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The WSU Stewart Library Annual UC-UI Symposium took place from 2001-2007. The collection consists of memorabilia from the symposium including a yearly keepsake, posters, and presentations through panel discussions or individual lectures. ; Audio Recording ; David Eccles and the Origins of the Utah Construction Company a commemorative lecture presented at the 2007 Utah Construction/ Utah International Symposium The Beginning of an Era by Dr. Thomas Alexander Thursday, October 18, 2007 1 It's a pleasure for me to be here today and let me thank a number of people for this opportunity. Thanks to Beverly Ahlstrom and to my daughter Tracy Alexander Zappala for their help with the research. Thanks to Richard Sadler and Joan Hubbard here at Weber State for inviting me to give this presentation. I thank Brooke Ann Alexander, another daughter for her help with the pictures that I put together today and thanks to John Sillito and the staff of Special Collections here at the Stewart Library for their help with the documents here. To Brad Cole and the staff of the Leonard J. Arrington Archives at Utah State University for their help and Greg Thompson and his staff at the University of Utah Marriott Library for their help. Most particularly let me thank Utah International and the Eccles, Wattis and Dee families for sponsoring this symposium. I'm grateful for the opportunity to be here today. On May 12th of 1849 Sarah Hutchison Eccles gave birth to David Eccles who joined his older brother, John, among William Eccles and Sarah's expanding family that eventually included seven children. After working hard selling resin stick as lighters and products of his fathers lathe in Scotland and obtaining less than a year of schooling David immigrated with his family from Scotland to Utah in 1863. The family settled first here in Ogden and then successively in Liberty and Eden in Ogden Valley. Cataracts had blinded William Eccles, but he turned utensils on his lathe by feel and David peddled those products from a pack in Ogden and Brigham City and points between. The family moved to Oregon City in 1867 and William Eccles, David now age eighteen and his younger brother Stewart found work cutting cord wood. The back braking labor of felling and 2 sawing timber became David's entree in to the business in which he grounded his fortune. In 1869 after two years in Oregon the Eccles family moved to Ogden because of the joining of the Union and Central Pacific that same year. Ogden became Utah's transportation center and it surpassed Provo as Utah's second largest city. David and Stewart returned to lumbering. In the winter of 1869- 70, now twenty years old David found additional work in Wyoming as a freighter and in Eden on his father's homestead. The entrepreneurial spirit evidence in his business ventures in Scotland however impelled him to brake loose from working for others. Capitalizing on the skills he had learned in Oregon he negotiated a contract to furnish logs for the Wheeler Saw Miller which was located at the confluence of Wheeler Creek and the Ogden River just west of the present site of Pine View Dam. With his earnings he purchased two oxen. To his great regret an accident killed the oxen as they pulled logs for him. The death of his team forced him to return to work for others. He worked for the Union Pacific and the Alameda Coal Mine in Wyoming. Recognizing David's industriousness the boss gave him a job for which he was not qualified, because of the lack of schooling in Scotland he had not learned to do arithmetic properly and he soon lost the job as a bookkeeper for the company. Soon Chinese workers willing to work for much lower wages replaced the Euro Americans in the job there at the coal mine. The boss fired him and he returned to Eden. After returning to Ogden Valley he again engaged in logging. 3 David recognized the need for better education to supplement his entrepreneurial skills and during the winter of 1872- 73 and again in a later winter he enrolled in a private school in Ogden's old City Hall that was run by Louis F. Moench. Moench a well educated immigrant from Germany's Rhineland later became principal of Weber Stake Academy, and now Weber State University. He's best known today as the lyricist of a familiar Latter- day Saint hymn written first in German as " Sehet, ihr voelker" and translated in to English as " Hark All Ye Nations." Many of you are familiar with that hymn. Although he attended only two terms David learned enough to develop the skill of adding a row of figures in what seemed to observers like lightening speed. The winter of 1872- 73 proved extremely busy for this ambitious young man. In addition to attending school he negotiated a freighting contract to take a load of coffins from Ogden to Pioche, Nevada. You wonder perhaps what all of this stuff that David did during his early life has to do with Utah Construction. Well his earnings in lumbering formed the basis of his fortune. The earnings in lumber provided the funds for his investment in First National Bank and investment in the sugar industry. The investment in the bank then led to his investment in Utah Construction. And the investment in Sugar led to Utah Construction's first large contract. If you don't learn anything else from this presentation today you ought to get those three points. To understand his success then, we need to understand these things. Now during the summer of 1872, David had a contract to furnish logs for a mill owned by Bishop David James on Monte Cristo forty- five miles east of Ogden after he finished the contract he reached an agreement with 4 two colleagues to share the cost of building a mill during the summer of 1873, the next year. He used a loan and the money he'd earned from freighting coffins for his share of the capital for that mill. Firm of Henry E. Gibson, W. T. VanNoy and David Eccles operated the mill and the following year they opened a lumber yard in Ogden. As David managed the mill on Monte Cristo he found time to come down the mountain to Huntsville to dance. There he renewed his acquaintance with a young woman Bertha Marie Jensen whom he'd previously seen in Huntsville and had met at Monech's school. In contrast with David's impoverished family, Bertha a native in Denmark had relatively fixed parents. Then in spite of their social differences the two feel in love and married in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City on December the 17th of 1885. The marriage produced twelve children. After his marriage David continued in the lumbering business. He logged and processed lumber on Monte Cristo with Gibson and VanNoy and then with Gibson. Then in 1881 after dispute because Gibson traded a span on his horses for some worthless oxen he broke with Gibson and formed his own company and after this time he was independent. Convinced of the need to retail his own products David opened a lumber mill on the corner of 24th Street and Lincoln Avenue in Ogden at which he always considered his primary business. Even when he became bank president and president of Utah Construction he kept his office at the lumber yard. Eccles soon moved his timber operation to Scofield a mining district in Carbon county about fifty miles northwest of Price. Concurrently he opened lumber operations in Idaho. 5 Engaging in business with John Stoddard who lived in Wellsville, he began to taking an interest in one of his fellow Scotsman's daughters, Ellen. That interest bloomed into love between the two. Born in January 1867 and nearly eighteen years younger than David, Ellen was only a couple weeks shy of age eighteen at the time of her marriage to David in the Logan Temple on January the 2nd 1885. Although the LDS church continued to encourage plural marriages in 1884 the federal government had inaugurated an intense campaign against polygamist Mormons and David kept his marriage to Ellen secret. At various times she lived with her father's family in Cache County at Scofield and in Oregon. The marriage produced nine children. Between 1884 and 1889 David continued to run his lumber business, but he entered in to local politics as well. He served as an alderman and mayor here in Ogden. While serving as mayor he bridged the gap between the Mormon and non- Mormon business communities by championing the organization of the Ogden Chamber of Commerce in April of 1887. He also oversaw the construction of a new city hall. At the time David also expanded his lumber operations. Between 1883 and 1889 he opened new timber stands in Oregon the opportunity to market lumber from the lush stands of the mountain west and pacific coast became part of the incentive for the construction of railroads through the west. And the available railroad transportation led to a boom in railroad logging. As entrepreneurs moved into the Rocky Mountains, California and the Pacific Northwest, to harvest evergreens Eccles got in on the ground floor of the logging business. 