After the dreadful trek over prairie and desert, this idyllic city looked to me like an enchanting paradise. The houses, mostly of adobe, were almost all painted in bright colors. The gardens were enclosed with high walls of mortared fieldstone, above which . . . fruit trees rose in full-bloom splendor. -- Theodor Kirchhoff, a German traveler, after an 1867 visit to Great Salt Lake City
"Do you have ghosts?" a visitor from California asked the guide leading an afternoon tour through Brigham Young's Beehive House. "You know, are there spirits here?"Not that she knew of, the guide replied.
But really there are.
The Beehive House, its time-capsule furnishings, the efficient Lion House to the west and the church and territorial offices between them are, in a way, apparitions.
Of Brigham Young's pioneer homestead, "They're all that's left," along with the most recent incarnation of Eagle Gate, the small family cemetery up the hill and a little bit of the wall that enclosed it all, said Jenny Lund, curator of education for the nearby LDS Museum of Church History and Art.
Salt Lake City long ago en- gulfed the Young family's estate, but a free tour of the historic Beehive House and a midtown walk can give turn-of-the-millennium strollers an idea of the farm's extent and what life might have been like there 125 to 150 years ago.
The Museum of Church History and Art is an excellent place to start. There, as well as on Temple Square, at the Beehive House and a few other locations, visitors can pick up a brochure, "This Is the Place: A Two-Block Walking Tour," that includes a map and points out 19 LDS- and pioneer-related sites and attractions.
Scattered museum displays spotlight antique belongings of "the Mormon Moses," who led his people to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847. Brigham Young was a carpenter, so we get a glimpse of his tools, his lathe and a chair he made in the 1830s. In a more formal setting are the church leader's inkwell, a desk with an array of pigeonholes and the document appointing him governor of Utah territory.
Still other exhibits allow us to imaginatively journey back to that Great Salt Lake City farm of his.
On the second level is Danquart Anton Weggeland's painting of "Brigham Young's Backyard." A 1915 copy of the artist's folk-art 1868 original, this "emphasizes not the grandeur of the Beehive House and the Lion House, but rather the day-to-day activities of 'Brother Brigham's' farm," notes an informational snippet on the wall.
The summer scene pictures a boy fishing in City Creek. Two men lug a load from the blacksmith and public works shed on what would become North Temple. Women walk along the 9-foot-high stone wall by the Youngs' large barn and stable behind the Beehive House, built in the 1850s, with its New England-style "captain's walk" observation tower and namesake beehive, the symbol of Mormon industry.
Haystacks, wood fences, trees, sheds and the family schoolhouse decorate the painting's middleground. And beyond the original Eagle Gate is the Salt Lake Valley and today's State Street, "which they called State Road back then," Lund said.
On the museum's main floor, the large Young compound is visible on an intricate diorama that maps and reconstructs Salt Lake City in miniature, circa 1870.
"People are just fascinated with this, because they want to know where Grandpa lived," Lund said.
The village's residential yet agricultural character is evident in this bird's-eye view of the mildly sloping settlement. Temple Square is prominent. The then-new Salt Lake Tabernacle is in place, north of the "Old" Tabernacle (since succeeded by the Assembly Hall), but only the temple's foundation is represented. Also shown are building-free blocks set aside for emigrant wagon trains; ditch-lined streets; and the new railroad yards, for the transcontinental rails met at northern Utah's Promontory Summit in 1869.
Using a laser pointer, Lund zeroed in on the Brigham Young estate.
Surrounded by a cobblestone wall, the homestead occupied the east side of the block over which the white Church Office Building now towers. The farm sprawled east above South Temple, up the western slope of the Avenues to A Street (initially called Walnut Street) and north to today's 4th Avenue. The property of his brother, Lorenzo Young, sat behind Brigham's, beside City Creek. Most of that stream, the model shows, was diverted west at this location to flow down the middle of North Temple.
The diorama's Beehive and Lion houses remain familiar landmarks on South Temple, a k a "Brigham Street." Just to the west of the residences is an orchard and a tilled plot, "what was known as a kitchen garden," Lund said.
