Students at the University of Utah in the early 20th century could study practical matters including horseshoeing, as in this blacksmithing class at the U. (Photo courtesy Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)

The University of Utah is now known for research programs that plumb the depths of space and the intricacies of the human body, but there was a time when University coursework took a more practical turn. A hundred years ago, the University offered vocational classes in such subjects as radio repair, carpentry, auto mechanics, and even horseshoeing.

Vocational training programs at the U started during World War I, with the establishment of the Student Army Training Corps (SATC). When the United States entered the war in 1917, the government wanted to engage the young ranks of college students, and it established an SATC branch on campuses so that young men could receive training in fields that would benefit the armed forces. The SATC lasted only a few months, and the students were discharged and the corps demobilized shortly after the war ended in November 1918.

The impetus for practical, vocational training, however, lasted longer. By 1919, the University of Utah was meeting with federal representatives to establish a summer vocational school curriculum under the aegis of the Smith-Hughes National Vocational Education Act, a law passed in 1917 that helped fund secondary school training in the various states in home economics, trades, industries, and agriculture. Vocational programs flourished at the University during the 1920s, and by 1937, along with diesel mechanics and aeronautics, courses in mining were offered. For female students, home economics courses were available.

After World War II, vocational training in Utah was gradually shifted to the newly established community colleges and the Utah Agricultural College, which in 1957 became Utah State University. Today, though students and others can take U Continuing Education classes in practical matters such as organic gardening, the only remnants of the U’s once-thriving vocational training programs that have survived into the modern era are old historical photos, of students repairing tractor wheels, building telephone lines, and yes, even shoeing horses.

—Roy Webb BA’84 MS’91 is a multimedia archivist with the J. Willard Marriott Library and a regular contributor to Continuum.

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A speaker attempts to hold forth on the Rostrum in 1915, a time of turmoil over free speech issues at the University. (Photo courtesy Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)

A big chunk of rock has been part of University of Utah campus history for a century, yet its whereabouts during some of that time remain a mystery. The Rostrum, a large granite boulder, started out as a feature in a pep rally for a 1913 football game against the University of Colorado at Boulder. Festooned with a “Bust Boulder” sign, the rock was loaded onto a wagon by freshmen and paraded around Presidents Circle. The parade continued through downtown Salt Lake City, where the boulder fell off the wagon and onto the streetcar tracks. It was shoved aside and later was moved to a spot near the flagpole in front of the U’s Park Building (then under construction). Since freshmen were required to wear green beanies as a mark of their lower-classmen status, the boulder soon sported a coat of green paint and the year of their class. U administrators and upper classmen, however, weren’t pleased, and the freshmen were required to clean off the paint and numbers and construct a concrete base for the boulder. A few years later, the Rostrum had taken on such an air of tradition that the junior class affixed a bronze plaque near the boulder with the year of their graduation, “1916.”

The Rostrum had by then begun serving its namesake function of providing a place for public speaking. For Senior Chapel Day in 1915, a crowd gathered to hear the junior class perform “the burial rites of the rightly deceased Seniors,” according to the Utonian yearbook. Also in 1915, a time of great turmoil at the U regarding free speech issues, a group of “Democratic speakers” attempted to hold forth on the rock but were told to leave the campus by the U’s president, Joseph Kingsbury, according to a satirical account in the Utonian. A 1955 Daily Utah Chronicle article noted: “Here it was that all candidates for school office could have their say by simply standing on the rock. A crowd gathered immediately to hear the speech-maker.”

The tradition of painting the rock in the school colors—crimson with a large white U—also became firmly established over the years, but the Rostrum was still frequently splashed with green paint by the freshmen, only to be repainted. In 1937, the Rostrum was moved away from the flagpole, where it could be painted without endangering infrastructure.