6 In 1883 he purchased a mill to manufacture railroad ties at North Powder from John Stoddard. Organizing the firm of Spencer, Ramsey and Hall in 1887 Eccles established sawmills at Veneta, Oregon and Chandroth, Washington. Fluming or floating logs to Veneta, the company cut the logs into ties, loaded them on railroad cars and shipped the out to fuel the ever expanding railroads throughout the west. In 1888 Eccles closed his operations at Scofield and moved the mill to Telocaset about thirty miles north of Baker, Oregon, and about eight mile from North Powder on the Union Pacific Railroad. Eccles' loggers at Scofield had been cutting illegally on public lands and after the inauguration of the Cleveland administration in 1885 General Land Office Commissar William A. J. Sparks began a sustained attack on illegal use of public resources. In addition, the General Land Office lumber inspectors had reportedly been extorting bribes from the company. That was somewhat of an incentive to close the operations down. In 1887 Eccles began his associations with Charles W. Nibley and you see the two of them here on the advertisement for the Oregon Lumber Company. Nibley a Scottish immigrant like Eccles earned a fortune in lumbering and in the beet sugar business before he became Presiding Bishop of the LDS Church stockholders in addition to Eccles, who held a controlling interest in the company. In 1889 David moved Ellen's family to North Powder. Eccles and Nibley induced the Union Pacific Railroad to use rails salvaged from other operations to construct in 1890 a twenty mile long narrow gauge railroad from Salisbury eight miles south of Baker northeast through the Sumpter Valley and he himself invested in that railroad as well. In addition the U. P. contracted with Eccles' firm 7 to furnish 500,000 ties each year which they shipped on their new railroad to various destinations. In 1891 the company shipped its first timber from Sumpter Valley and in 1892 Eccles opened a mill at Baker. By 1893 the company had operations at Hood River, Meacham, North Powder, Baker and Pleasant Valley. Eccles' company managed to weather the economic depression that followed the financial collapse in 1893 and the company was able to keep its employees, because they honestly told the workers about the dangers of working for the company under these stringent economic conditions. At the same time they promised the workers that they would treat them fairly. Into the early twentieth century the company continued its operations. In 1902 Eccles opened the mill at Anglish Oregon and about forty miles northwest of Portland. The town again lay on the Columbia River and also on the railroad line. In 1903 Eccles purchased the Lost Lake Lumber Company at Hood River also on the Railroad line and the Columbia River and he consolidated with the Oregon Lumber company. In 1905 Eccles induced the Union Pacific to construct a spur line the Hood River Railroad from Hood River twenty- five miles up to Parkdale. This allowed them to access the lush stands of fir in the region. In the mean time Eccles began to invest in other businesses. He reluctantly bought stock in the Utah Sugar Company, the parent company of Utah- Idaho Sugar. In spite of his reservations about investing in that company his connection with U& I proved a god send for him. He also began to invest in banking and it was the banking business that eventually led him to invest in Utah Construction. In 1881 a group associated with Horace S. Eldridge then president 8 of Deseret National Bank and manager of ZCMI chartered the First National Bank in Ogden. The bank located its offices at the corner of Washington Boulevard and 24th street. At the time the only Ogden stock holder was Neil C. Fliger. In 1883 the First National Bank increased its capital from a $ 100,000 to $ 150,000 and David invested in the bank and was elected to the board of directors. In 1888 the board elected David H. Parry as president of the bank and in 1889 Eccles was elected, or in 1892 Eccles elected vice president. In 1894 he purchased Parry's stock and was elected president of the bank. In 1898 he became a director of the Deseret Savings Bank and Deseret National Banks in Salt Lake City. These banks later became the basis of the First Security Bank system, now part of the Wells Fargo Bank system. As a faithful Latter- day Saint he also responded to calls to help his church. He never served a mission himself but sent sons on missions. He made his initial investment in the Utah Sugar Company because of a request from Heber J. Grant. Later when President Lorenzo Snow decided to issue bonds to help satisfy the church's creditors David Eccles subscribed to $ 200,000 worth of Latter- day Saint bonds. Eccles also paid off a $ 7,000 debt of the Ogden fifth ward by inducing President Lorenzo Snow to allow the ward to credit his tithing toward the debt toward that ward. Imagine trying to do something like that now. While David Eccles amassed a fortune from lumbering, the earning from which he invested in other business, two other young men, Edmund O. and William H. Wattis began to make their mark in business. E. O. and W. H. farmed together in Uintah and you'll hear some more about them from Stan Layton later 9 on, but they also began taking grading contracts often with their uncles George L., Charles J, Amos B., and Warren W. Corey. In 1881 the Corey Brothers and Ira E. Spalding organized Corey Brother Construction Company as a private company. In 1886 the Wattis brothers joined with their uncles and Spalding and incorporating Corey Brothers. The corporation constructed railroads in various states. Sometime after this incorporation David Eccles offered to purchase a share in the company, but reportedly the opposition of Warren Corey kept him out. Already however, Corey Brothers had begun financing their operations by borrowing $ 50,000 from Eccles' First National Bank. For the Portland to Astoria job for which the Corey Brothers contracted to grade the railroad line the contract required the company to pay the contractors at the completion of each twenty mile section of the railroad. As they moved along in the construction the company ran short of funds, in part because they had to front the cost of construction. Financial problems also arose because a company they were doing some work for in Nevada went bankrupt and because of the financial stringency. The depression of 1893 was probably the second worst depression that we had in the history of the United States. When Corey Brothers could find no financing to conclude the railroad contract local authorities auctioned their equipment to meet their obligations. In the mean time, the Corey Brothers soon reached First National Banks lending limit of ten percent of their capital. Warren Corey came to bank to borrow some more money. Well bank officials told him that David Eccles wasn't there. He was in his office over at the lumber company where he always 10 had his office, so Corey went and sought him out. What David did was to say, " Look, I don't want to talk with you. I want to talk to W. H. Wattis he's the general manager of the company." So Wattis came in to Eccles office and Eccles asked him, " Look what's the matter. Why do you need more money?" Wattis replied, " That nothing was the matter if we could get rid of the Coreys." He told Eccles that job wasn't good enough for seven families to live off. Unable to meet their obligations as the depression deepened the Corey Brothers filed for bankruptcy in 1895. To settle their debts the Wattis's and Corey's had to sell a great deal of their property in downtown Ogden and on the bench, east downtown to the First National Bank. As a bankrupt company Corey Brothers passed into receivership and the receiver sold the company assets now totaling about $ 7,000 to a new company incorporated on November the sixth of 1895 with capital of $ 10,000. Significantly with the new Corey Brothers they had a new set of senior partners all officers of the First National Bank. After the reorganization the officers of the bank, Thomas D. Dee, James Pingree, Joseph Clark, and David Eccles owned two- thirds of Corey Brothers Construction Company. Eccles held the largest block of stock with thirty- six shares. Dee, Pingree and Clark each held ten percent among the Corey Brothers only Warren Corey and his wife, Julia, with thirty- two percent and Amos Corey with one percent remained as stock holders and William H. Wattis held only one percent of the stock in this company. In what was an apparent effort to avoid calamities similar to that the company had experience in 1895 David Eccles insisted that company carry no 11 long term debt. In a bow to the Corey Wattis partnership however and because David Eccles had considerable confidence in him William H. Wattis was appointed vice president and general manager of the company. The new owners elected Dee as president of the company and Pingree as secretary and treasurer. Since the company had come under the wing of First National Bank however, David Eccles as bank president and the largest stock holder became a major power in the company. Soon however as Wattis had hoped the new owners of Corey Brothers shut the Corey brothers out of the business. On January the 8th of 1900 E. O. and W. H. Wattis together with their brother Warren L. Wattis incorporated the Utah Construction Company. They subscribed stock worth $ 8,000 from an initial offering of 24,000. Then on February the 8th of 1900, David Eccles, Thomas Dee, James Pingree and Joseph Clark, you'll remember their names from the bank together with the Wattis brothers purchased the remainder of the stock. Utah Construction agreed to purchase Corey Brothers assets except their books, probably weren't any good anyway, for $ 24,000. In the reorganization the Wattis brothers and W. H.' s wife Marie held $ 8,000 in shares, the same amount as David Eccles. Dee held $ 4,000 worth and Clark and Pingree $ 2,000 worth each. The directors reappointed W. H. Wattis as vice president and general manager and Dee was appointed as president. Wattis' reappointment came on the motion of David Eccles who had a considerable confidence in this younger mans ability. Eccles told his wife Bertha that the Utah Construction Company was one business that he did not have to concern himself about and that Mr. 12 Wattis knew the construction business and was competent to handle it. He also had similar confidence in E. O. Wattis whom he eventually place in charge of the companies San Francisco office. Under new management Utah Construction still had to finish the contracts that Corey Brothers had previously negotiated. The one Corey relative that they hired was Lester S. Corey, who served in various positions and eventually became company president. Completing the Corey Brothers contracts, Utah Construction finished a number of jobs including grading a road from Idaho Falls to St. Athenie for the Oregon Short Line, a subsidiary of railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman's Union Pacific Railroad. They also continued negotiating contracts for other jobs. In 1901 Utah Construction took a contract with Oregon Short Line to grade a line from its terminus in Utah to Las Vegas, Nevada. This construction project put O. S. L. and Harriman's Union Pacific system in competition with the Los Angeles and Salt Lake railroad owned by William Andrews Clark, who was a banking and mining magnate from Montana and who served for a time as Montana's senator. The Union Pacific had surveyed a line from Utah to Los Angeles in the nineteenth century, but Clark insisted that the franchise had lapsed because Union Pacific had not constructed the line very soon. This difference in opinion led to a frantic race between the two lines to completely construction through choke points. That is Narrow Canyons where workers could construct only one line. Both the Utah Construction Company and the L. A. S. L had crews that they pushed into the breach. Beginning at choke points construction crews actually graded road beds between places where other crews had already laid tracks. 