Today the granite Church Administration Building, built in 1917, occupies the spot.
"See this right here?" she added, pointing to a tower rising mid-block, "This is an eagle perch." Brigham Young had assigned an eagle with an injured wing to serve as a "guard bird" there. "It essentially protected the orchard from birds and kids," Lund said.
Eagle Gate nearby, with its majestic span and carved wooden raptor, was more than the estate's entrance.
"This is the main access to City Creek," Lund said.
Brigham Young took a keen interest in the creek and its canyon, a valuable source of water and wood for the fledgling community. "Those who went up the canyon had to pay a toll. Mostly at that time they paid in kind," she said, therefore people who headed into the hills for lumber had to deposit with the gatekeeper a load for the community's use. The model re-creates tiny piles of wood, stacked a little downstream from the 20th century's Memory Grove.
Across the way from the Beehive House was the white-towered family schoolhouse, also used by the city's 18th Ward. The Eagle Gate and Gateway apartments now fill that northeast corner of State and South Temple streets.
Farther east, between and along what are now South Temple and First Avenue, were the Youngs' White House, "actually the first house he built on the property," Lund said; the general-purpose "lamb barn," named for its lamb-topped gate; a smoke house; an underground ice house and several sheds. On the hillside, as is still the case, is the family cemetery, where Brigham Young was buried in 1877. A tilled field and orchard lay to the northeast, beside a largely undeveloped slope probably used for grazing and grasses harvested for hay.
We'd call most of that "open space." But homes and residential complexes, including the new Brigham Apartments, have since filled it in.
In fact, a downtown stroll today emphasizes what IS more that what WAS.
Wouldn't it would be nice to find a congenial ghost, as the California man wished, to show us around?
The spirit could point out where the old Council Hall presided on South Temple and Main before it was destroyed by an explosion and fire in 1883, where the Social Hall offered entertainment into this century on State Street, and where the fabled Salt Lake Theatre stood on 100 South and State between 1860 and 1929.
Luckily, a few structures survive. Historic markers recall others.
The Salt Lake Temple, dedicated 16 years after Brigham Young's death, rises majestically on Temple Square. He and the other pioneers of 1847, as well as frontiersmen and Indians, are remembered by sculptor Cyrus Dallin's Brigham Young Monument, lately repositioned on Main Street. For more than a half-century, the general tithing house and Deseret Store (longtime home of the Deseret News) sat on the northeast corner of Main -- or East Temple -- and South Temple streets. In 1911 the elegant Hotel Utah opened there. The refurbished building now serves as the LDS Church's Joseph Smith Memorial Building.
The Youngs' spacious Lion House, named for a recumbent carved lion over the entryway, has been a social center for decades and today hosts receptions, meetings and lunch-time guests. After Brother Brigham's death, the Beehive House was alternately a family home, an LDS presidential residence and a boarding house for young women. Following painstaking renovation, it reopened as a museum in 1961.
Pleasant little parks also remember the great man's legacy.
Three-year-old Brigham Young Historic Park at North Temple and State streets honors him as "a pioneer, colonizer, governor and religious leader." Plaques note that this land was part of the family estate. Statuary of children playing and of working women and men -- plowing a field and repairing a mill flume -- recall Weggeland's painting. A curved portion of the original estate enclosure remains in place in one corner and marker on A Street, a block or so to the east, also recalls the "garden wall"
The Mormon Pioneer Memorial, with an evocative sculpture by Edward J. Fraughton, and Brigham Young Cemetery lie just uphill from State Street on First Avenue. Though surrounded now on three sides by apartment buildings, the little graveyard is a peaceful urban sanctuary.
The old schoolhouse is gone.
The White House came down in 1922.
Eagle Gate, of course, remains a civic landmark, the narrow 19th-century arch of Brother Brigham's day having given way to a wider and mightier bronze span. The original wooden bird reposes in the Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum, the urban path beneath its once-familiar perch now, more often than not, choked with cars, trucks and buses.
The introductory Theodore Kirchhoff quotation was translated by Frederic Trautmann for a 1983 article in the Utah Historical Quarterly.