The Isaac Chase Mill, located In Liberty Park, remains as the only grist mill on its original site built by the early pioneers in Salt Lake City. It was also the first mill in the valley to separate the flour from the shorts and bran.
The property, with springs of water, was deeded to Isaac Chase in 1847. He soon purchased another fifteen acres and eventually owned more than one hundred acres in the area. In late 1847, he built an upright sawmill to cut lumber for his home and mill. In 1848, a small crackling mill was built. hen, in 1852, Isaac Chase supervised the building of the “Chase Mill” and installed the irons and millstones his daughter had “freighted” to Utah when the family emigrated to the valley in September 1847. William Weeks was the architect. Chase later built a home nearby, which is still standing.
In 1854 Brigham Young, who had married Mrs. Chase’s daughter by a previous marriage, bought into the mill. The mill’s flour became extremely important during the famine period of 1856-1857. In 1859 Brigham Young Jr. was assigned to manage the mill. By i860 Brigham Young purchased Chase’s stock and assumed complete control. Chase moved to his adobe cabin on State Street where he died a year later.
The mill continued to be used into the 1880’s. About 1882 the location was purchased from the Brigham Young estate by Salt Lake City for “Liberty Park.” The mill was used as a supply shed for a number of years. Then, in 1896, a drive was made to tear it down; however, through the effective efforts of Kate Chase, a grand-daughter, support was marshalled to save it.
In 1927, the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, began negotiations with the city for its use and preservation, which they obtained under lease in 1933. They have used it as a relic hall and now open it to the public during the summer months.
Interest has been expressed at various times to restore it to operating condition, which now may become a possibility.
This site was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 15, 1970 (#70000627)
Built c. 1880 of native rock, it served as a hotel for many skilled workers on the Manti Temple. It was acquired in 1897 by John D. T. McAllister, prominent Utah pioneer and churchman.
This house, built about 1858, is a significant example of one of the traditional building designs found in early Utah Vernacular architecture. Three of Manti’s most prominent families lived here. Orville Southerland Cox, the builder, was a leading Mormon colonizer. Jezreel Shoemaker who took over the house in 1861, was three times mayor of Manti. In 1879, Edward Parry, a stone mason from Wales, moved into the house to supervise the masonry work on the Manti Temple.
Located at 50 North 100 West in Manti, Utah – this home was added to the National Historic Register (#82004157) on August 4, 1982.
The Cox-Shoemaker-Parry house is an excellent example of early vernacular architecture in Utah. Constructed around 1858, the six-bay, double-pen plan is representative of the range of traditional building designs found in the state during the second half of the nineteenth century. The house also demonstrates the process by which older houses were remodeled to meet the demands of changing architectural fashion. The home is also significant as the residence of three of Manti’s most prominent families. The builder was Orville Southerland Cox, a leading colonizer of the Mormon West who personally figured in founding and settling a dozen towns. When Cox was called in 1861 by Church authorities to colonize the Big Muddy in Nevada, the home became the property of Jezreel Shoemaker. Shoemaker was a wealthy convert to the LDS Church who arrived in Manti in 1849 with the first contingent of pioneers. He participated on the first city council and later, in addition to his many ecclesiastical duties as a member of the local church hierarchy, served three terms as mayor of the city. Shoemaker died in 1879, just as work was commencing on the monumental temple which the Mormons were planning to build in Manti. Edward Parry, a stone mason from Wales, was called to Sanpete County to supervise the masonry work on the massive limestone edifice. In local tradition, the home is primarily associated with Edward Parry, the master mason of the Manti Temple.
Manti was settled by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, in 1849 as part of their larger colonization of much of the Intermountain West. Although the town was surveyed in 1850, tension between the newcomers and the native Utahns, the Sanpitch (Shoshone) Indians, confined most families to the protective forts which were constructed in the town during the first decade of settlement. 2 A large fort, enclosing nine city blocks was completed in 1854 and several families began building private residences within its stone walls. Orville Southerland Cox, one of the members of the first company to reach Manti, began hauling oolite limestone from the nearby quarry in 1858 for his two-story home.
