Salt Lake City in 1880: A Census Profile

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 24, 1956, Nos. 1-4

SALT LAKE CITY IN 1880:A CENSUS PROFILE

BY WILLIAM MULDER

READING United States Census reports is not exactly my idea of summer entertainment, but one of these fat and forbidding volumes caught my eye recently: a compilation of the Tenth Census (1880) called Social Statistics of Cities. "Utah Territory—Salt Lake City" is the last entry. Moved by a curiosity about the past which always seems keener in July (the spirit of '47, I suspect), I read the description and found the vital statistics of seventy-five years ago still vital. One line sounded like prophecy: "Of late years the houses have crept up the foot of the spur on to the bench, as it is called." Today the Ensign Flats development rises high above the old watermark.

The young and growing city had its problems, some of them painfully familiar: "Salt Lake City has no sewers, nor has it yet adopted any plans looking to the early construction of sewers." Outside the business center "the houses are detached" and "the sanitary regulations of compactly built cities have not, to the present time, been found necessary here"—a euphemistic way of saying plenty of outhouses dotted the landscape.

What distinguished the city's sanitary arrangements were the "irrigation water-channels that run through all the streets." Property owners were enforced by municipal authority to keep the channels cleaned out. And the city council had a right to levy a ditch and water control tax, no doubt needed in a day when canyon streams still freely traversed the town. Irrigation water, by the way, gave Salt Lake City a municipal office peculiar to itself—the water-master, "who regulates and distributes the water flowing into the city and adjudicates difficulties in the distribution of the supply in the several wards."

In 1880 the city's inhabitants numbered 20,768, including "179 colored, 82 Chinese, and 11 Indians." The population had nearly doubled since the previous census. There were nearly 1,000 more females than males (10,815 as against 9,953). Over a third of the residents were foreign-born—7,673 to be exact, most of them from Scandinavia and the British Isles.

Described, not inaptly, as an irregular and broadfaced "L" hugging the western spur of the "Wahsatch," the city was divided into five municipal wards and subdivided into twentyone "ecclesiastical or bishop's wards." "Localities are better known by the ecclesiastical than by the municipal title." In town, each bishop's ward was a uniform square of nine blocks; outlying wards were irregular and larger. Below Ninth South was farmland where the soil was "black loam of great fertility." At the city's northern border from the mountain spur emerged a warm spring with a temperature of 100 degrees Fahrenheit considered therapeutic, site of the Warm Springs Bath. One and a half miles to the northwest were still hotter springs, temperature 128 degrees, which formed Hot Springs Lake, a shallow lake covering two square miles extending from the base of the mountains to the Jordan River.

The city's trees were already "rendering it a conspicuous contrast with the surrounding country." Gaslights illuminated the central blocks but East Temple Street (now Main Street) and some of the stores used "several electric lamps, on the Brush system."

Salt Lake City, known until 1868 officially as Great Salt Lake City, was not yet calling itself the heart of the scenic West, but economically it was a regional capital, the hub of supply for a wide agricultural and mining domain, a fact made graphic by the railroad lines radiating from it like so many spokes: the Utah Central to Ogden, connecting there with the Central Pacific to San Francisco, the Union Pacific to Omaha, and the Utah Northern into Idaho; the Utah Western to a terminus thirtyseven miles distant; the Utah Southern to Frisco, Utah. The tourists were still to come, but the completion of the railroad in 1869 had brought an influx of mining and business men. And Mormon immigrants to the territory, from the States, from Europe, from Australia, numbering one thousand to six thousand a year, always came to the city first.

By 1880 Salt Lake had suffered its calamities: three floods (1850, '53, '62), three prolonged periods of drouth (1848, '55, '79), and seven onslaughts from destructive insects (1848, '54, '55, '67, '68, 70, 73). And it had seen a good deal of history: it outlived the state that incorporated it, the provisional State of Deseret,. which was succeeded by the territory of Utah in 1851. For a time Salt Lake had yielded the seat of government to Fillmore, Millard County, which was nearer the geographical center of the territory, but the capital was moved back after five years, in 1856, to be at the center of the population, if not the map. Salt Lake had once been completely deserted in a mass evacuation known as the "Move South," when in 1858 Brigham Young hoped to forestall the occupation of the city by Johnston's Army, sent to quell an alleged "Mormon rebellion."

Economically, too, the city by 1880 had had its ups and downs. Old settlers remembered a freak flush time—the passage through the city of thousands of gold-seekers in 1848-50 who, stripping for the race to the coast, eagerly bartered away their goods, supplying Salt Lake, at a cost below that in the Atlantic states, with many needed articles as they disposed of teams, wagons, clothing, and oxen to obtain pack-horses or mules to make better time. The occasional arrival of gold dust from California helped business too. But provisions went soaring. In the early summer of 1850, flour sold for $1.00 a pound, even bringing $25.00 per 100 after harvest time. The city's five mills were besieged by emigrants begging for enough flour to carry them through to the new El Dorado.

The evacuation of Salt Lake City in 1858 meant for the merchants "a special business depression," of course, but the location of the soldiers, several thousand of them, about forty miles southwest of the city at what was first Camp Floyd and later Fort Crittenden, made business lively through the demand for supplies and later, with the breaking up of the encampment in 1861, through the forced sale of large amounts of provisions and equipment.

The development of gold mines in Montana and Idaho in 1863 and the years following increased business and raised prices in the city, wheat selling for $5.00 or $6.00 a bushel, and other things in proportion.

The construction of the Union and Central Pacific railroads, completed in 1869, followed closely by the discovery and development of valuable silver and lead mines in the territory, introduced a "notable era" of prosperity. Real estate in the city went up to "almost fabulous prices." Shades of the present! But the city suffered with the rest of the country during the financial depression of 1873-79.

Merchants doing business in the more hopeful days of 1880 remembered too that before railroad days every winter brought Salt Lake City a business depression, a cycle inherent in frontier conditions. Ox teams, which brought the merchandise from the Missouri River, 1,000 miles to the east, could travel only in the summer. Most of the staples were generally sold out by Christmas or soon after, leaving the market bare until fresh supplies came through the next summer.

A table on "Manufactures" in the special census report of 1880 may be translated into an interesting image of the city's work life: of 166 establishments classified as "mechanical and manufacturing industries," boots and shoes led all die rest with 19, followed by blacksmithing with 12, and saddlery and harness with 11. It was a horse and buggy era all right. Salt Lake supported five carriage- and wagon-making shops. Printing and publishing, the intelligentsia will please note, represented the largest capitalization ($154,660.00), followed by malt liquors ($100,500.00, no comment). Oddly enough, "mechanical dentistry" qualified as an industry; Salt Lake had five such establishments.

Together, the city's "manufactures" employed 696 male hands above 16 years of age, 114 female above 15, and 118 children and youths. Their average wage? $458.55 a year.

In 1880 things were looking up for Salt Lake City, long the "half-way house in the wilderness" and always a national attraction: "The present year, owing to the general revival of business throughout the country, with the projection or extension of several railroads in the vicinity, as well as the prospects of a bountiful harvest, promises to be very prosperous."

Maybe that was the year your granddad made his fortune.