1/23/2024 0 Comments Salt lake city jazz festival 2016In the next twenty years the non-Mormon population grew two to three times as rapidly as did the Mormon population. In 1870 more than 90 percent of Salt Lake’s 12,000 residents were Mormons. The population became increasingly diverse. There were full-time police and fire departments, four daily newspapers, ten cigar factories, and a well-established red-light district in the central business district. Main Street was a maze of wires and poles an electric streetcar system served 10,000 people a day. Urban services developed in much the same time and manner as in other cities in the United States, and by the beginning of the twentieth century Salt Lake was for its time a modern city. A working-class ghetto took shape in the area near and west of the railroad tracks. A business district, for which there was no provision in the original city plan, began to emerge in Salt Lake City. Mining and smelting became leading industries. Its economy became more diversified and integrated into the national picture. The completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 and the subsequent spread of a network of rails throughout the territory ended the area’s geographic isolation. Gradually at first, however, and then more rapidly, the city began to change. Even so, for the first few years of settlement, it was Salt Lake’s most striking feature. The extent of early Mormon pioneer unity can be, and often is, overstated. The hand of the Mormon church was ever present and ever active. A counterculture that differed in fundamental ways from its contemporary American society, it was close-knit, cohesive, and unified, a closely-woven fabric with only a few broken threads. Religion infused almost every impulse, making it difficult to draw a line between religious and secular activities. A grand experiment in centralized planning and cooperative imagination, it was a relatively self-sufficient, egalitarian, and homogeneous society based mainly on irrigation agriculture and village industry. Its history has been the story of many peoples and of unsteady progress, and it was formed from a process of conflict-a conflict of ideas and values, of economic and political systems, of peoples with different cultural backgrounds, needs, and ambitions.įor about a generation after its founding, Salt Lake City was very much the kind of society its founders intended. In many ways the history of Salt Lake is the story of that effort: its initial success its movement away from the original ideas in the face of intense political, economic, and social pressure from the outside and its increasing, but never complete, assimilation into the mainstream of American life. Like the Puritan founders of Massachusetts more than 200 years earlier, Mormons considered themselves on a mission from God, having been sent into the wilderness to establish a model society. They did not come as individuals acting on their own, but as a well-organized, centrally directed group and they came for a religious purpose, to establish a religious utopia in the wilderness, which they called the Kingdom of God on Earth. The people who founded the city in 1847 were Mormons, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The settlement of Salt Lake City was not typical in many ways of the westward movement of settlers and pioneers in the United States.
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