By 1944, though, the repaintings had become nightly, rather than annual, with “nurses, Army, and neighborhood vandals” visiting the rock to make their mark, even covering it with stripes or polkadots, according to the Chronicle. U administrators decided to move it into a glass case in the basement of the Park Building. But the move didn’t stop the painters. Staff members came in one day to find that the glass had been removed and the rock once again painted green.

By 1946, the rock had become such an annoyance that some administrators wanted to remove it and “bury it in a field,” the Chronicle noted. In 1953, the Chronicle wrote that the rock had been taken to the mountains and dumped several years earlier. Nonetheless, it (or a replacement) was brought back to the base of the flagpole, only to be removed yet again, however, and this time supposedly “destroyed by dynamite.” A 1964 Chronicle article notes that a new boulder was placed in Presidents Circle, while “the original rock has never again appeared, but is believed to be buried somewhere on campus.”

By 1967, students were again being urged to use the Rostrum as a speaker’s platform. “Many are the student voices searching for a platform, and you don’t have to buy a press or rent a building to use the rock,” the Chronicle wrote. “It is one school tradition we shouldn’t lose.”

Questions remain regarding possible whereabouts of the original Rostrum. But in historical photos from 1915 to 1991, the rock appears identical. So if it was removed from campus in the 1950s, was the same rock at some point recovered and returned to a place of honor on Presidents Circle? The Rostrum sits there still, if you want to wander by and take a look.

—Roy Webb BA’84 MS’91 is a multimedia archivist with the J. Willard Marriott Library.

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Carlson Hall was one of the first dormitories in the western United States to be built for women. (Photo courtesy Special Collections, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah)

In the first decades of the University of Utah’s existence, students lived off campus in rented rooms in boarding houses or private homes and commuted to campus by riding the Bamberger and other trolleys or by walking. But the University’s first dean of women, Lucy Van Cott, who served from 1907 to 1931, had long dreamed of a dormitory for female students. As U President George Thomas noted, “For some reason, there is a disposition not to accept women as readily as men in boarding houses.” It was not until the Great Depression that Van Cott’s dream was realized, however.

Prior to her death in 1933, Mary P. Carlson in 1931 had made a bequest of more than $120,000 to the University in honor of her late husband, August W. Carlson. He was a Swedish immigrant who had become treasurer of the Z.C.M.I. system, a director of the Zion’s Benefit Building Society, and director of the State Bank of Utah and the Deseret National Bank. He had also served as a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Deseret, the precursor to the University of Utah. In 1911, he had a heart attack on a hotel veranda while on vacation with his wife in Santa Barbara, California, and died. His wife, who was from England, never remarried. They had no children.

After her bequest to the U, the University administration approached the Public Works Administration, a New Deal agency, and it provided a further $90,000 in funding to allow the creation of the new women’s dormitory. The building, named Carlson Hall, was completed in the late summer of 1938. Carlson was the first residence hall on the University of Utah campus, and one of the first in the western United States to be built for women.

Planned for 80 students, the dorm’s interior design was by noted artist and designer Florence Ware, who also painted the murals in Kingsbury Hall. The rooms at Carlson Hall were furnished in Early American style, but the sun room on the third floor was more modern. The dormitory also featured a dining hall and a “date room,” where escorts of Carlson Hall students were expected to wait for the young women.

Carlson Hall served generations of women students, but the wave of new students on campus after World War II meant that other housing for students, both men and women, had to be found. After other residence halls were built on campus, Carlson Hall was converted to offices and classrooms in 1971. The decision was not without controversy, however. Brigham Madsen, who served as the U’s administrative vice president from 1967 to 1972, remembered meeting with the law dean in Carlson Hall’s dining room. At the end of the meeting, “the door opened suddenly and about a dozen of the women residents marched in in single file, dressed in the flowing robes of classical Greece, each bearing a lighted candle, and with the last two women bearing Mrs. Carlson’s portrait draped in black. They were absolutely silent as their ghostly procession circled around us,” Madsen wrote in his unpublished autobiography, a copy of which is in the U’s Marriott Library.

