Throwback Thursday: When North Salt Lake Was Bought an Acre at a Time (North Salt Lake, 1926)

One hundred years ago this week, the Davis County Clipper ran a short list on page 4 of its October 15, 1926 issue. It didn’t look like much. But read it closely and you can watch a community being born.

“North Salt Lake Growing Rapidly”

That was the headline, and the story underneath it was nothing more than names, employers and acreage. The paper said these were “among the number” who had recently bought real estate from J. Fred Odell. Then it simply listed them, one after another, about two dozen entries in all.

Most of the buyers lived in Salt Lake City. What makes the list fascinating is that the Clipper told you where each of them worked. There were buyers tied to the Myers Cleaning Company, the Western Foundry Company, Utah Light & Traction, the Newhouse Hotel, the McDonald Candy Company, the Ketchum Lumber Company and the Le Grand Richards Realty Company. The owner of the Guthrie Bicycle Company took eight acres, the largest parcel on the list. One buyer came all the way from Arizona, and a couple more were already Davis County neighbors from Woods Cross and Bountiful.

Most of all, though, the list was full of Cudahy men. Six of the buyers were identified as working at “Cudahys,” and the list also noted a post office and store going in “near Cudahys.” When a neighborhood’s landmark is the place everyone clocks in, you know what kind of neighborhood it is.

An acre at a time

These weren’t subdivision lots. Nearly every purchase was measured in acres: one acre here, two acres there, a half acre for a business. Add up every parcel the Clipper printed and you get roughly 35 acres changing hands in one short column. An acre was room enough for a house, a garden, maybe some chickens and a few fruit trees, a toehold just outside the city for working families.

The list also hints at the businesses that followed the people. A Bamberger loading station took a half acre. Two garages were on it, including one listed as “Cullen Garage No. 2,” which suggests the first one was doing well enough to expand. There was the post office and store. A town needs mail, groceries, gas and a way to get freight in and out, and in October 1926 the Clipper was quietly recording all of it.

Baseball, a band and a watermelon wreck

Earlier that year, the Clipper’s North Salt Lake column shows the community already had a personality. On May 28, 1926, it reported that the Cudahy team beat the Stock Yards at baseball, 10 to 6.

By July the rivalry had grown. The July 23, 1926 column reported that the Salt Lake Union Stock Yards team “walloped” the South Davis band 27 to 6 in a seven-inning game, then beat the Cudahy nine 13 to 4 two nights later. Both games were played on the Woods Cross grounds. The band boys, the paper said, were not satisfied with such a trouncing and challenged the yard boys to a rematch, with the soda water riding on the outcome.

That same column carried the best line of the summer. The Stock Yards crew and some of the Cudahy employees “had a treat to water melons,” the Clipper reported, after one freight train ran into the back of another and wrecked two cars full of melons. The paper didn’t say how many melons made it home, but it sounds like very few went to waste.

Why this little list matters

Big histories tend to start with incorporation dates and official milestones. Small newspaper items like this one show the part that comes first: ordinary people deciding to plant themselves somewhere. A cleaning company employee, a hotel worker, a candy company man and a bicycle shop owner each looked at open ground north of Salt Lake City in 1926 and decided it was worth buying.

If you live in North Salt Lake today, some of those acres may be under your street. We don’t know exactly where each parcel sat, because the Clipper didn’t say. But the families on that list were among the first to call this place home.

Do you have a family story from early North Salt Lake? Did a grandparent work at Cudahy or the stock yards, or play on one of those ball teams? We’d love to hear it.

Explore more Davis County history on our History hub, see the North Salt Lake history page, and learn how to search old issues yourself in our Davis County Clipper Archive guide.

Sources

• “North Salt Lake Growing Rapidly,” Davis County Clipper (Bountiful, Utah), October 15, 1926, p. 4. Utah Digital Newspapers, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah. View the page
• “North Salt Lake,” Davis County Clipper (Bountiful, Utah), May 28, 1926, p. 1. Utah Digital Newspapers, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah. View the page
• “North Salt Lake,” Davis County Clipper (Bountiful, Utah), July 23, 1926, p. 1. Utah Digital Newspapers, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah. View the page