13 Lester Corey served as Utah Construction's forwarding agent. In that capacity he had to make sure that hay, oats, and other supplies reached the camps ahead of the construction crews. From that vantage point Corey watched the progress and the confrontation between Utah Construction and Clark's company. They sent men and teams over land to places as much as fifty or more miles ahead of the rail end, those are Corey's words as he watched this. Laying rails at the rate of a mile a day the O. S. L people reached a choke point in Caliente Canyon, about sixty miles as the crow flies from Modena, Utah which was the last town in Utah before the tracks went into Nevada. Crows however don't fly the circuitous route that Utah Construction had to take to get into Caliente Canyon and down to Meadow Valley Wash in southern, southwestern Nevada where the town of Caliente was located. The Utah Construction crews reached Caliente Canyon before the L. A. S. L. crews did. Although the story is a bit unclear, Utah Construction must have already graded road bed through the canyon because the O. S. L. crews pulled in laying track on the way. When they got to the canyon they found that L. A. S. L. crews had strung a wired fence across the road bed, behind the fence stood a squad of toughs with rifles aimed at the O. S. L. construction crew. O. S. L. chief engineer, William Ashton, order his men to push the construction cars up to the fence and then he dumped a load of ties across the fence. In the face of these riflemen then, Ashton jumped the fence to call their bluff. Well as it happened the shooters weren't bluffing, at least not exactly. As soon as Ashton reached the other side of the fence the rifle men greeted him with volley of shots. 14 Fortunately the shots were all bang and no lead because the shooters had loaded their rifles with blanks. Both sides laughed at the confrontation and cooler heads prevailed. Utah Construction crews then packed up and returned to Utah and Idaho to carry several bank widening contracts. U. P. and L. A. S. L. took a year to negotiate an agreement and the line eventually became part of the Union Pacific system and Utah Construction returned to finish the road into Las Vegas. Significantly one of the stations in Caliente Canyon is named Eccles probably after David Eccles. After the organization of the company Eccles understood that Utah Construction could not really prosper if they continued to take small contacts for portions of railroad lines or for realigning various railroad lines the way the Corey Brothers had done. He wanted to undertake a very large project, but he needed help to negotiate it. His help came from Henry Havemeyer. As we've noted before through the good offices of Thomas Cutler, Eccles had already met Havemeyer. Cutler's Utah- Idaho Sugar Company had sold a fifty- one percent interest to Havemeyer's sugar trust. In June of 1902 after Cutler had introduced them, Havemeyer left Cutler twiddling his thumbs in the outer office and spent most of the day with David Eccles. The wily New Yorker apparently thought he could wear Eccles down, having cut his teeth though on the rough and tumble of western business Eccles held his own. After having his fill of Havemeyer's tactics Eccles finally told him bluntly, " We don't have to sell. We don't owe a dollar. This is what we'll do and nothing under that." Accepting Eccles proposal Havemeyer purchased fifty- one percent of the Ogden, Logan 15 and Oregon sugar companies that Eccles owned for more than the combined total of the three companies, and he consolidated them into the Amalgamated Sugar Company. Although he stood his ground in these negotiations, Eccles recognized that he could not battle a powerful company like the American Sugar Refining Company, so he bargained for the best deal he could. Significantly instead of detesting Eccles for his unyielding stand Havemeyer found Eccles a capable and impressive businessman and they became close friends. In Bertha Eccles' words, " Havemeyer didn't lose any respect for him because he stood up for what he knew was right." In fact he kept Eccles on as company president. Later when Havemeyer sent one of his technical experts to investigate Amalgamated Sugar Company plants the expert returned with the complaint that Eccles managers and other employees didn't have any advanced education. Havemeyer then defended Eccles, he told him, " Any man Mr. Eccles employs as a superintendent or to work around the mill is satisfactory and you must not interfere with Mr. Eccles." Now Havemeyer's friendship with Eccles proved more that propitious. Following the death of Callis B. Huntington in 1900 Edward H. Harriman gained control of the Southern Pacific Railroad. He already owned a controlling interest in Union Pacific and with the control of S. P. he effectually monopolized all of the railroad traffic from Salt Lake City to California. Previously S. P. had divided its patronage between the Denver and Rio Grande and the Union Pacific. With the 16 acquisition of Southern Pacific however, like a first rate monopolist Harriman began to squeeze the D. & R. G. In the mean time ownership of D. & R. G. had passed from Jay Gould to his eldest son George Jay. George Gould then owned a controlling interest in railroads stretching from Buffalo New York to Ogden Utah and he intended to extend that railroad from Baltimore to Oakland. To accomplish the western leg of his dream Gould turned to E. T. Jeffery who was president of Denver and Rio Grande in which Gould had a controlling interest. Gould and Jeffery tried to conduct surveys in secret over Beckworth Pass and down the Feather River Canyon to Oroville in California. But Arthur Caddy and Walter Barknet who had long planned for such a railroad learned of these efforts. Pressing Gould with claims that they'd already staked. Barknet negotiated an agreement with Gould on February the sixth of 1903 to provide for a new company to build this railroad from Salt Lake City to Oakland. On March the third then, a month after the two had signed this agreement and less than a year after Eccles had negotiated the sale of the controlling interest in his sugar plants to Havemeyer eleven men sat down at the California Safe Deposit Building on California Street in San Francisco. And you should remember that name, California Safe Deposit because it becomes important later on to the company. They signed and agreement to construct the Western Pacific Railroad from Salt Lake City to Oakland by way of Beckworth Pass, the Feather River and Oroville. Beckworth Pass lay more that 2,000 feet lower than Donner Pass which the Southern Pacific controlled. 17 Virgil Boge whom Gould sent out to conduct surveys found that they could construct a road with a grade of one percent, making it much more efficient that the Southern Pacific's grade over Donner Pass. After word of the new railroad reached Ogden the Company Officers learned that the contract for the western leg of the rail road from Oakland to Oroville had gone to E. B. & A. L. Stone of San Francisco. No one however had won the contract for the eastern end of the road which was to cross the Sierra Nevada, span all of Nevada and then cross Utah into Salt Lake City. No one in Utah Construction except David Eccles had an association with anyone with influence who could recommend them to Gould's representatives. He was in the word of Lester Corey, " The only one of our group who was known in eastern circles." Moreover " Eccles firmly believed that the company could do the job, so he agreed to go to New York and see what could be done," those are Lester Corey's words. Since he had a working relationship with Henry Havemeyer Eccles went to see the sugar magnate. Because of Havemeyer's confidence in Eccles' ability he recommended Eccles to the W. P. officers. Eccles said that " Havemeyer told Gould and his associates that anything that Eccles would sign his name to they could be sure he would see it through." Significantly Eccles, personally obligated himself to the successful performance of the contract, gave his personal word for it. In the midst of these negotiations on July eleventh, 1905 Thomas D. Dee contracted phenomena and died. On August seventh vice president W. H. Wattis called a meeting of the board of directors, the directors then elected David Eccles 18 president of the company. On September thirtieth, Eccles met with the board to ratify the first of the results of his negotiations with the Gould people. The directors agreed to sign first what to have been six contracts and seven supplemental contracts that authorized Utah Construction to prepare a roadbed for laying of rails from Salt Lake City to Oroville, California. The first contract obligated Utah Construction to grade between Salt Lake City and Silver Zone Pass, a pathway through the Toano Range about a hundred and ten miles west of Salt Lake City. Readers should understand that Utah Constructions obligation on this as on many previous contract consisted on preparing road bed on which the railroad laid its tracks rather than to lay the tracks as well. It did some jobs where it laid tracks but a lot of these involved grading road bed. Eccles then tasked Andrew H. Christenson with supervising the contract from Salt Lake City end and Edmund O. Wattis to superintend the Oroville end. Each section of the line had its own problems. In crossing the Bonneville Salt Flats near Wendover the construction crews faced a vast span of water soaked salt under pinned by mud. To solve the problem by laying lumber on the salt laying tracks on the lumber and hauling train loads of earth and gravel until the train bed would hold the locomotives and railroad cars. Consulting with supervisors and engineers the company broke new