Orville S. Cox was born in 1815 in Plymouth, New York. 4 A blacksmith by trade, Cox followed the westward moving frontier, landing by 1837 in the Mormon settlement near Lima, Illinois. Here he met and married a Mormon girl, Elvira P. Mills. In 1839, the young couple visited Nauvoo, where Orville was converted and baptized by the Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith. After the martyrdom of Smith and the expulsion of the Saints from Illinois, the Coxes followed the general exodus to Utah in 1847. Orville served two years as the presiding bishop of Bountiful, a town several miles north of Salt Lake City, before being sent in the pioneer party to Sanpete County in 1849. In the new community of Manti, Cox was primarily engaged as a blacksmith and lumber dealer as well as serving as counselor to Bishop John Lowery, Sr. By 1860, Orville Cox had entered into Mormon sanctioned polygamy and had three families. In 1861-1862, he moved his first wife, Elvira Mills, to the town of Fairview, Sanpete County. In 1864, Cox moved with his two other wives, Mary Alien and Eliza J. Losee, to the LDS settlement on the Big Muddy, in Nevada.5 In later years, the Coxes also participated in the cooperative, Utopian experiment at Orderville. Orville S. Cox died in 1888 at Fairview. When Orville Cox pulled out of Manti for Nevada, the big stone house was purchased by Jezreel Shoemaker.
Jezreel Shoemaker was born in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in 1796. Brought up along the frontier, Shoemaker was involved in farming and lumbering when he moved to Adams County, Illinois in 1828. Near Quincy, along the Mississippi, he homesteaded 160 acres and eventually built up the largest farm in the county. When he joined the LDS Church in the early 1840’s, he was one of the wealthiest men to affiliate with the young religious movement. When the church was forced from Illinois in 1846-1847, he sold or gave away his lands and migrated west to Salt Lake City. In 1849 he was called by Brigham Young to settle Manti in Sanpete County. Here he continued to prosper in the accumulation of material wealth as well as spiritual favor. Shoemaker served on the High Council of the local ecclesiastical ward and carried out three terms as mayor of Manti City. He died in 1879.
As the principal city in Sanpete County, Manti was selected in the late 1870’s as the site of a Mormon temple.8 Brigham Young, the church president, dedicated the land in 1877, shortly before his death. William Folsom from Salt Lake City was selected as temple architect in 1875 and work commenced in 1879. Since the monumental building was to be constructed of the local oolite limestone, a mason of considerable talent was required to supervise the work. Edward L. Parry, an immigrant from Wales, was brought into the project in the spring of 1877 as chief mason. Parry had been born in 1818 in Denbigshire, Wales, where he learned the mason’s trade from his father. He joined the LDS Church in 1853 and emigrated to Utah. During the late 1850’s he was instrumental in laying the foundations of the Salt Lake City Temple (not completed until 1893), but in 1862 he was sent south to St. George in Washington County. Here he built the city hall and courthouse and served as master mason on the St. George Tabernacle and temple. In 1877, Parry moved on, well-qualified, for his role in raising the Manti temple, a building considered by many to be the finest example of nineteenth century Mormon architecture. The temple was dedicated in 1888 and Parry then formed the company, E. L. Parry and Sons, specializing in stonework and marble cutting. Edward L. Parry died in 1902. The house remained in the Parry family until 1961.
Constructed in 1904, this ship-lap sided frame cross-wing house contributes to the historical nature of Spring City and retains excellent historical architectural integrity. Marsden Allred was a long-time occupant of the home.
Located at 310 South Main Street in Spring City, Utah
Oakwood is significant as the, finest remaining home of Utah’s famed Silver Queen, Susanna Emery-Holmes, a major figure in the state’s mining economy whose flamboyance caught arid still holds the public’s attention. The large house is a good example of an Eastlake Style summer “cottage”, the best surviving home of the era in the Mill Creek area. The site and house reflect Utah’s changing economy over a century and a quarter, illustrating changes in land use along Mill Creek from an area of water powered mills, to an isolated cluster of country homes for Salt Lake’s nouveau riche mining millionaires, to a suburb of Salt Lake City.
Located at 2610 E. Evergreen Avenue in Millcreek, Utah, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places (#79002503) on November 16, 1979.
Long before the Silver Queen entertained lavishly at Oakwood, John Neff built Utah’s first grist mill on this site. The Neff mill was first, of many flour, and sawmills to be located in this area. Between 1850 and 1880 more than 20 mills were in operation here, and the area was appropriately named, Mill Creek.
The former millpond and Mill Creek, running through the Oakwood estate, are visible reminders of the first chapter of the site’s history. The end of the nineteenth century saw a deemphasis of the early Mormon ideal of self-sufficiency as once-isolated Utah became integrated into the economy of the United States. & major cause of these socioeconomic changes was the development of a booming mining industry in the mountains around Salt Lake City. Camps located at Park City and Tintic, both now listed on the National Register of Historic Places, as well as Bingham Canyon, Alta, Mercur, and many smaller locations produced vast quantities of gold, silver, lead, copper, and dozens of trace minerals. By 1904, Utah was producing over twenty percent of the nation’s metal.
