Browse Items (12 total)

If you could provide drinking water for thousands of people by displacing twenty-seven farming families, would you do it? Utah leaders faced this very dilemma in the 1950s. Find out what they decided. How would you weigh the cost of progress? As…

This week learn about one family who made it their mission to preserve nature in the heart of a growing city – and they succeeded! In Summit County, a precious 1200-acre area of wetland is permanently preserved through conservation easements as a…

American mink are cousins to otters and ferrets, and their fur is exceptionally soft and dense. While times have changed, mink furs raised on rural Utah farms were once the height of luxury fashion. Utah’s mink industry began in earnest in 1924,…

Tensions between the old and new are not new to rural Utahns – but in 1970s Park City, these tensions erupted into an actual brawl between two seemingly opposite groups: hippies and miners.  Park City’s population rapidly changed during the…

Industry in rural towns often relies on the markets of larger cities. But, such reliance means that rural communities may be vulnerable to shifts in public policy and opinion that impact long-standing ways of life. Located in Utah's Summit County,…

If you visit Lagoon Amusement Park, you may stumble across a modest stone building in the park’s Pioneer Village that used to be Coalville’s old Rock School House. In the late 1800s, this small structure supported a thriving rural community in…

Meet prominent socialite and millionaire Susanna Bransford, who built her fortune on the back of Utah’s mining boom.Susanna Bransford – Park City’s infamous “Silver Queen” – epitomizes Utah’s glamorous Gilded Age.  But Bransford…

Barred from lucrative work and hounded by local residents, it took years of discrimination against Chinese workers to erase their contributions to Park City.All that remains of Park City’s once-thriving Chinatown is a name on a parking garage:…

Meet Howard Coleman, who came West with the railroad and built a better life – one job at a time.Like many of us, Howard Coleman used his work as a stepping stone to a better life.  As a black man and the son of a Kentucky share-cropper, his…

Any parent who has ever lost a youngster in a crowd can imagine Park City resident Bridget Donohue’s panic when she couldn’t find her thirteen-year-old son, Bobby.  Believing he had gone to nearby Heber in the fall of 1898, Bridget must have…

An explosion reverberated through the sleeping town of Park City in 1894. Residents woke up to the discovery that someone had planted dynamite under the front stairs of a local house.On the morning of May 3, 1894, a tremendous blast reverberated…

The wreckage of a plane and the body of its young pilot was found in the Uinta Mountains in 1929.On July 8, 1929 Nymphus Simmons, a sheepherder, found wreckage of a plane and the body of a young man in Dry Canyon near Soapstone Basin in the Uinta…