technological ground. This is the old technology, horses and wagons and scrappers. Here's an example on a construction project on the way they went ahead with their horses and wagons. Before 1905 construction company 19 workmen had prepared the road bed with horse drawn plows scrappers and dump wagons. Crews blasted through rock with dynamite but horse drawn equipment did virtually all of the earth moving. Since numatic drills available in the nineteenth century were bulky and difficult to move crews did most of the drilling by hand to place dynamite and nitroglycerin. On the Utah Construction job however, on the western construction job, Utah Construction began to move its technology into the twentieth century. Crews began to use in Lester Corey's words, " Air compressor, power drills, small steam locomotives, dump cars of four to eight cubic yards capacity, and steam shovels." You can see in this picture one of the trains with dump cars and the steam shovel operating, this is at Beckworth Pass. Since much of the hardest work took place in California and Western Pacific had its office in San Francisco as construction near completion in 1908 Utah Construction opened what they anticipated would be a temporary office in San Francisco. Eccles sent E. O. Wattis to head this office which was located in the Flood Building on Market Street between Turk and O'Farrell. After completion of the Western Pacific job the company began to secure contracts for work on the west coast and instead of closing this temporary office, it remained opened. E. O. and his associates Henry J. Lawler, John G. Tyler and John Q. Barlow aggressively sought contracts on the west coast as well. With the exceptions of the difficulties encountered on Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats Utah Construction crews had a relatively easy time constructing the road through Utah and Nevada. The seventy five mile Feather River Canyon in 20 northwestern California between Cady and Oroville however seemed like something from another world. On the surface a span of seventy five miles that dropped only one foot in a hundred seems like a walk in a park, at a glance. If you look at a topographic map of Feather River Canyon however, it reveals something quite different. The canyon is so steep that contour lines seem to lie on top of one another. And photographs from the canyon reveal a gloriously rugged landscape. And you'll see one of those pictures here. In some places surveyors had to hang by cable to drive the center line and field space across the canyon. In some places crews had to work very hard because they had to build a railroad grade with curves of only twenty degrees. Utah Construction blazed a trail and brought supplies in by mule train to set up camps and used these as bases for blasting out wagon road to haul in provisions and equipment. Eleven men lost their lives working on a rope bridge at Cromberg. Five died in and explosion at Beckworth Pass. At the confluence of Grizzly Creek the crews had to raft around shear cliffs. Utah Construction blasted forty tunnels of between forty and 7,500 feet in addition to building bridges, trestles and doing cuts and fills. E. O. Wattis moved his family to Oroville just beyond the north fork of the Feather River and his daughter reported that they could hear blasting from their home. As the construction proceeded, Utah Construction in general and David Eccles in particular faced a new problem caused in large part by the panic and recession of 1907. On October 22nd 1907 W. H. Wattis approached J. Dalzell Brown, Western Pacific's treasurer and asked him for payments due the 21 company. Lying to Wattis, Brown told him that the company didn't have any money on hand when in fact Western Pacific had deposited in the California Safe Deposit and Trust Company in San Francisco. Wattis had to leave San Francisco but Brown promised to send him the checks to Salt Lake City. Later Brown who was also the treasurer and vice president of California Safe Deposit, he had both those companies together, sent Utah Construction two checks totaling $ 236,000 drawn on California Safe Deposit. John Pingree who was the cashier of First National Bank of Ogden had left the business when the checks arrived and James F. Burton who was assistance cashier received the checks and sent them to California Safe Deposit for credit instead of depositing them in the San Francisco banks at the First National generally did business. Dalzell Brown and the other bank officers however knew something that Wattis and Brown didn't know. Through out the month of October 1907 California Safe Deposit was insolvent, in fact only deposits from Western Pacific from failing earlier and the bank apparently tried to protect itself by paying only nominal amounts from W. P. had deposited. More over California Safe Deposit had not kept the more than $ 400,000 required by the state of California for its financial institutions. Thus in an age before deposit insurance First National stood at risk. Employees at California Safe Deposit nicely credited First National's account for the checks, this was on October the 28th 1907 but they paid out no money, they simply credited the account. Safe Deposit proved quite unsafe deposit however because it closed its doors two days later on the October 30th. 22 To compound the difficulty at the same time because of the recession Western Pacific ordered construction curtailed by forty percent. In spite of Western Pacific's curtailment, Utah Construction had obligated its self to pay subcontractors their retained percentages, but W. P. didn't have to pay Utah Construction. In effect Utah Construction faced involuntary bankruptcy. Now David Eccles had guaranteed the contract with Western Pacific personally so he felt personally responsible for the losses incurred by the banks failure and the obligations to the subcontractors. As a result he negotiated a personal loan of $ 100,000 from Desert Savings Bank which he deposited in First National Bank, the remaining $ 125,000 came from Utah Construction's undivided profits. Thus Utah Construction and David Eccles absorbed this loss. Utah Construction however agreed to repay the bank losses and though the documents on this matter are not clear Eccles may have recovered some of the money that he advanced. After the completion of the contract Utah Construction tried to recover its losses from Western Pacific. Western Pacific insisted that since California Safe Deposit had credited Utah Construction with the checks that they gave him that the company had no liability. Safe Deposit was bankrupt of course and the checks were no good. Utah Construction officers believed that Western Pacific should repay the money. Officers of Utah Construction and Western Pacific then agreed to submit their disagreement to arbitration on April 29th 1910 the two companies's turned the dispute over to Charles P. Ells. Ells ruled for Western Pacific and Utah Construction then appealed to the California Superior Court in 23 San Francisco in 1912. The California Superior Court also ruled in favor of Western Pacific and to add insult to injury ordered Utah Construction to pay court costs and attorney fees to Western Pacific. Utah Construction the appealed to the California Supreme Court and on January the 9th 1917, five years after David Eccles' death the Supreme Court sustained the lower court decision in favor or Western Pacific. Now I discussed this case with an attorney friend that told me that a Utah company probably didn't stand the chance of beating a California company in California court in 1912. He said that the company might have stood a better chance had they applied in federal court. In spite of this setback Utah Construction had made its mark as one of the west's major construction companies. The company received $ 22.3 million dollars for a contract that kept its crews and subcontractors busy from 1906 through the end of 1909. The company hired more that 7,700 workers it drew many of them from Europe through an employment agency in Chicago. At about the same time the company contracted to construct this line. It agreed to build a line for the Nevada Northern Railroad in Nevada from Cobre on the Southern Pacific line southward to Ely. Eccles also purchased an interest in a livestock company, which is son and executor of estate David C. Eccles sold to Utah Construction in 1913 to obtain money to pay his fathers inheritance tax. The owners incorporated as the Vineyard, Land and Stock Company. Between 1908 and 1911 the company also undertook a number of smaller projects which kept their crews busy. All of these 24 activities proved extremely profitable. In 1900 the incorporators had purchased the assets of Corey Brothers for $ 24,000, in 1906 the company increased its capital to $ 500,000, on December the 31st of 1912 a few weeks after Eccles' death the company had paid stock of $ 903,000, moreover it had additional resources of assets over liabilities totaling $ 1.4 million. David Eccles had invested $ 8,000 in a company in 1900 that was worth $ 24,000. At the time of his death in 1912 the value of the stock and undistributed profits of Utah Construction Company totaled $ 2.3 million. In 1971 Leonard Arrington interviewed Marriner S. Eccles, the son of David and Ellen Stoddard Eccles. Marriner had had both the Utah Construction Company and First Security Corporation. Eccles told Arrington that Utah Construction was then worth in excess of $ 60 million, this was in 1971. Now I'm quoting from Marriner Eccles, " The Eccles family holding in First Security are chicken feet compared to Utah Construction." David Eccles died on December the 5th of 1912 running to catch a train in Salt Lake City he had a heart attack from which he did not recover. By today's standards where billionaires seem to abound, his estate seems relatively small. David C. Eccles administrator of that estate valued it at $ 7.3 million. In 2007 dollars however the estate would be worth about $ 154 million. Bertha got a widows share of one- third the estate and his children by both Bertha and Ellen received equal shares of the remainder. As a plural wife Ellen received none of the estate. His heirs paid inheritance tax of $ 297,000. 