The changing economy meant the end of the water-powered mills along Mill Creek, and simultaneously brought into being a new leisure class of nouveau riche mining millionaires. Several of these saw the wooded dale along Mill Creek, far south of Salt Lake City, as an ideal place to build country homes to supplement their city palaces on South Temple Street (nominated to the Register).
In 1891, William H.H. Spafford, a wealthy mine owner and real estate magnate, purchased the mill site and machinery for $4500. He tore down part of the mill and remodeled it into a dance hall. Edward H. Air is bought the property in 1898, paying $8000 for the mill site, water power, and water rights. Airis was Secretary of the Mercur Gold Mining Company and had real estate holdings in Salt Lake City. The mill was completely destroyed some time between 1898 and 1905. Part of the mill burr was saved and set in a monument in front of the East Mill Creek Ward LDS Church, one half block east of the site. The mill pond, used for many years for LDS baptisms, was cemented in and still survives as the Oakwood estate’s swimming pool, located northeast of the house.
In 1904, the Neff mill site was purchased by Mrs. Susanna Bransford Emery-Holmes, the most famous of the new mining millionaires. Mrs. Holmes was known throughout he world as the Silver Queen, due to her first husband’s investments in the Silver King mine in Park City, Utah. It was Mrs. Holmes who built this house as her summer retreat and named it Oakwood.
Mrs. Holmes had humble beginnings in Richmond, Missouri, where she was born in 1859. Her family moved to the new mining camp at Park City, Utah, five years later. In 1884 she married the first of her four husbands, Albion B. Emery. He was an early speaker of the Utah House of Representatives and had nine holdings. At the time of his death in 1899, his mining stocks were declared worthless. Mrs. Emery refused to sell the stocks and parlayed her holdings into a huge fortune. She eventually owned an interest in every major mine in Utah. Because of her mining successes and her elegant arties she was given the title the “Silver Queen”.
In 1900 she married Col. Edwin B. Holmes, a millionaire from Detroit. The couple lived at the Amelia Palace (now demolished) on South Temple Street in Salt Lake City, the former home of one of Brigham Young’s wives. The Holmes were leaders of Salt Lake Society and entertained lavishly at the Amelia Palace and in Washington, D.C. They traveled around the world many times and were received by Pope Leo, Queen Victoria and Russian royalty.
At Oakwood the Silver Queen built this house to serve as her summer residence. It is a large frame Victorian home with Eastlake Style decoration, the finest home of its era in Mill Creek. The frame construction is not common in Utah, and the 1904 date makes it a very, late example of Eastlake architecture, popular in the 1880’s. The architecture may represent a desire to be old-fashioned and “countrified”, or it may indicate the house was an attempt to emulate the earlier homes of wealthy eastern capitalists.
The estate is heavily wooded and had beautifully landscaped grounds. Over the creek and irrigation canals Mrs. Holmes built many small wood bridges. A small house built behind the main house produced electricity for Oakwood until about 1927 when the power company lines reached the Mill Creek area. The “power house” now sits in a corner of the Oakwood estate. Oakwood was the site of many of the summer tea parties, luncheons and other entertainments that made the Silver Queen famous.
In 1919, the Silver Queen gave Oakwood to her nephew, Harold B. Lamb. Mr. Lamb’s mother died in childbirth and Mrs. Holmes treated him as her own son. Harold Lamb was married to Grizelle Houston of Salt Lake City. The couple had three children, James, Susan, and Harold, Jr. Harold B. Lamb, Jr. was a self-trained landscape architect who received his early experience working on the grounds of Oakwood. He worked with the noted Utah architectural firm of Walter E. Ware and Alberto O. Treganza creating the gardens surrounding Salt Lake’s finest homes, as well as the Salt Lake Golf Course. In 1925, Mr. Lamb died suddenly and Oakwood was divided among Mrs. Lamb and her children.
By the mid-twentieth century, the Mill Creek area was no longer an isolated group of country homes, opening the third chapter in Oakwood’s history. Salt Lake’s growing economy pushed residential development far south down the Salt Lake Valley, and Mill Creek became a suburb of the city. Dr. Harold Lamb, Jr. and his brother now live in modern homes on the edge of the Oakwood estate. The house and tree-shaded grounds have been kept largely intact by Mrs. William 0’Conner, widow of Harold Lamb, Sr., who lived there till her death in 1978. The brothers plan to restore the old estate and rent it as a single family residence.
