the lake shores and taking detailed soundings and direct laboratory investigations of the chemistry of the lake, the mixing of the salt and fresh water, and other, more general topics. It is obvious from his correspondence that Adams considered himself in charge of the whole project, but this impression wasn't shared by others involved.
The survey was jointly funded by the state of Utah and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, a New Deal agency. The crew was recruited from among Adams's students and the ranks of the unemployed, of whom there were many in Salt Lake at the time. Before they could begin, however, a considerable amount of preparation had to be done. A large boat and several smaller craft were needed, as well as survey equipment such as transits, stadia rods, and chains. Camp equipment was also required, as the parties expected to be out on the lake and islands for a week or more at a time. Supplies of fresh water, gasoline, and food were to be shipped to points along the Union Pacific Railroad where it crossed the lake, to be picked up by the crew as needed.
Adams secured a twenty-four-foot cabin boat, named the Hydrographer, for the main support craft for the survey. The Hydrographer had an inboard marine engine and because of a hinged propellor shaft could operate in only eight inches of water, which turned out to be of great importance to the completion of the survey. The crew lived on board the boat. There was also a seven-foot dinghy with oars for getting into especially shallow places. Smaller craft were used by other parties, but the Hydrographer was the flagship of Adams's fleet.
Actual survey work on the lake began in October 1934. Adams stayed on shore for the most part, coordinating the other crews and overseeing the course of the work. The crew of the Hydrographer began at the southwest end of Stansbury Island and in the next four months worked all the way around the lake. On the first day the boat developed engine trouble, a harbinger of things to come. The survey was hampered from the start by the extremely low stage of water, the lowest recorded up to that time on the gauge at Saltair. Salt crystallized on the outside of the boat and fouled the cooling system of the engine. Mudbars, sandbars, and reefs of tufa—precipitated calcium carbonate — impeded progress, making access to some parts of the lake difficult and even impossible. East of Antelope Island, for instance, where Margetts's crew was working, was one vast mudflat. Finally, the weather began to turn toward winter, which heralded storms and rough sailing for the intrepid but inexperienced crew of the Hydrographer and the other survey parties. Several times the boats were driven ashore by severe wind and wave conditions, and on a couple of occasions they were almost wrecked on the leeward shores of the islands.
Through it all they persevered, however, and made good progress on the scientific work of the survey. By the first of November the crew of the Hydrographer had completed the survey of the west side of the lake up to the Lucin Cutoff and made the somewhat hazardous crossing under the railroad tracks to the north side of the lake. The railroad rested on pilings, and the Hydrographer's crew had a difficult time finding an opening that would permit the passage of a large craft. On November 10 Adams met the survey crew at Gunnison Island with some of his colleagues, and all climbed to the highest point of the island where they found a cairn erected in 1850 by Capt. Howard Stansbury.
After a month's work on the north side of the railroad trestle the crew crossed back under the pilings (making it only after three separate tries) and returned to the southern part of the lake. They continued along the south shore, pausing at most of the islands to set up triangulation points and explore their seldom-visited shores. Finally, at the end of December 1934, field work was completed and the crews disbanded. Calculations, laboratory work, and preparation of reports and maps took a good part of the next year. The proposed freshwater embayment on the east side of Antelope Island was declared to be completely feasible from an engineering standpoint, and bids were called for from several dredge and construction companies. Various Utah state agencies and industrial commissions predicted that the freshwater lake would make Utah one of the premier industrial centers of the country. Even before the surveys had begun, state officials had predicted great things would come of the project. At a dinner at the Alta Club in May 1933, R. A. Hart, of the Industrial Section, Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce, grandly declared:
Despite all the optimistic predictions of the Chamber of Commerce, however, nothing came of the plans for creating the freshwater lake. By the time the surveys were finished, America was beginning to pull out of the depression, and a sober look convinced state officials that the project was in reality out of their league. This is not to say that the project was not a sound scientific achievement. By making such a comprehensive and thorough survey, Adams and Margetts added immeasureably to the body of scientific knowledge about the Great Salt Lake. Later, in the 1950s, some of the data obtained by the surveys was used in the construction of the Willard Bay dikes and the Antelope Island causeway and in later engineering projects around the shore, such as the construction of the Salt Lake International Airport and Interstate 80 in the 1960s. The survey laid the groundwork for future scientific research efforts and provided data for government decisions concerning development of the lake shores. Thomas Adams had added his name to the list of scientists who had felt compelled to study Utah's inland sea.
