Nelson Wheeler Whipple House

This substantial two-story adobe house was built in 1854 by Nelson Wheeler Whipple at a cost of approximately $2,000. Whipple was a Mormon immigrant from New York who arrived in Salt Lake City in 1850. During his long career in Utah he worked as a policeman, gunsmith, carpenter, and cabinet maker. He also operated a successful shingle mill, supplying shingles for the Tabernacle and many other public and ecclesiastical structures. His detailed journals provide excellent insight into the early settlement of the valley and were serialized in the 1930s in the Improvement Era, an LDS church publication.

A central-passage type house, the Nelson Wheeler Whipple House has careful, classically-inspired details in the roof cornice and frieze, window hoods, and the main door with sidelights. It is one of the oldest surviving residences in the Salt Lake Valley. Since its construction was carefully documented by Whipple, it is especially valuable as a “textbook” of early Utah building practices.

564 West 400 North in Salt Lake City, Utah.

• mentioned in Salt Lake Northwest Historic District:
  There are 742 contributing single-family dwellings located within the Salt Lake City Northwest Historic District, only eleven of which have been identified as having been built before 1879. However, historical documents suggest the actual number is much higher. Unfortunately additions, alterations, and the general lack of documentation makes it difficult to come up with an exact number. The eleven also include the district’s two properties previously listed on the National Register: the Nelson Wheeler Whipple House at 564 West 400 North (built in 1854 and listed in 1979), and the Thomas and Mary Hepworth House at 725 West 200 North (built in 1877 and listed on April 21, 2000).
  
  and again:
  The majority of these houses were single-story, one or two-room (single cell and hall-parlor) dwellings, which were plastered as soon as the owner had the resources. The Nelson Wheeler Whipple House, an eight room, two-story house built in 1854, was one of the few exceptions. Whipple, who immigrated to Utah in 1850, had various occupations (policeman, gunsmith, carpenter, cabinet maker and superintendent of the Municipal Bath House), but is best known for his lumber business and shingle mill. The house at 564 West 400 North (within the 19th Ward boundaries) was home to his entire family: himself, three wives and seventeen children. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.