Day 47, Saturday April 13, 2024: Brigham City, Utah to Salt Lake City, Utah
- Mark Carl Rom
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
Carnegie libraries visited: Brigham City, and Chapman Branch (Salt Lake City), Utah
Days sober: 296
My car is a mess. I’m glad that I’m not. Goldfinger’s interior “cargo space” (the area behind the front seat) is 73.3 cubic feet, so roughly six feet long, four feet wide, and three feet tall. It’s the size of about two and a third coffins. I continue to be amazed at how much stuff I can misplace and how disorganized my car is, although I understand the former is closely related to the latter. I was slow getting up and going, despite (because?) getting more than nine hours of sleep.
Ugh. My milk container had leaked for reasons unknown, and the yogurt was warm. My refrigerator only runs while the car is on, but it usually holds the cool overnight. This time it didn’t. Further testing revealed that my car’s utility port was not working, so I think my refrigerator wasn’t running yesterday. I’ll need to get this fixed. I need my dairy products.
If heaven is a well-ordered city, with majestic public buildings and a Rocky Mountain backdrop, Brigham City is heavenly. If you stand in the middle of Main Street, looking one way you’ll see the Box Elder Tabernacle, the monumental late 1800s Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Directly across the street is the equally regal Brigham City Temple. Walk a couple of blocks north and you’ll pass the Capitol Theater, the Idle Isle Candy Store, and the Brigham City Public Library.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has had an extraordinary impact on Utah’s history, even if today a majority of its population do not identify as adherents. It is unambiguously “pro-archive,” as the day the church was organized in the 1830s founder Joseph Smith received a revelation from the Lord ““Behold, there shall be a record kept among you.” Its Church History Library and Family History Library in Salt Lake City have a vast collection of material on the church and its members.
Whatever the role of women within the Church – I’m neither qualified nor eager to speak on this topic – they were consequential in the secular world. In 1869 women in the Utah territory received the right to vote, and Seraph Young, the niece of Brigham Young, was the first woman to vote under an equal suffrage law in the United States. (In 1887, the U.S. Congress disenfranchised Utah in an attempt to politically punish the Church.) In 1873, Brigham Young’s wife Anna Eliza Young divorced him on the grounds of “neglect, cruel treatment, and deserting herself and her children in the harsh conditions of frontier Utah.” In the late 1800s, Utah had the most liberal divorce laws in the country, with any woman insisting on a divorce getting one.
Still, women were not always the dominant actors in bringing libraries to the state. Mansfield Snow, the editor of the Brigham City Bugler, the local rag (if a bugle can also be a rag), proposed building a library in 1897, and four local LDS wards set about getting one. Church youth leaders Oleen Stohl and Minnie Snow (Mansfield’s daughter) were assigned to lead the movement, and by 1898 they had raised enough money to build a small frame building to hold the 300 books that had been collected. John Baird served as the first librarian. The library did not have a female librarian until 1912, when Ida Young was hired – the last hire by church leaders.
Miss Young, who had been trained as a librarian at the University of Utah, gave all the books a Dewey Decimal System number and ran the small library as a business. She also trained two assistants, Elvira Hess and Henrietta Bott, who took over when Young left in 1914. Miss Bott herself had the “arduous task” of moving all the books out of the library into storage when the new Carnegie library was being built, and then moving them all into the new library when it was finished in 1915.
In seeking a Carnegie grant, the library board was blunt in its request: “Dear Mr. Carnegie, Brigham City wants a Twenty Thousand Dollar Library Building.” Bertram, in response, offered $12,500 and that’s how much the town received.
LaPreal Wight held the longest tenure as librarian, leading it for twenty-seven years from 1947 until her retirement in 1974. A tribute written by a cousin after her death, states that
She was, during most of my youth, the librarian at our local Carnegie Library, and when we went to the library, [we] were always given special treatment, at least that was the feeling we had. Her kindness, her expertise and guidance, her love, really, was an important influence in my early education in general, but especially she helped me, and surely many others, love and appreciate books and literature. LaPreal was a gracious, cultured and educated lady, and we loved and respected her as such…
On [one] trip, I remember she revealed to us "the truth" about Great-great grandfather Wight's exodus to Alberta, Canada. Yes, we knew that he went North with the younger polygamist wife and left our grandmother, crippled from her participation in the Willy Handcart Company, in Brigham City, but LaPreal told and explained it in such a way that there was reason, preparation, and even kindness in the history.