In 1996, Carlson Hall was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But by 2012, as the U was planning its new College of Law building, Carlson Hall was deteriorating and in need of costly seismic upgrades and remodeling for handicapped accessibility and code compliance. U administrators decided the best option would be to replace it with a new structure, and this past summer, Carlson Hall was torn down to make way for the new law building. But Carlson won’t be forgotten: The new law building will feature a display of commemorative items from the U’s first residence hall.

—Roy Webb BA’84 MS’91 is a multimedia archivist with the J. Willard Marriott Library.

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The crowds lining Salt Lake City’s Main Street were eager; a buzz of anticipation ran through the throng. “The dinosaurs are coming!”

Soon the mounted police escort appeared, followed by 19 old-time freight wagons loaded with large blocks of plaster that looked like white boulders. The date was Wednesday, September 17, 1924, and the wagons were the “Dinosaur Caravan,” bringing fossils from the quarry at Dinosaur National Monument in eastern Utah to the University of Utah for display in the University Museum, which was housed in what is now the James Talmage Building on the U’s Presidents Circle.

The fossils were part of a trove discovered in 1909 by Earl Douglass, a paleontologist with the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The museum had funded the excavations at the site for 13 years. But by 1922, the museum decided it had enough fossils and ended its claim to operate the quarry. Douglass, still employed by the museum, stayed at the quarry in 1923 and 1924, and worked with the National Museum (which was part of the Smithsonian Institution) and with the University of Utah, as they both sought fossils at the quarry.

Douglass had spent six months supervising the selection and excavation of specimens for the U, but then a problem arose: how to get 60,000 pounds of fossils—five separate species, including a Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Brontosaurus, and an unknown type— from eastern Utah to the University. There was no railroad, roads were primitive at best, and there were no trucks that could carry such loads.

The U instead turned to large freight wagons, which had been used for years to supply Fort Duchesne and the towns of the Uinta Basin. The wagons and teamsters were assembled, the fossils loaded, and the train started creaking its way west.

Led by “Uncle John” Kay, a Vernal resident, it took the Dinosaur Caravan nine days to travel the 210 miles from the quarry, north of Jensen, Utah, to Salt Lake City. Their route included a ferry crossing of the Green River and followed what today is U.S. 40 and Interstate 80. They reached Draper, in the south end of the Salt Lake Valley, on September 16.

The next day, a ceremonial entrance for the caravan had been arranged at the U. “All along the line of the parade there were large throngs gathered to watch the picturesque procession,” the Salt Lake Telegram wrote. The caravan headed up State Street to 900 South, made a jog over to Main Street to South Temple Street, and then turned to go to the Park Building at the University, where they were met by U President George Thomas.

The Dinosaur Caravan drew attention from newspapers and magazines across the country. The fossils took several years to clean and mount, supervised by Douglass, who joined the University staff in 1924. Those fossils remain on exhibit at the U, in the Natural History Museum of Utah.

—Roy Webb BA’84 MS’91 is a multimedia archivist with the J. Willard Marriott Library.

The Block U of the University of Utah is said to be not only the first such symbol placed on a hillside by a university, but one of the largest.

It has its origins in a class competition. In April 1905, the sophomore class at the University laid out and painted a giant “07” on the side of Mount Van Cott, easily visible from the University campus. Not to be outdone, the freshman class replaced the numbers with “08,” and for a time the numbers changed as often as students could scramble up the hill with buckets of lime.

The lights of the icon shine on a recent fall evening. (Photo by Nathan Sweet)

Cooler heads proposed that instead of numbers, a giant “U” be put on the hill, “as an emblem of loyalty to the whole school,” according to an account in the Utonian yearbook. One spring day shortly after this decision was reached, almost the whole student body turned out to haul buckets of lime from a nearby kiln to replace the dueling numbers. But by the spring of 1906, the snow and rain had all but washed it away. It was refreshed that year by 600 students who handled about 5,000 buckets of lime, but it was obvious that unless they wanted to redo it every spring, a better solution was needed.

