UTAH STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Segregating Sanitation in Salt Lake City, 1870-1915 BY BEN CATER
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ike many American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Salt Lake City experienced rising morbidity rates from filth-related diseases. Urban and industrial growth, increased pollution, and the lack of effective therapeutics contributed to human suffering, sickness, and death. Sanitation laws existed, including those for disposing of waste and barring animals from grazing in public watersheds, but enforcing them remained difficult, particularly in a farming community rapidly entering the urban-industrial age. Since curbside ditches supplied water for cooking and bathing, residents were appalled at the sight of garbage “choking and obstructing the ditches and defiling the water.” Ditches produced noxious gasses, or “miasmas” thought to cause disease, and they harbored deadly microbes that contributed to diarrhea, cholera, typhoid A Salt Lake City home at the fever, and diphtheria. As water-borne illness historic address of 130 North and “dominated the health picture,” recalled the 200 West. As this 1915 image physician Ralph T. Richards, citizens demonstrates, many residents of the Westside faced difficult demanded sanitary improvements.1 This article argues that public health sanitary conditions. Ben Cater, PhD, earned his doctorate in history at the University of Utah in 2012. Currently he serves as an assistant professor of history at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Massachusetts. He wishes to thank his colleagues, students, and family for their encouragement and support.
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