25 At his death Eccles' stock in Utah Construction Company were valued at $ 235,000, that from an $ 8,000 investment. It was the fifth largest block of stocks that he owned exceeded only by Amalgamated Sugar Company, Lewiston Sugar Company, Utah- Idaho Sugar Company, and the Oregon Lumber Company. In effect his $ 8,000 investment in Utah Construction in 1900 had grown 2,938 percent in twelve years. That's a fairly decent return on your investment. Now to what did David Eccles owe his success? The origins of his fortune lay in hard work and thrift. During 1872 while he ran the mill on Monte Cristo he seldom slept in a bed. He worked until dark, laid down where ever he could find a place to nestle himself and began to work again at dawn. He spent virtually none of the money that he earned saving it as an investment to improve his position as a capitalist. Although he accumulated some debt during the early years shortly after his marriage to Bertha he paid that off and he ordered his business affairs so that he carried no long term debt. He had excellent business acumen and extraordinary ability to recognize significant economic trends. He based his fortune on lumbering during a time of cheap or free land and a rapidly expanding market. Then instead of carrying all the all of his eggs in one basket, he diversified into eighty- three companies in a wide range of business ranging alphabetically from Adams Copper Mining and Smelting Company in Washington County to ZCMI in Salt Lake City, that's A to Z. He was an excellent judge of the abilities of people with whom he associated and of the opportunities open to him. He recognized the particular strength of people like Thomas Dee and William H. and Edmund O. Wattis. He 26 knew how to cultivate the friendship of people that could that help him. Without his association with Henry O. Havemeyer it seems unlikely that Utah Construction would have obtained the large contract to build the eastern leg of the Western Pacific Railroad Company. Clearly Utah Construction Company owes much of the credit for the early successes which provided a foundation for its future to David Eccles. Thank you. © 2007 WSU Stewart Library, All rights reserved.

The WSU Stewart Library Annual UC-UI Symposium took place from 2001-2007. The collection consists of memorabilia from the symposium including a yearly keepsake, posters, and presentations through panel discussions or individual lectures. ; Audio Recording ; The Wattis Brothers: Spanning Distances, Spanning Eras a commemorative lecture presented at the 2007 Utah Construction/ Utah International Symposium The Beginning of an Era by Dr. Stan Layton Thursday, October 18, 2007 2 Well thank you Gene for that very gracious introduction and thanks to all of you for being here today. I'm particularly gratified to see so many of my students in the audience. I am teaching a class in Utah history this very hour. I gave my students an exam two days ago and I told them if they didn't come here to listen to the old man they'd never get their exams back. Here they are. Not long ago as I was walking towards parking lot A1 a nicely dressed middle aged couple hailed me asked me for directions to the Waters Building. I was pleased to correct their pronunciation and point them toward the Wattis Building. Once again I found myself asking why the Wattis name is not better know in our larger community. Why is it not as immediately recognized as a Huntsman, Matheson, Bamberger, Eccles or Sadler? I've got to tell you my research assistance Stephanie as she read this paper last week and we talked about it over the weekend, she read that sentence and she said, " Wouldn't say, Dee be a better name for this purpose?" I said, " Stephanie, that's a joke." Edmund O. and William H. Wattis are men of towering importance in twentieth century Utah history. They put together a construction company that in true Horatio Alger fashion expanded in size and stature to become one of the largest in the nation and left an indelible mark on the Utah, Western American, Mexican and Australian landscapes. They served as model citizens, family men, community servants and philanthropists. Their business acumen still serves as a model for today's entrepreneurs and their eventful lives continue to fascinate historians. 3 I am sure that most of us in this room have had our lives impacted in some small way by the Wattis family. They influenced the place of my birth for example. For three generation on both sides of my family, as Gene intimated, all my forbearers had been born in Layton. All of the sudden there I was as a newborn in a hospital in Puyallup Washington. Condemn throughout my childhood to try to conceal my embarrassment at having entered the world at such an awful sounding place. That angst was not eased in the least by my mothers constant telling of a joke about two boys with the unlikely name of Atle and Allup who surprised a skunk as they were walking one day. " See Atle," yelled the one. " Pew Allup," replied the other. I even thought of having my dear old mom come and tell that joke for you, but unfortunately she passed away about three weeks ago. My parents had been gone to Washington a few years earlier. Having a small child but no money or prospects they gathered up their meager belongings and headed for the construction site of the Grand Cooley Dam, where Utah Construction Company was a major subcontractor. My mother gave me this magazine just a few days before she died. I didn't know that she had it, but she and my dad always, always treasured their time in Washington. Several other Davis County families in similar circumstances were already there and had gained work, maybe Stan and Viola Layton would be so lucky. They were. Ultimately the wielding skills my dad acquired on this job and others opened up greater opportunities, including employment at the Tacoma Ship Yard which was yet another Wattis related enterprise. It was then while he and my mother lived in 4 the neighboring community of Puyallup that I was born. I like to think that my dad was the man behind the wielding hood in this photo. How might your lives have been touched by the Wattis brothers, William H. and Edmund O? Perhaps simply by taking a class over here in our Wattis Building, or maybe flipping on a light switch in a Las Vegas hotel room, or enjoying fresh apple grown in irrigated orchards of central Washington, or maybe boating on our Pineview Reservoir. Certainly as President Milliner said tens of millions of lives have been impacted, and will continued to be impacted everyday by the dams built, transportation systems constructed and mines developed by the Wattis brothers, and their Utah Construction Company, later named Utah International. How delighted I am as a Utah historian to see William and Edmund Wattis begin to receive the recognition due them and what a special treat to have been selected for a research fund, fellowship funded by the heirs of their company and administered by the Stewart Library. Very, very much appreciated. Then to have these library administrators suggest that I focus specifically on the Wattis brothers was the perfect scenario for me. I had first run across W. H. in researching my master's thesis forty years ago. These same people, Joan Hubbard and others were also generous in funding two research assistants to help me with this work. Janice LeFevre who is in class now and didn't feel that she could be here, but her husband Steven is here and Steven we appreciate the sacrifices you and the rest of the family made in support of this fellowship this 5 summer. And Stephanie Combe who is here in right in front as is helping me with the visuals today. And they were just of immeasurable assistance all summer. For purposes of this research project the term the Wattis brothers means the two older brothers only. Edmund O. and William H. this is not to minimize the importance of younger brother Warren L. who also played a significant role in the company's success. Rather it is simply a necessity of establishing realistic limits on the scope of this work. Let us begin with a short survey of Utah Construction/ Utah International. Just to get a feel for the scope, diversification and significance of its enterprises. And this will be short. You've all seen the photos, you've heard Tom Alexander's excellent presentation, you have probably I see a number of you have some of the booklets published by the library and so you don't need a long survey here of the scope of their work. Utah Construction Company evolved from a twenty year affiliation with the four Corey Brothers. They were brothers to the Wattis mother. In a number of railroad and canal construction projects in Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, Montana and Oregon the Wattis brothers bought half the stock in the newly reorganized Corey Brothers incorporated in 1886. The company thrived for several years before collapsing in the financial crash of the mid 1890' s. From its ruins Utah Construction emerged without the Coreys as you heard last hour. Incorporated in the year 1900 Utah Construction Company first undertook small scale railroading projects in Idaho, then several larger ones in Nevada and California, which included that daunting 942 mile Feather River route and then in Utah which included a portion of the Denver and Rio Grande track between 6 Soldier Summit and Helper. Then in 1915 Utah Construction made its entry into dam building. Beginning with our own East Canyon Dam which is another way in which many of us have been impacted. Without East Canyon Dam and the irrigation water impounded there Davis County would never have enjoyed the prosperity it has. Gene mentioned our farm our 100 acre family farm. Every six days this summer I was there irrigating that farm and I took pride in the prosperity of the farm and green alpha and the corn that we produced and I couldn't have done it without that East Canyon Dam. Railroad construction and dam building projects much too numerous to be detailed here were the companies bread and butter throughout the 1920' s. Then came the granddaddy of all construction projects in 1931, Hoover Dam, began in 1931. Where in Utah Construction Company joined Morrison Knudson, Bechtel, Kaiser and others to form six companies, to form Six Companies the name of that conglomerate to span the