In light of the sudden rise in lake levels in the 1980s, several facts about the proposed diking project become interesting. When solutions to the problem of lake flooding were being discussed by the Utah State Legislature, the diking project was revived as an alternative to the West Desert Pumping Project. Had the dikes been built in the 1930s the cost would have been about $1 million; the same plan fifty years later would cost over forty times that amount. Also, it is interesting to note that the tops of Adams's proposed dikes would have been at an elevation of 4210 feet, which at the time seemed ample to ensure containment of the water. In 1987, however, when the lake reached a level of 4211.89 feet, the tops of the dikes would have been two feet underwater.
Adams's interest in the Great Salt Lake was not limited to scientific matters. Even before the diking surveys were underway, he was instrumental in reviving the Great Salt Lake Yacht Club. The club, founded in the 1870s when the lake was in a high-water cycle, had languished in recent years. Largely due to Adams's persistence, it was re-formed in 1928 and incorporated in 1932, its purpose being, as stated in the by-laws:
Adams, predictably enough, was commodore.
The club was headquartered at first in the aging Saltair resort, where members installed change rooms for men and women, storage rooms, and a boat hoist. Although they were forced to use the old pier built by the Saltair Beach Company, Adams and the other club members had more ambitious plans. They convinced the Works Progress Administration to finance and build, at a cost of $175,000, a grand new boat harbor as a relief project. Construction began in November 1934 on a site about a mile east of Black Rock, a well-known lake landmark, and was mostly completed the following year.
The harbor was formed by a "tee" of uneven arms, thus creating two anchorages. The breakwater, constructed about 400 feet from the shore of the lake, was 850 feet long. Ironically, Adams's main concern at the time was that the lake would recede further and leave the harbor and yacht clubhouse high and dry, much as Saltair had been left when the lake began to recede in the late 1920s. This possibility, however, was provided for by means of a deepwater channel leading out into the lake. No thought was given to the possibility that the lake might rise and cover the breakwater, although that is precisely what happened when the lake rose in 1984. In Adams's time, with the lake at its lowest level in recorded history, that was deemed impossible. Situated on one arm of the breakwater was the clubhouse "at a point of great scenic beauty." In a pamphlet entitled "The Great Salt Lake Yacht Club: Advantages and Obligations of Membership," Adams extolled the clubhouse's other virtues.
Adams didn't stop with being commodore of the Yacht Club and chief exponent of the wonders of the Great Salt Lake. He compiled a file of information on the history of the lake and wrote numerous pamphlets about various aspects of the lake, including "A Compendium of Useful Information for Yachtsmen on Great Salt Lake" and the interestingly titled "Catechism on Boating on Great Salt Lake." He also wrote others detailing the advantages and disadvantages of inboard and outboard motor boats vs. sailboats and even designed a shallow-draft sloop specifically for sailing on the Great Salt Lake. He appeared on local radio shows to talk about the lake, the Yacht Club, and the Saltair resort. He became the lake's chief prophet (although even he never envisioned the high levels of recent years), promoter, and, in many ways, protector.
As he sailed on the lake and enjoyed the "great scenic beauty" from the deck of the clubhouse during the 1940s and 1950s, Adams's eye was continually drawn to the aging Saltair resort. This grand structure was a shell of its former glories. During its first decades the magnificent resort had drawn thousands of visitors from Salt Lake City and surrounding communities. When the lake began to drop, however, Saltair suffered. The resort's fortunes rose and fell with the lake, until finally in 1959 the owner deeded the massive structure to the state of Utah.
