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Lewis Curry House
The Curry house, built in 1910, is locally significant because of its association with Lewis Curry, one of the founders and most influential citizens of Vernal, Utah. Vernal is the county seat of Uintah county, considered almost the last frontier in Utah. Located in eastern Utah (bordering Colorado), this county contains the Uintah-Ouray Indian religion science sculpture social/ humanitarian theater transportation other (specify) Reservation, which was established in 1861 and expanded in 1881. It was not until 1905 that the reservation was opened-up for white settlement, but Lewis Curry had migrated to the area in 1887. The city of Vernal became the county seat in 1893, and Lewis and Sally Curry’s broad business involvement, civic service, and cultural role made a substantial contribution to the developing town. The Curry house remains the only one standing from Vernal’s early decades of settlement which retains a degree of architectural integrity.
The Lewis Curry House is located at 189 South Vernal Avenue in Vernal, Utah and was added to the National Register of Historic Places (#82004166) on July 26, 1982.
Uintah County is part of the Uinta Basin of eastern Utah. Created in 1880, the county has been associated with the early nineteenth century fur trade, Indian reservations, and recent energy development with the oil industry. In 1861 the region was set apart as an Indian reservation by President Abraham Lincoln; thus, lands were closed for settlement, with their only use by whites being for stock raising. The Ouray Reservation, adjacent to the Uinta Reservation, was established in 1881.
Settlers had arrived in the Vernal area as early as 1878, but it was not until 1888, when some lands were segregated from the reservation, that Vernal Precinct was created. Vernal continued to grow and in 1893 became the seat of county government. After 1905, when lands in the reservation were opened to white settlement, the character of the county changed with further development of the region’s agriculture and mining industry (the mining of Gilsonite). Within this network, Vernal became the main commercial and governmental center.
About 1880 Oran Curry responded to a government notice and moved from Harrodsburg, Kentucky to set up a trading post on the Ouray Indian Reservation. Oran’s brother, Lewis, had been a banker with the First National Sank in Harrodsburg, but in 1887 he decided to move to Ouray to become Oran’s partner.
By 1909 discontent with the lending policies of the Bank of Vernal led several prominent Vernal businessmen to form a new bank, and Lewis Curry was invited to operate the bank. Their invitation, together with Curry’s later community involvement in Vernal, was significant. In a small pioneer town like Vernal, it was not surprising that the bank organizers were Mormon ecclesiastical leaders was well as community and business leaders. Mr. Curry was a Presbyterian who valued his privacy, yet he was on the first board of education in Uintah County, appointed by the county commission. He was a charter member and later president of the Vernal Commercial Club. Lewis Curry was also involved in a mill, a theatre, a furniture store and the trading post at Ouray. Responding to his prominence in the community, a large brick home was constructed for the Curry family in 1910.
In his role as Uintah County chairman of the War Finance Committee, he hosted and stumped with both Heber J. Grant, a Mormon apostle and soon after president of the church, and Governor Simon Bamberger. He was elected to the Utah State House of Representatives by a large majority. He would also have served as Utah Grand Master of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks had his health not failed in 1922.
After his passing, a large delegation from the Ute tribe came to visit. The group filled the living room, library, stairway and were standing on the sofa and chairs paying silent homage to the man who had lived and worked among them for many years.
Each year the Currys travelled to Chicago to attend the theatre; Lewis was a moving force in Vernal’s opera house and opera company. His love of poetry was shared by Heber J. Grant, who frequently visited and exchanged many volumes of poetry. The Currys also collected Indian artifacts.
After Lewis Curry’s death, his brother Matt married his widow. Matt followed his brother as state representative until his death in 1939. Sallie Curry then lived alone in the home for almost 23 years after Matt died. She was known for her spunk and for her grandmothering of neighbor children, as she oversaw the neighborhood from her rocker in the second-story bedroom. When she died in 1962 the home passed to her only son, David H. Curry, who lived there with his wife Enid. When the burden of maintaining the large home became troublesome to David, then in his eighties, he sold the house to H. Wallace and Nancy Goddard in 1979.
The Curry house is a large two-story brick structure. In plan it is in the form of two long, narrow rectangles joined on the long sides but offset to make projecting facades at the front and rear of the house. Because of its formal arrangement, such houses are often simply described as “T-plan” houses. The front porch was enclosed with brick in the 1920’s, and projects slightly forward from the body of the house. This enclosed porch is the only significant alteration of the home and does not detract from its historical integrity. The multiple hip roof has recently been re-covered with wood shingles. Largely devoid of ornament, the Curry house is a straight forward example of a house type which became extremely popular throughout Utah during the early twentieth century. The plain double-hung windows have rough-faced stone sills and lintels, and the projecting bay on the facade is rectangular in plan. The house is almost entirely unaltered from the earliest known photograph which was published in Wealth of the Uintah Basin in 1914.
From the porch oval glass doors enter both the “hall” (as the main parlor was called) and the dining room. An oak mantel and decorative fretwork were removed from the hall about the time central heating was added but have recently been restored to their original place. French doors separate the hall from the library with its large, one-story window bay.
A summer kitchen remains in the rear yard, with a brick root cellar underneath. A Mr. Cook was the main carpenter on the home in 1910. David Manwaring was the brick mason and used locally fired clay brick. Pine for the structure came from the mountains north of Vernal. The decorative oak staircase was ordered from Chicago, and was trimmed two feet in width by the carpenter while the Currys were away in the east.