In 1907, Stayner Richards, the student body president, proposed that the “U” be constructed of concrete and whitewashed each year. This was met with enthusiasm, and with the help of a water wagon drawn by spans of U.S. Army mules borrowed from Fort Douglas, the “U” was laid out. The massive size of the symbol, 100 feet wide by 100 feet tall, meant that it took two days and part of a third for the men of the student body to mix and pour the concrete.

After that, whitewashing the concrete “U” became a hallowed campus tradition every April, and hundreds would participate in the annual ritual. In the 1960s, to make it visible at night, lights were installed. But by the end of the 20th century, the “U” had fallen prey to the ravages of Utah winters and was in poor condition. University administrators and alumni rallied to save the “U,” raising more than $400,000 in a campaign to renovate it. In October 2006, an official lighting ceremony was held during the halftime of a football game between the University of Utah and Texas Christian University.

The new “U” is not only stabilized on its hillside, with a diversion dam and a drainage system to protect it from melting snow, it also has flush-mounted lights that can flash red and white, and be dimmed or brightened as the need arises. The lights are controlled by a wireless signal that emanates from a control panel located in the Merrill Engineering Building. Today, all members of the University community can be proud that the symbol can be seen all over the Salt Lake Valley. As former U president David Gardner once put it: “It flashes when we win a game; it burns steady in defeat.”

—Roy Webb BA’84 MS’91 is a multimedia archivist with the J. Willard Marriott Library.

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Like many U.S. Army posts established for monitoring the frontiers, Fort Douglas has seen its share of American history. The fort was founded on the east bench of the Salt Lake Valley in October 1862 by a regiment of California Volunteers under Colonel Patrick Connor to guard the overland mail (and, legend has it, to keep an eye on the Mormons). Fort Douglas this year is celebrating its 150th anniversary, and that history has entwined with the University of Utah’s own.

The post has sent Army units marching off to the Indian Wars, the Spanish-American War, and World Wars I and II. In the late 1800s, a unit of African- American soldiers, the 24th Infantry (one of the Buffalo Soldier regiments), was stationed at Fort Douglas. During World Wars I and II, Fort Douglas served as a training and recruitment depot, with thousands of troops passing through its gates on their way to far-flung battlefields. The fort also housed prisoners of war during both conflicts: German sailors captured in the Pacific in the first World War, and German and Italian POWs in the second. The present University soccer field, in fact, is the location of the World War II POW camp, and several prisoners from both wars are buried in the Fort Douglas Cemetery.

The land that the University and Fort Douglas presently share originally was declared “University Square” by an act of the Territorial Legislature in 1855, but with the coming of Connor’s Volunteers, it was absorbed into the Fort Douglas military reservation. Then, in 1894, shortly before Utah became a state, the University was granted 60 acres of the Fort Douglas Military Reservation for expansion. That acreage formed the core of the present University of Utah campus: Presidents Circle and associated buildings on the west side of the campus.

During World War I, the large red brick barracks currently occupied by the 96th Army Reserve Command were built, and during World War II, Fort Douglas became a major U.S. Army base and headquarters for the network of camps where Japanese-American citizens were interned. The end of the war saw the 9th Service Command moved back to the West Coast, and the Army announced that Fort Douglas would be closed.

Finally, in 1989, the fort was officially closed, and by 1993, the buildings and grounds, except for those still in use by the U.S. Army Reserve, had been transferred to the U. In anticipation of the 2002 Winter Games, the grounds of Fort Douglas were chosen as the site of the Olympic Village, and new dormitories were built. Today, Fort Douglas remains a treasured part of the University of Utah.

—Roy Webb BA’84 MS’91 is a multimedia archivist with the J. Willard Marriott Library.

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