Adams, always one to espouse a cause, was quick to adopt the defense and restoration of the resort soon after it was donated to the state. As commodore of the Yacht Club he drummed up interest among the membership and created the Saltair Restoration Division of the club with himself as acting secretary. According to Adams, the Utah State Parks Commission had neglected to protect the property, ruthlessly stripped it of anything valuable, and allowed "marauders and vandals" to break windows, shoot holes in the roof, and generally wreak havoc. Furthermore, the commission "refused to consider several meritorious and inexpensive plans [i.e., Adams's plans] for operation which would have soon led to full-scale restoration, and attempted to substitute wholly impractical, extravagant plans" of their own. In a final indignity to the grand old resort, the Parks Commission "announced frequently that it would immediately proceed to demolish and obliterate the property."
It was too much for Adams to stand, and in 1963 he browbeat the state attorney general's office and the Parks Commission into selling the entire resort and property to the Yacht Club. This was necessary, he said in a parting shot, "to remove it from the sphere of political and bureaucratic interference and bungling." That done, Adams and the Yacht Club plunged into planning the restoration of the resort to its former glory. Pamphlets were written, meetings held, money raised, and plans laid out; and for a time it seemed as if the efforts to increase the public's interest in the structure and its past would succeed. Unfortunately, efforts to raise sufficient money for restoration of the deteriorated resort were unsuccessful and the plan was abandoned. All would have come to naught, in any event, for in November 1970 Saltair caught fire and was destroyed in a spectacular conflagration.
The Parks Commission's neglect of the resort was not the only threat, however. No sooner had Adams secured the sale of Saltair to the Yacht Club than Kennecott Copper announced plans to dump a billion cubic yards of tailings from their mills into the lake. This proposal threatened more than the resort; it endangered the very existence of Adams's beloved lake, and he jumped to its defense. In a statement to the Salt Lake County Commission, he raised his rallying cry:
Adams, other Members of the Yacht Club, and concerned citizens collected samples of the tailings for analysis. Despite Kennecott's blithe assurances, opponents of the proposal found that the tailings, far from being sand that would create new beaches, were more like silt that would create nasty, clinging mud. When washed up on shore and dried, they would be lifted by the strong winds around the lake and create clouds of dust. Samples of the tailings in plastic bags were stapled to a four-page fact sheet about the proposal and mailed all over the state. Under public scrutiny the plan did not look so good after all, and Kennecott backed down. It was Adams's last victory.
When Florence Bollschweiller and her husband became concerned over Adams's prolonged absence they drove out to Saltair to see if something had happened to him. The resort was so run down that a person could easily fall through the rotting boardwalks and be injured. Or Adams could have had car trouble or be stranded in a boat out on the lake. With the lake at its lowest recorded level and the resort closed, not many people went out there these days. The Bollschweillers were walking around the resort, calling his name, when suddenly they spotted him lying where he had fallen. They rushed over . . . but it was too late. Adams had apparently been stricken by a massive heart attack as he wandered around the resort and had died there alone.
When asked about the danger of dying alone in his beloved Yosemite Valley, the naturalist John Muir responded, "Such a grand burial place is not to be taken lightly." The same thought could be applied to Thomas Caldwell Adams. Throughout his long and sometimes controversial career in engineering, teaching, consulting, and fighting for causes public and private, Adams had always seemed to be the odd man out. He was always the loner campaigning for sometimes unpopular causes against what he considered to be mediocrity and narrowmindedness. Although he achieved high honors in his chosen profession and held offices in many distinguished societies, he never fit into the society of his birth. Always, he preferred the company of the wind, the waves, the vistas, and the smell of salt in the air as he sailed out on his beloved Great Salt Lake or worked, alone, within the crumbling ruin of Saltair. What better end, then, for a loner in love with a lake than to spend his last moments alone, with only the seagulls wheeling overhead, the aging pavilions, and the salt-tinged breezes to witness his departure from this life.
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