mighty Colorado River. It is a measure of the reputation enjoyed by the Wattis brothers that William, and he according to the style of the day took to his initials W. H. and so I'm going to refer to him by that term throughout the remainder of the paper, he was named president of this huge conglomerate. And Edmund O., similarly went by his initials E. O., was named second vice president and they referred to each other by their respective initials and sign their names and other documents with those initials. As fate would have it both brothers died before the dam was completed in 1935. However the reputation gained by Utah Construction during this time allowed the company to continue to shine for another generation. Gene Sessions 7 and Sterling Sessions in their outstanding business biography list eighteen major dam building projects completed during the period 1936 and 1959 after their deaths by Utah Construction, including Pineview and Wanship in our own backyard. The warriors brought contracts in ship building including at that aforementioned Tacoma Ship Yard and road construction including the famous Alcan Highway. They had an important contract for a portion of that highway. After World War II the company entered into an entirely new phase, emphasizing mining which dominated its operations into the modern era, revived its financial strength and turned it into a multinational corporation. This paper advances the thesis that although E. O. and W. H. Wattis were not particularly well positioned by birth or education to achieve the remarkable success that they did, nevertheless we can identify certain character traits, experiences and opportunities that they took full advantage of in their quest for success. Pouring through hundreds of documents this summer my research assistance and I have identified six such factors of success we've called them, which I summarize in the following pages. First, these brothers had a remarkable knack for recognizing opportunity when they saw it and making the most of it. A good example of this aptitude is visible in their very first construction experience. Grading portions of the Union Pacific track as the initial transcontinental line approached Utah in 1868 and headed right for the Wattis farm in Uintah. The younger brother William was only ten years old and too young to hire on, but he undoubtedly observed the activity with wide eyed interest knowing that his older brother was one of the workers. 8 Edmund was only thirteen and had to have help in yoking his oxen, but his diligence paid off. And at the end of several months he brought home $ 225. This seemed like a small fortune to that cash strapped family. Of the 5,000 local men, Leonard Arrington tells us 5,000 worked on that project, only a handful used the experience as a career path in heavy construction. But E. O. Wattis was one. Opportunity came right down the tracks for these brothers and they jumped aboard. I'm indebted to my research assistant Janice LeFevre for putting it that way, but I love the way she said it. Opportunities came right down the tracks for these brothers and they jumped aboard. Second, both of these men reflected traditional agrarian values of hard work and perseverance. Farm youngsters learned the importance of looking after details and of staying with a task to its completion regardless of weather conditions. They learned safety consciousness and patience with animals. And it was of no small benefit to these boys that they were skilled in working with oxen, mules and draft horses. Both grew into large men who were strong and full of grit. Oh that's an excellent photo. I could not find a single job that they ever quit on. And I was interested in that Tom Alexander pointed out that that was a trait of David Eccles as well. Particularly revealing was E. O.' s involvement with the Coreys that is two uncles and three other men in the transportation of a wagon load of whiskey from Kelton, Utah to Boise, Idaho in the year 1868. Young Wattis was only thirteen years old but proved to be one of the steadiest of the group when bad weather 9 overtook them. All except him began nipping at that whiskey and all except him suffered frost bite. Third, was the development of the self confidence to stride forward on their own. Quite likely the single most fortuitous business decision they ever made was to end their partnership with the Coreys. Even though the implosion of Corey Brothers was cause by the panic of 1893, the break up of that company must have been difficult for the Wattis's on a personal level. The Coreys after all were family, uncles and cousins and the Wattis's had worked with them or for them since childhood and incorporated with them since 1886. Nevertheless the Coreys did not have the acumen or stability to thrive as a modern company. I'm convinced that they didn't, but that was only an intuitive and deductive conclusion and I was gratified as I listened to Tom's paper last hour that he apparently moved toward that same conclusion and he had the benefit of some primary source documentations to draw his conclusions from. But I know that numerous Corey cousins plugged in and out of the company. The elder Coreys insisted on dominating the decision making even though the Wattis brothers owned fifty- one percent of the stock and were better decision makers. And the elder uncle, Warren Corey, could be petty and vindictive and I was a little worried about advancing that point of view in those words, but I'm much reassured by Tom's paper. On of the truly remarkable document in twentieth century Utah political history is Warren Corey's open letter to his nephew W. H. Wattis published in the Salt Lake Tribune in August of 1928 reeking of spite this letter chides W. H. for being an unsuccessful candidate on 10 several previous occasions. Labels him a lame duck, obviously not understanding the meaning of that term and accuses him of being a disloyal party member and I know that that was not true based on a lot of years of research and so I wondered what was the cause of that animosity. There was something else there that I was not able to see from my research and again much indebted to Tom Alexander for having enlightened me and all of the audience this morning on that. The bitter animosity of this letter speaks volumes as to the Wattis' good fortune in being rid of the irascible man. By the same token the Wattis alignment with the Ogden financiers Thomas D. Dee, David Eccles and others following the breakup of the Coreys was undoubtedly the single most fortunate occurrence in their business lives. Fourth, was a commitment to a hands- on management style. No wonder they fit so well with David Eccles. Don't you agree? These were men who maximized their time on the construction site and minimized their time in the board room, especially during their early and middling years. They were comfortable with dust in their nose, blisters on their feet, calluses on their hands and dirt under their fingernails. In 1893 on one of his last jobs with Corey Brothers W. H. Wattis then 34 and a full partner was operating a slip plow on the Portland- Astoria job site when he received a surprise visit from his new financiers David Eccles, Thomas Dee and others and on that occasion one of them gave him a cigar. " I wish it had been a twenty- five cent piece," he later recalled, " Since I hadn't eaten food for a day and a half." This was a full partner. 11 The older brother held the same commitment to tenacity and detail the Wattis brothers were managers yes, and they grasped the big picture yes, but they were also detail men who understood the need to worry about on site activity. Incidentally this was no doubt the safety record of the company was so good even though their work involved blasting, working at great heights, spanning raging rivers, operating heavy equipment and sometimes supervising hundreds of men at a time. And while Tom could tell us of some dozen or so fatalities on that Feather River job that was nothing as compared to the hundreds, maybe as many as a thousand Chinese workers who were killed on the Central Pacific construction job in those two years of building the transcontinental railroad. Fifth, both men had the good fortune to marry talented, devoted and stable wives who liked each other and got on well together. The fact that both these women were well poised and possessed of good lucks would also be counted an advantage, especially in the 1920' s as the newspaper society pages found a growing audience of readers with and insatiable curiosity for news of the upper crust. Additionally such a spouse was essential to someone like W. H. who had developed political aspirations and began a series of campaigns for election to public office. W. H. married the striking Anna Maria Dorothea Sophie Standard and she went by Marie Dee, in 1889. He was nearly thirty she was twenty- three, her senior year report card from the Sacred Heart Academy reveals that she was as talented and sophisticated as she was beautiful. And isn't she something? 