Since Wight’s retirement, the library has been led by Karen Ann Howard, Mary Hansen, Sue Hill, and Elizabeth Schow.
The Box Elder Tabernacle (Box Elder was the original name of Brigham City) and the Brigham City Temple face each other across Main Street. LDS temples are not open on Sunday, so the faithful attend services at their local chapel. Temples are special places for worship, mainly used for special ceremonies. They are not open to the public after they are consecrated. A tabernacle, in contrast, is a multipurpose building used for conferences and community services.
When I visited, the elegant Box City Tabernacle was locked tight. It was certainly worth admiring, a stone and brick gothic building with sixteen graceful white pinnacles. The Temple was open, so in I walked. I was greeted by three angels, dressed in white more Elvis Presley than Tom Wolfe, in the pure white foyer. The angels – two men in white hair and a woman in blonde bouffant – greeted me warmly. They advised me that I could not tour the building, but that I was in luck: a temple in nearby Taylorsville had not yet been consecrated and so was open to the public today. A massive traffic jam deterred me from attending. A signal, perhaps?
The Chapman Branch of the Salt Lake City library is named after the first librarian in Salt Lake City, Annie E. Chapman, who served for four years until her death in 1903 at age 61. Since then, the city has tended to alternate between periods of female and male leadership, with women heading the library system from 1897 to 1959, then men from 1960 to 1995, women from 1996 to 2013, and then men again from 2013 to the present. The longest serving librarian has been Joanna H. Sprague, who led the system for 37 years.
Annie E. Chapman, 1897–1903
Joanna H. Sprague, 1903-1940
Julie T. Lynch, 1940–1943
Ethel E. Holmes, 1943–1952
Margaret E. Block, 1952–1959
Robert E. Thomas, 1960–1969
Richard J. Rademacher, 1969–1976
J. Dennis Day, 1976–1995
Nancy Tessman, 1996–2007
Beth Elder, 2008–2011
Linda Hamilton, 2011–2013
John Spears, 2013–2016
Peter Bromberg, 2016–2021
Noah Baskett, 2024–
The Carnegie library in Salt Lake City, one of 23 built in Utah and one of the ten still operating as libraries, opened in 1918, long after the town first asked for one in 1899, during the Annie Chapman years.
In 1872, a small group of Mormon women in Salt Lake City banded together to form the Ladies Library Association and, with 400 books that they had gathered, they opened a reading room in the First National Bank building. Their efforts were short lived and the room closed after only four years, with the books put in storage. In 1877, the Masonic Order opened its own public library, which by 1891 had grown to 10,000 volumes. Lacking financial support, the Masons donated their books to the newly organized Pioneer Library Association. What happened during the following six years is unknown to me, although in 1898 these books were given to the Free Public Library of Salt Lake City, as the new state of Utah had enacted legislation calling for the establishment of public libraries. Annie Chapman, who had been the librarian of the Pioneer Library Association, continued on as the director of the new public library.
Even though the Carnegie library did not come into being until 1918, as early as 1899 townsfolk had written to Carnegie asking for one. The earliest letter in the Carnegie archives came from a John Eston (perhaps; his signature is unclear) who sought it to keep the public “safe from the perversion” of the “darkness of Mormonism.” William McKay, another citizen “not connected with the library in any official capacity” wrote Carnegie around the same time seeking a library for the more conventional reason that “we are so sadly deficient in all that aids or makes for intelligent public opinion or education.” Nothing apparently came from these requests, as no reply from Bertram appears in the archives.
In 1915, librarian Joanna Sprague resumed the inquiries. Bertram replied, in a change of pace, to “Dear Madam” and the correspondence proceeded apace, with Bertram offering that, if the Mayor or other city officials made the request, Carnegie would give it due consideration. They did, he did, and the library was funded.
I arrived in Salt Lake City in time to attend a recovery meeting at Fit to Recover. FtR was started by a group of recovering alcoholics who wanted “to support each other in sobriety through exercise and fellowship” whose “four pillars” are “Exercise, Nutrition, Creative Expression, and Community Service.” The meeting was held inside a cavernous gym, and it was a raucous celebration, which flowed out into an area that could have been a beer garden, minus the beer.
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