An 1899 map of Salt Lake City's neighborhood plats

Salt Lake City map, Published by W.H. Whitney, August 1st 1889

Maps are fun! This map from 1899 is new to me. It is a real estate map of SLC showing the various platted neighborhoods.

Some examples:

Image 2: Glendale Park Addition

Image 3: Fort Douglas and Red Butte Creek. Poperton Place is the prominent Pink cutout north of Fort Douglas.

Image 4: Utah Driving Park Race Track (500 E 2100 South)

Image 5: Hot Springs Lake (neighborhood to the west in red is near Northwest Middle School)

The official description is "Compiled from the Records and Actual Surveys By Simon F. Mackie, Civil Engineer. Published by W.H. Whitney, August 1st 1889"

There are plenty of sites on the internet that would love to sell you this lovely map, but don't fall for that.

You can download your own copy from Stanford University's Barry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection.

URL: purl.stanford.edu/sy439kf2563

Native Place Atlas- some Native names of Salt Lake County

The Native Place Atlas is a project from the American West Center at the University of Utah.

Overview of the Native Place Atlas

From their website:

Place names in the United States are officially kept by the US Board on Geographic Names, which was first created in 1890 to address conflicting names and spellings that faced mapmakers in the American West.

The place names that appeared on the first maps of the West derived from Euro-American explorers, surveyors, and settlers. Native presence became “under-mapped” as the cartographic tools of settler-colonialism reconstructed the imagined landscape through place naming.

Out of respect for tribal knowledge and to safeguard against non-Native trespass, the map will not name or show the location of sacred sites.

Unlike drawings of territorial tribal boundaries, which are static and limiting due to the changing nature of these lines throughout history, Native Places allows viewers to see the spread of Native homelands through their linguistic presence.

The data currently contains nearly 600 place names.

https://nativeplacesatlas.org/

Map showing Native Placenames for Salt Lake County vv

Excerpt of Salt Lake County Native Placenames

Alligator in the Sewer!

Composite image showing an alligator at the
Salt Lake Hot Springs Sanitarium.
Image of Sanitarium from UDSH.
Alligator stock image from Adobe.

About 1900 a rumor emerged of an alligator living in the SLC sewers.

The Salt Lake Hot Spring Sanitarium was a bathhouse, swimming pool, and spa that used hot spring water piped from Beck’s Hot Spring. 

The building is now demolished but it was located at 52 W 300 South, which is now the site of the Broadway Media building.

(Read my previous posts about the history of the Sanitarium building and the post about a racial discrimination lawsuit involving the Sanitarium). 

In April 1902, a young man from the telephone company was sent to fix the phone lines in the basement of the Sanitarium. He was deep the back of the dimly lit basement near a long tunnel that encased the water lines connecting the Sanitarium with Beck’s Hot Spring, about 2 miles away.

He suddenly heard a curious sound and caught a glimpse of a monstrous animal scurrying back into the tunnel. The man’s hair stood up in affright and he immediately scrambled out of the basement.

The animal turned out to be an alligator named Jim that had been living in the Sanitarium’s basement and water system for the past 2 years. Jim was originally part of an exhibition of 3 juvenile alligators in the front window of the Sanitarium in 1899.

Once the alligators became too large (and no longer cute) they were disposed of; one was killed, and another was sold to the University of Utah's Biology Dept (this one died 4 months later; supposedly its brain and skin were preserved).

The story told to reporters was that Jim was found to be listless and supposedly dead, so he was thrown into the basement of the Sanitarium. The management denied any knowledge that Jim was alive and blamed its employees who left lunch scraps in the basement and who must have unknowingly kept the gator alive.

A more plausible explanation is that the Sanitarium employees knew all about Jim and kept him as their secret pet until exposed by the unsuspecting telephone employee.

Regardless of how Jim became a resident of the basement and water systems of the Sanitarium, it is unknown what happened to him after he was found out. Supposedly the management of the Sanitarium organized a posse to search out the alligator and finally dispose of him.

Of Note:
As it turns out, finding alligators in Utah is not as rare as I thought. Juvenile alligators were found in SLC in 1955 and 1956. A 2 ft long alligator was found in the Jordan River in 2003. A 3ft alligator was found in Grandpa’s Pond just outside of Hurricane in 2008. All of these were likely pets that were released by their owners. It is now illegal for a private individual to process an alligator in Utah.

Sources:
Ogden Standard Examiner 1895-08-27; SL Herald Republican 1900-03-12; SL Trib 1902-04-19; Des News 1955-08-20; KSL.com 2003-07-17; Daily Herald 2008-07-28

Officer W.A. Stround and Ronald Parry
with a baby alligator, 1955 (From UDSH).

500 Eels Are Creepy Creatures

American Eels. From Getty Images.

Welcome to October (and my first #SpookySLC post). And yes eels are creepy creatures and I would hate to stumble upon 500 eels.

In July 1872 Albert P. Rockwood imported 500 American Eels and released them into the Jordan River.

Rockwood was Superintendant of the Zion Cooperative Fish Farm and Utah’s first Territorial Fish Superintendent. He was tasked by Brigham Young to determine why Utah’s native trout population was declining and to increase fish populations in waters along the Wasatch Front.

In addition to trying to propagate local trout species, his approach was to import exotic fish species. In addition to the eels, he introduced King Salmon, American Shad, lobsters, oysters, Asian Carp, and numerous other species. Many of these species (especially lobsters and oysters) failed immediately but we are now living with many of the impacts of his efforts such as the abundance of carp just about everywhere.

In 1871 Rockwood built a fish farm in Sugar House- probably near what is now the Forest Dale Golf Course. On the 20-acre farm he build a hatching house and 12 fish ponds fed by a large spring with water at a constant temperature of 55 degrees.

Rockwood’s trial-and-error methods combined with regular reports of his efforts and correspondence with the Smithsonian Institute means that his enterprise was the first scientific fish hatchery in the world.

One of his first attempts at fish farming was to import 500 baby American Eels from the Connecticut River in Massachusetts. Once the eels were about 4 in long he released them into a nearby tributary of the Jordan River.

The eels were seen sporadically over the next few years. One was caught and released in Sept 1874 in Utah Lake near the mouth of the Provo River, it measured 2 feet long.

Another was found dead in Jan 1875 along the shore of the Great Salt Lake near Centerville and was eaten by its finders who said “it was cooked and found to be well pickled in salt.”

The last sighting of a living eel was in the Jordan River just south of SLC in 1875.

Rockwood died in 1879 but others continued his fish farming experiments, thankfully without the eels.

Sources:
Utah Stories Sugar House Prison Farm by Lynne Olson; SL Herald Republican 1871-07-30; Des News 1873-03-26; Utah County Times 1874-09-10; Des News 1875-08-25; Des News 1875-01-27; Des News 1876-02-03; SL Herald Republican 1879-11-27; The Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated Jan 1874.

American Eel, image from USFWS.