12 When I first met Stephanie as a student in my 1700 class three or four years ago, I was able to learn before the semester was over that her maiden name was Standard because her brother was also in the class and his name was Standard. When I got to know Marie Dee, I asked Stephanie about the relationship and she said yes, she's my great- great- grandmother and I was able to assure Stephanie that there is enough good looks represented in that woman to serve the Standard family for a hundred generations. She received a perfect score, 100, in all categories of citizenship that Sacred Heart Academy report card. Her academic achievement was equally impressive with scores ranging from ninety to ninety- eight in the nine subjects graded. She and W. H. had four children, two of whom died in childhood with in six months of each other. But I was pleased to learn that we have a great granddaughter of his. Say again? Okay Granddaughter and a great- great, oh how about? That's wonderful. E. O. on the other hand married the petite Martha Ann Bybee from nearby Riverdale in June 1879. When he was twenty- four and she was just sixteen, sixteen and a half. Martha was described by a grandson as a little on the plump side in her later years, though Stephanie and I wonder about that. The photos we have seen of her in her later years do not suggest that at all, including this one. But the grandson described her as full of energy and quote, " Very interested in civic activities." She was active in a local charity, the Martha Society that assisted the needy. And incidentally I have concluded that the Martha Society did not bear relationship to her name, but if somebody knows differently about that I would appreciate hearing the details. She also served as president of the Utah 13 Federation of Women's Clubs and she participated in countless other civic activities and municipal clubs. Having recovered from a serious illness through the healing hand of Christen Science she became an ardent convert to that faith. She and E. O. raised eight children, although one, a son Earl preceded him in death, the victim of an automobile accident. So is this the family? Oh the Child Culture Society that she was active in. Say it out loud Stephanie, she is where? The third one from the left? From my left as I'm looking at it? This one? Over here? Okay alright. Oh, that beautiful house, oh wow. 1915 Stephanie says. In looking at the personalities and lives of these men as individuals we can not improve on Linda Sillito's insightful taxonomy of W. H. as Mr. Outside and E. O. as Mr. Inside. William was gregarious, smiling, athletics and always at ease in the glare of the public spotlight. Edmund was comfortable with people, but somewhat more reserved more paperwork and detail oriented and a bit more inclined to worry. W. H. first came to my attention when I began researching my master's thesis as I mentioned. And I peaked in on that state republican convention of 1920. There he was front runner for the gubernatorial nomination moving easily among the delegates shaking hands smiling and asking for support. By the second vote he had begun to slip and by the third he had lost by a decisive margin to the nominee Charles Mabey. Newspaper accounts of the day pointed to W. H.' s recent indictment under the Lever Act as the likely reason for his fade. The Lever Act was a war time 14 measure that sought to prevent price gouging in the marketing of food and fuel. And W. H. as an executive of the U& I Sugar Company had been targeted by federal prosecutors. The act its self was poorly drawn and ill advised and was in fact declared unconstitutional in 1921 at which time all indictments were dismissed, but the damage had been done. The fact that W. H. was a Weber County man would not have worked in his favor. The Utah Republican Party was firmly controlled by a nepotistic Salt Lake City clique during that era and they played political hardball. By decades end W. H.' s sterling reputation as a business man hammered down all such barriers and won him the gubernatorial nomination. By then he was a man of such status that LDS Church President Heber Grant could write him saying, " I tried to get you on the phone all night last night until ten p. m." and then apologizing to him that he had to leave town for a week quote, " Before we had arrived on a decision on what do to in the affairs of the Utah- Idaho Sugar Company." W. H. was so popular with the local press that the press even reported on his fishing and hunting trips. He was a person so esteemed by his peers around the nation that he was named director of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce and entrepreneur so successful that he stood as president of one of the half dozen largest construction companies in the nation, a businessman so esteemed that the president of the United States sought his feed back on speeches. The nomination simply could not be denied him. But facing a very popular incumbent George Dern in the general election of 1928 W. H. was to garner only forty- one percent of the vote. 15 After that W. H. turned back to business and did not again seek public office. After all he had been defeated twice at the polls first in the congressional race on 1918 and now in the gubernatorial race 1928 and he had been frustrated three times in the nominating convention seeking the gubernatorial nomination in 1920, as previously mentioned, and in 1924 in seeking the U. S. senatorial nomination in 1922. By 1929 he had started to develop health problems nevertheless his natural charm and good humor continued on and served him well until death in 1931. Oft quoted, I'm sure many of you have heard this before but I can't resist repeating it here, it's a capsule that comes from the hospital room upon hearing of Six Companies successful bid on the Hoover Dam project. He's quoted by Linda Sillito in one of the Stewart Library booklets, comes from Joseph Lee Stevenson and goes as follows, " At St. Frances Hospital the press core found William H. sitting up wrapped in a silk bathrobe puffing on a long black stogy. His bushy white hair had been carefully brushed in to place by his wife and he was eager to talk. News of the winning bid had lifted his spirits. He grinned broadly for the photographers then said " Now this dam is just a dam, but it's a damn big dam," and his eyes twinkling. " Otherwise it was no different that others we've thrown up in a dozen place," end of that quote. Unlike his younger brother E. O. on the other hand had no political aspirations. Out side of business his constituency was his family. The only babies he kissed were his own and when he shook hands it was often for the purpose of slipping a dollar to his grandchildren. They call it the silver dollar handshake. 16 Unlike W. H. who loved golf, played it often and was photographed in golfing attire along with such celebrities as Heber J. Grant and Reed Smoot and Tom isn't Charles Nibley in there? Does that look like Nibley? Ya second from the right, ya. But unlike W. H. in this kind of environment and W. H. is second from the left E. O. played golf mostly as a social necessity. Simply taking off a suit coat he turned his suspenders the other way around and played in his business attire. E. O.' s idea of leisure time fun was being at home with his family riding scooters with the children, romping with the family dog, picking fruit and vegetables from his orchard and garden and joining in the many socials hosted at his beautiful home on Eccles Street or in the immediate neighborhood. Due to the press of business however E. O. was denied the time at home that he coveted. Christmas time was the exception. He always made it a point to be home for the holidays. Incidentally I should tell you that the E. O. Wattis family put together a wonderful twenty minute DVD featuring a number of clips from home videos shot by E. O.' s family when he was still alive and in that beautiful home on Eccles Avenue and I have watched that DVD its available here, its just wonderfully revealing and you can just feel how important it was to him to be home when ever he could be, which wasn't often. In fact that point is made in that DVD by one of his granddaughters that there was a time, almost a year when he was gone the entire time. 17 E. O. was quite tall for that day, standing a full six feet. Unlike his younger brother W. H. he never took on that middle age spread but remained slender. His curly hair, rosy cheeks, spectacles and pipe all fit the image of a dignified business man. E. O. was a bulldog, albeit a gentle one. His hallmark was tenacity and his genius was energy. One of his grandsons noted quote " My grandfather's education consisted of two or three years of formal schooling," unquote. He said that E. O. could write, but made a lot of grammatical mistakes and that he quote, " came up through the process with a long construction history of being on the site and doing the work," end of this quote. In today's vernacular he would probably be described as a workaholic. In a letter to his sister Mary Jane written from Oroville California in 1909 he mentioned that he had lost weight was down to 155 pounds, remember that's on a six foot frame. He said. " I am getting very tired of railroad work and I don't know whether I will ever take another job or not. It is very monotonous for me to always be away from home and I think that I am needed at home about as bad as anybody. Besides that I am fifty- four years old and have always worked very hard and have never had but very little pleasure in life. I don't think I have hardly had my share. My young life was spent in poverty and hard work and I am not in the best of health. W. H. left here a few days go and should reach Ogden tonight. I want to make a trip home very bad but am so badly crowded with the part of business that it is my duty to look after that I can not get away now," end of his quote. E. O. Worries in this letter that he will become even less happy as he 18 grows older, that he did or didn't, cannot be discerned from the historical record, but his health problems continued. In a letter written as early as 1914 he commented on his rheumatism. In 1927 he described his bladder infection and pending surgery which promised a ninety- five percent success probability. Two years later in 1929 he mentioned his cough, eczema, insomnia and urinary infection, puss in the urine. So he obviously did not enjoy that ninety- five percent probability success rate, but he was rather in the five percent. And in 1932 he complained of swollen feet, swollen feet and inner ear problems. What the historical record also reveals is that E. O. never did relax his work schedule to any significant degree. At the time of his death in 1934 he was president of six companies and Hoover Dam was in the final phase of construction and as always he was busy with on site visits production schedules, costs, press relations and dozens of other executive level tasks. The heart attack that took his like was sudden and massive. In approaching the conclusion of this paper I return to the thesis and advance the sixth factor of success, you thought I'd forgotten it. It's not a factor that can be offered for general applicability in a business management class for its unique to the Wattis brothers. Simply stated they had each other. E. O. and W. H. were a perfect match as business partners. Their individual personalities, aptitudes, likes and dislikes complemented the others to a consummate degree. Equally important they like and