From the freeway, it looks like just another place now. You've got your 10-plex cinemas, two frozen yogurt shops and a Toys R Us. But don't let that fool you, says Lynne Olson. Sugar House is full of memories.
Olson, a volunteer who works with KOPE (Kids Organized to Protect the Environment) at Hawthorne Elementary School, hopes to compile those memories into an oral history of Sugar House - a history she hopes will "reconstruct a sense of identity" in the community.Olson hopes ultimately to use those memories to help protect an oasis of trees and creek, known as Hidden Hollow, in the heart of Sugar House (see related story).
With the help of Sprague Library manager Anne Menzies, Olson organized two "history socials" this summer, where long-time residents like Ward Reed gathered to reminisce about the way things used to be.
It turns out that the history of Sugar House, as recently as 40 or 50 years ago, is full of gypsies and sheep and convicts and a woman, or maybe several women, known as Crazy Mary.
Ward Reed was born on Blaine Avenue in the same house he lives in now. The house was designed by Truman O. Angell, whose more famous architectural triumph was the Salt Lake Temple.
When Reed was a little boy in Sugar House in the late 1930s and early '40s, the place - despite all the industries and furniture stores it was home to - still had a rural feel to it. There were sheep, chickens, cows and vacant lots. Children played in Hidden Hollow and swam in the pool fed by the cold water of Parley's Creek.
Reed's father ran his sheep twice a year from the top of Parleys Canyon to Grantsville, stopping midway to camp overnight at Hidden Hollow, which extended then up to 1700 East, along the wall of the state prison.
Like other longtime residents, Reed remembers seeing gypsies coming through the hollow each year, too.
When he was in grade school, just as World War II was ending, Reed had a Saturday morning routine that took him past the landmarks of Sugar House. Like others of his generation, he speaks of these landmarks with fondness, as if they were old friends.
First stop was the Red Wing Shoe Store, where he would X-ray his feet. Then on to Walgreen's for a root beer float, then Pehrson's Hardware, the Sprague Library, and Poll and Austin, where he watched the men repair radios. On the way back from his piano lesson he sometimes took in a Flash Gordon serial at the Marlo Theatre.
His parents warned him never to go near a place called Crazy Mary's, which he remembers as a tar paper and wood shack near what is now Sugar House Park. "Paul Van Dam (now Utah's attorney general) and I used to crawl around there and sit in the bushes, but we'd only go near her house."
Apparently there were two or maybe even three women known as Crazy Mary. The more famous was a woman who lived in a former inn and brewery in Parley's Hollow, just west of "suicide rock" at the base of Parleys Canyon.
"Kids would come and torment her all the time," remembers Florence Youngberg, author of "Parley's Hollow: Gateway to the Valley."
According to Youngberg, Crazy Mary was actually Loretta Dudler Schaer, whose father had built the brewery in 1864. After she married, Schaer lived in the house with her husband and two sons. When one of those sons died as a toddler, according to the story, Schaer went into a severe depression.
Because the house was so isolated and her behavior apparently erratic, legends grew up around "Crazy Mary." Adele Weiler of the Heritage Foundation remembers going up to Crazy Mary's as a teenager in the early '50s. "You could see her playing a piano buried in concrete in her front room. She would play from midnight till two in the morning."
In 1952 the house burned down to its stone foundation, apparently the result of arson. You can find remnants of the stone if you hike down into the hollow from Tanner Park.
Nothing at all is left of the area's two most famous buildings. The state prison, which sat for nearly a century at the site now occupied by Highland High School, was torn down in the 1950s. Also long gone is the sugar mill, at the corner of what is now 2100 South and 1100 East, that gave Sugar House its name.
Although Brigham Young and the early settlers had high hopes for the sugar mill - the first one to be built in the United States - things went sour from the start.
The refining equipment had to be shipped from France, then hauled by ox cart across the western plains. Not all of the parts arrived, and it turned out that the water supply from Parley's Creek was insufficient. And in the end the best the mill could produce was a thick, unpalatable molasses.
Aside from accounts of Sugar House's early history, not much has been written about the area, according to Sprague Library's Anne Menzies. If the library can track down enough memories from area residents, Menzies is hoping to devote a small section of the library to Sugar House history.
Anyone willing to contribute information or old photos can contact Menzies at 524-8280.