The Lyceum Theater, later known as Victory Hall, was constructed in 1915 by John Baxter. The theater was used for school productions, plays, and convocations through the 1940s. Later the theater served as an LDS cultural and recreation center.
Located at 35 North Main Street in Spring City, Utah
Victory Hall in Spring City
The Lyceum Theater, later known as The Victory, was constructed about 1915 by John R. Baxter, Jr. (1888-1978). It featured silent films and later “talkies.” The “hall” was sold to the LDS Church and served as a recreational center until 1976 when the cultural hall addition to the LDS chapel was completed.*
William Sandstrom built this two-story frame and adobe commercial building in 1911. The first floor operated as a pool hall with a dance hall above. Later in the century, it was operated as a grocery store. It also served as the post office and, during the 1930s, had a WPA library on the upper floor. At one time it was occupied by the Dahl family.
Located at 37 N Main St in Spring City, Utah
William Sandstrom (1877-1911) built this two-story adobe-lined, wood frame commercial building about 1911. The first floor operated as a pool hall with a dance hall above. After Sandstrom’s death, James W. Blain ran a grocery store here and in the teens it was the post office. It also served as a bicycle shop, WPA library, and Dahl’s Grocery.*
The Hans Ottesen house, built c. 1865-1875, is one of 61 examples of the Scandinavian pair house type that have been recorded in Utah. Graphically documenting the migration of thousands of Scandinavian converts to Mormon Utah during the second half of the nineteenth century, the pair house type makes a significant contribution to the architectural history of the state. The Ottesen house is to be included in the thematic nomination, “Scandinavian-American Pair Houses,” listed in the National Register in 1983.
Hans Ottesen was born in Aalborg, Denmark, in 1834. The Ottesens were early converts to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons, and emigrated to Utah during the 1850s. Hans Ottesen was living in Manti as early as 1860, where he was a farmer and stonemason. Ottesen never married, and probably built this house sometime in the 1865-75 period. On November 2, 1884, Ottesen was brutally murdered by two men during a robbery attempt on the house. In 1886 the house passed to Otto Ottesen, the son of his brother, Jens Ottesen. Otto Ottesen was the sheriff in Manti for many years.
The Hans Ottesen house in Manti is a 1 1/2 story example of the pair house type. It has three rooms arranged axially under its gable roof. The center room was the kitchen, and the upstairs rooms were never finished. The house is constructed of the native oolite limestone in the Greek Revival style. The walls were coursed rubble, and the principal facade was originally plastered. Fine limestone sills and pedimented lintels embellish the windows. A bungalow-style porch was added to the front of the house during the 1920s, and the entire house was plastered in 1952. The chimney at the south end has also been removed. These additions do not significantly affect the historic integrity of the home, which remains a good example of the pair house type in Utah.
Built in 1934-35, the Stewart/Hewlett Ranch Dairy Barn is one of eight o significant buildings on Stewart Ranch, a well preserved turn-of-the-century “recreational ranch” that served for over 50 years as both a working ranch and a recreational summer retreat for its owners, prominent business and professional men from Salt Lake City. Stewart Ranch is probably the best preserved of the recreational ranches that were established on the western edge of the Uinta Mountains, a popular location for such ranches because of both its wilderness appeal and its proximity to Salt Lake City, only about sixty miles away. The ranch was established c.1902 by four Stewart brothers William M., Samuel W., Charles B., and Barnard J. who maintained their homes and professions in Salt Lake City while supervising and, to various degrees, participating in the operations of the ranch. The dairy barn was constructed during the ranch’s second phase of operation, which began in 1931 when the ranch was sold by the Stewarts to Lester Hewlett, son-in-law of Charles, and his brother, Vern. At that time the emphasis of the ranch was changed from cattle raising to dairying.
The notable buildings remaining on the ranch and when they were built:
Ethelbert White/William M. Stewart Ranch House (1890)
The Morelli House, relocated and restored by the Junior League of Las Vegas and placed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 3rd, 2012. (#11001086)
Located at 861 E. Bridger Ave in Las Vegas, Nevada
The Morelli House is a classic example of Las Vegas, mid-century, residential architecture. It was built in 1959 by the Sands Hotel orchestra leader, Antonio Morelli, and his wife Helen. Originally located at 52 Country Club Lane in the former Desert Inn Country Club Estates, now the Wynn Resort, the modernistic house then featured an open plan that integrated interior and exterior spaces, natural materials, and the latest innovative home appliances. In 2001, the Junior League of Las Vegas related the Morelli House to its present site and completed restoration in 2009.
