Utah Stories from the Beehive Archive

Browse Items (91 total)

  • Tags: County: Salt Lake

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Stereotyped as dirty and dangerous, Salt Lake City’s Westside was the last to receive sanitation improvements. The city’s slow response to public health concerns helped make the area’s bad reputation worse. Learn more about how public sewer…

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In the late 19th century, Black settlers in the Salt Lake Valley used the waters of Millcreek Canyon to create a thriving community of their own. Where water is, people gather. This was true for Indigenous peoples of Utah, as well as Mormon colonists…

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Frequent droughts and a growing population continue to raise the stakes for water access in Utah. Learn about a drawn-out conflict over water in Salt Lake City that shows how tensions between agricultural and municipal water users are hardly new. In…

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In the late 19th century, a Utah newspaper announced that the two whales swimming in Utah’s Great Salt Lake had added children to their family. Was this a scientific reality, or just a whale of a tale? In 1888, the Salt Lake Herald-Republican…

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Here in arid Utah, our terminal lakes are so sensitive that even small-scale nineteenth-century agriculture produced measurable changes. Find out how early geologist Grove Karl Gilbert calculated this delicate balance. Although short on rainfall,…

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You have probably walked over a buried creek many times and not realized it. Underneath the streets of Salt Lake Valley are seven creeks flowing from the Wasatch Mountains. What are the costs of hiding this water? In 1852, land surveyor and explorer…

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Like most Utah communities in the early 20th Century, Salt Lake City’s Sugar House neighborhood lacked a public swimming pool. What’s a kid to do on a scorching summer day? Well, use the pond on the grounds of the nearby Utah State Prison, of…

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The Great Saltair Resort is often remembered for its glory days as a dance hall and amusement park. But it was constantly at war with the harsh, saline environment that gave it its claim to fame. In 1893, the LDS Church built the Great Saltair…

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Great Salt Lake is the natural wonder that gave Utah’s capital city its name. Yet, it is cut in half, deprived of water, and shrinking before our very eyes. Learn about the water story of our beloved Great Salt Lake – and the warning it…

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Have you ever looked out over Great Salt Lake and thought, “I’d really like to grow oysters there?” You probably haven’t. Learn how Utahns have tried — and failed — to cultivate this unlikely product. The Mountain West is not known for…

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In the mid-nineteen eighties, global pressure was mounting against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Learn how persistent student activists at the University of Utah forced their campus to confront its connections to an oppressive regime half a…

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This week, learn how the most famous American theater actress of the early 20th Century used gender-bending roles to push the early boundaries of a queer aesthetic.Salt Lake City native Maude Adams was the highest paid and most beloved American…

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Did you know that before Prohibition, Utah was home to fifteen breweries? Some were among the biggest and best in the West. Learn about Utah’s early beer brewers and their specialized craft.Ask any beer brewer – or any beer connoisseur – and…

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Long work hours and blurry lines between personal and professional lives is hardly a modern dilemma. But imagine if your employer controlled not just your hours and your paycheck, but where you spent your off hours and how you spent your money.…

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Learn how one family went literally from “bags to riches” and how a son honored his mother’s legacy by naming after her one of Salt Lake’s most noted buildings.When Izzi Wagner lost his father, he was just sixteen. Life was hard for his…

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The Mexican Mural Renaissance is one of the most famous art movements in modern history. Learn how a blond-haired, blued-eyed, 20-year-old from Salt Lake City became a Mexican Muralist.  In 1924, Utah judge Edward Higgins put his twenty-year-old…

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In 1914, the state of Utah put labor activist Joe Hill on trial for murder in a case that remains controversial to this day. Learn about Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the woman who fought hard for Hill’s pardon.When the state of Utah sentenced labor…

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Rafael Lopez came to Utah to help break a strike up in Bingham Canyon in 1912. A year later, he was a fugitive ­– and a folk hero.When Greek miners went out on strike in 1912, the Utah Copper Company turned to Mexican labor to keep production…

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“Extra! Extra! Read All About It!” was a common cry from boys and girls peddling newspapers on city corners all across America. Learn about the newsboys who filled the streets of Salt Lake City.Child labor played a big role in Utah’s turn of…

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“Big Bill” Haywood was a legendary Utah labor leader, whose ashes were buried in the Kremlin Wall.In February 1869, William D. Haywood was born in Salt Lake City into a working class family.  He would grow up to become “Big Bill” Haywood,…
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