Years after Utah's Constitutional Convention, Louis Laville Coray, one of the delegates, was in Salt Lake City and decided he wanted to see the original copy again for old time's sake. His simple request uncovered a startling fact: No one then in state government knew where the original document was.
The revelation started Coray on a search back over 20 years to find the important piece of Utah's history.Coray later wrote that he had a desire to see the document over which he and others had labored for two months in 1895 "to determine how well it was being preserved. I knew how much the delegates thought of it. You see, it had to be referred to President Cleveland for his approval, and they were afraid to trust it to the mail for fear something might happen to it, so they appointed a committee to make a certified copy of the original document, which was forwarded to the president and approved."
When Coray, who had been appointed a delegate to the convention from Mona, asked then-Secretary of State Milton H. Welling if he could see the document, a confused Welling asked what document he meant.
"I mean the constitution of the state of Utah, written in longhand and signed by the delegates," Coray told him. Welling admitted he had never seen it. He volunteered to find Coray a typewritten copy.
"I can get one of them at any lawyer's office in the state," Coray responded. Welling promised to launch a search for the constitution, but a few days later, it had not turned up. The secretary referred Coray to H.E. Crockett, an earlier secretary of state. Crockett referred him to Leland M. Cummings, Supreme Court clerk and librarian. He referred him to former Gov. Heber M. Wells, who in turn referred him to J.T. Hammond, Utah's first secretary of state.
Hammond was able to tell Coray he had had a strongbox made for the original document and that he carried the key in his own pocket. Supreme Court justices used it to make minute comparisons between the original and the copy sent to Washington, he recalled. Throughout Utah's first statehood period, Hammond said, he had not trusted the manuscript to anyone but watched over it personally "with an eagle eye" to see that no alterations were made.
But that was all Hammond could tell Coray. His successor, Charles S. Tingey, to whom he entrusted the document, had been dead for 10 years. Coray was about to give up, concluding that "Utah had no constitution and that it was forever gone." He made his frustrations public.
Embarrassed state officials initiated an intense search for the document. Welling told Coray that if he found it, he would put it in a safe "locked so tight no one could see it." When Coray suggested that wasn't a good approach, Welling asked what Coray would do with it - should it ever turn up.
"I would put it in a marble case, covered with glass, in some conspicuous place in the Capitol where it could be seen but not handled," Coray responded.
Welling countered that "it was nonsense, a matter of sentiment and (Utah's constitution document) did not amount to any more than the Declaration of Independence and that there was nothing to THAT, aside from the signature of John Hancock," Coray wrote.
After two weeks of searching, Welling was going to call off the effort when his secretary, Frank Lees, asked permission to make one more try. Lees found the constitution concealed in a niche in the Capitol foundation above one of the safes, where it appeared to have been for the better part of 20 years.
Coray, determined it should not disappear again, asked Gov. George H. Dern and the Legislature to appropriate money to provide a safe resting place for the document. They refused, since the current session of the Legislature was to treat only "taxes and whiskey." But Dern did agree on his next trip to Washington D.C., to see what was being done to preserve the national Constitution.
Meanwhile, Coray solicited help from prominent legislators. A bill was passed in January 1939, despite the sentiment of some senators that the Utah constitution was not worth preserving.
Lorenzo D. Young designed the marble case that became a repository for the constitution. Coray could rest at last, with the document safely on display in the Capitol rotunda in a place "where (he wrote) we hope it will remain for 500,000 years." The document now on display for thousands of Capitol visitors is, however, a replica. The Utah State Archives has responsibility for the original, which has been stored in a safe.