trusted each, a family trait. " There are very few families that have as strong as long a love for each other as ours have and none have any stronger," wrote E. O. in a 1909 letter noting that quote, " there have 19 never been any quarrels between any of us nor any hard feelings," unquote. Those are truly remarkable statements aren't they? As close as these two brothers were however they usually did not work in pairs. They were not joined at the hip to use that contemporary phrase. Indeed their trust was so implicit that they were frequently apart and engaged in different types of tasks. A revealing snap shot in time comes from the summer of 1922. I had hoped in pouring through those hundreds and hundreds of pages of documents I could I find them writing letters on the same day. And I could then share with you what different kinds of tasks and different approaches they were taking. I never was able quite to do that, but I see them close together here in the summer of 1922. W. H. who was then preparing his run for the U. S. Senate was participating in number of activities at Lagoon. They included umpiring a softball game between a Salt Lake and Ogden young men's republican clubs and attending several wrestling and boxing matches. In the distinctive newspaper style of the day that were topped off by a battle royal between five members of the Ethiopian race all in the ring at the same time. Contrast this with E. O. who's hectic travel schedule had made him almost invisible even to his wife, " I was surprise your father was in Kansas City," she wrote to a daughter June 15th after spending that anniversary alone. This is not to imply that E. O. worked while W. H. played. W. H. was just a little more extroverted, more readily given to conduction business on the golf course or in other recreational settings. And who can doubt that how important that is in the modern corporate world. E. O. took a quieter but more direct approach to 20 business. Again we see Mr. Outside and Mr. Inside in perfect compliment. The brothers used that friendship and bond to span distances over four thousand miles of track alone, plus many more of road, tunnels, canals, etc. and to span eras from the pre- railroad era, from the pre- railroad frontier to the industrial era when they died. Again going back to the comment President Millner made the monuments to industry they created would span many more eras and serve the purposes of society long into the indefinite future and you can take that from a historian who's maternity bill was paid by a father whose pay check was back in part by Wattis money long ago and far away in Puyallup Washington. Thank you. © 2007 WSU Stewart Library, All rights reserved.

The WSU Stewart Library Annual UC-UI Symposium took place from 2001-2007. The collection consists of memorabilia from the symposium including a yearly keepsake, posters, and presentations through panel discussions or individual lectures. ; Audio Recording ; Thomas D. Dee: Founder, Builder, Public Servant a commemorative lecture presented at the 2007 Utah Construction/ Utah International Symposium The Beginning of an Era by Professor John Sillito Thursday, October 18, 2007 1 Well I'd like to thank Gene for that generous introduction. He read it exactly the way I wrote it for him. No thank you, I do appreciate it. Can you hear me okay? I've got more wires on me than the last time I had a test at McKay Dee Hospital let me tell you and if things start going off you'll know I'm in real trouble here today. Let me repeat something I said a little bit earlier, you don't know how pleased I am to be one of this years Utah International Fellows. It's been a marvelous experience for me to be involved in the research on a most interesting individual and I won't do that individual even remotely justice today, but will just touch the surface. As part of that process I have had the pleasure of having two fellows to assist me in research. Stan said earlier that we were both spoiled by this to have someone to actually find things, and keep us on track, and catch an error occasionally. I really appreciate those two fellows. Brett Peterson is one of my fellows. Brett has graduated from Weber and gone on to law school. My other fellow Marci Farr is with us today and Marci stand up. I appreciated everything Marci did to help and again keeping on track and it's been a great experience. My paper today is entitled Thomas D. Dee: Founder, Pioneer and Public Servant. In Ogden Utah on July 12th 1905 grocers and butchers closed their shops, school children lined city streets, public officials turned away from their duties and hundreds of prominent and ordinary citizens gathered at the Ogden Tabernacle. On the diocese were Utah Governor John C. Cutler and LDS Church President Joseph F. Smith who had traveled north to speak at the funeral of a man the Ogden Standard called, " The city's foremost citizen," Thomas 2 Duncombe Dee. As the paper reported that day, no other man in Ogden was identified with so many and diverse enterprises as he. Indeed in a career spanning fifty- five years, Dee lead in business, church, education, political and governmental affairs. During his life time Dee accomplished many things. He was a devoted husband and family man, the father of eight children. He was a friend, business partner and political ally of David Eccles and the two men along with several other created, organized and expanded a wide range of commercial ventures. Simultaneously, Dee pursued a career in politics as an office holder and judge. He chaired the Ogden Board of Education, served in a variety of capacities in his local ward. And as the twentieth century began Dee became the first president of the Utah Construction Company which sprouted from humble root and flowered into international prominence. Today it is my challenge and opportunity to address the many facets in the life of this important Ogden figure. While time will not permit an in depth examination of each aspect, I purpose to survey the breath of his career and hopefully down the line will be able to explore the many strands in detail. To begin let us examine Thomas D. Dee's roots and the series of event that in 1860 brought him to Ogden. Two important facts lead our inquiry. First the history of the Dee family is deeply rooted in the soil of Wales, and second, the family was part of what William Mulder has called " a unique element in the total stream on American migration," the relocation of thousands of Mormon converts to their Zion in western America's Great Basin. Thomas Duncombe Dee was born on November 10, 1844 in Llanelly South Wales, the second son and third 3 child of Thomas Hill and Elizabeth Reese Dee. We know very little of Thomas and Elizabeth's early lives, but they seemed typical of many citizens of nineteenth century Great Britain who faced a hard scrabble existence. We do know that the young couple, both age twenty- five married in 1837. Thomas Hill Dee sought work where ever he could find it practicing the trades of potter, gardener, plate maker and likely others. The couple moved frequently, no doubt in search of economic opportunity and their first two children Annie and James were born in Staffordshire England. At some point prior to young Tom's birth in 1844 the family returned to Wales where the couple's last child, Elizabeth, was born in 1851. Six years later in July 1857 the Dees made a decision which would alter and shape their lives and those of their decedents. When they joined the American based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints and became part of that intense conversion period sweeping the British Isles between 1837 and 1870. Not long after their baptism Thomas and Elizabeth decided to come to America. Apparently Tom's parents and siblings were baptized into their new faith earlier than he. As church records indicate he was baptized and confirmed just a few days prior to leaving England. His daughter Maud records that family lore held that " young Tom would stay at home reading and studying while the other attended church services. In the end," Maud added, " he was a better Mormon than any of them, because he understood what he believed." Many English Latter- day Saints during that time drew upon the church's Perpetual Emigrating Fund, the PEF, to provide the necessary financial 4 assistance to make the trip. From 1850 to 1887 that fund brought some 30,000 converts to America in the eighteenth century, including the family of David Eccles. The system allowed them to repay their loan over time through their labor once they had settled here in Utah. While some sources indicate that the Dees came with the help of PEF British mission records housed at the LDS Church Archives do not support this claim. It is possible that they may have received some assistance from some local church members in Wales or that the PEF aided them later in their journey. The Dee family left Liverpool on March 30th 1860 aboard the Underrider. Carrying as many provisions as possible or required by law, and paying the fare of some twenty- four English pounds. The ships manifest lists Thomas Hill Dee as a potter, Elizabeth as his wife, James as a plasterer and Tom as a joiner. Annie just barely twenty is listed as a spinster, tough crowd. A local band serenaded the departing vessel as the 600 passengers from Wales, England and Switzerland left port. The group was under the leadership of James D. Ross who was returning from his second mission to England and his counselors James Taylor, who will marry into the family, and John Croft. The Underrider arrived in New York on May 1st. During the voyage according to the Mormon publication the Millennial Star, " there were four deaths and four marriages and upon their arrival the health of the saints was generally good." Two days later the Dees set out for their destination of Florence, Nebraska not far from Omaha. From there the saints prepared for the final leg of their journey to the Great Basin. The company of 240, including both British and Swiss 5 immigrants as well as some U. S. citizens, left Florence on June 17th 1860, again under the leadership of James D. Ross. According to Church records the Dees were among those traveling on a church wagon train as opposed to a hand cart which the church was discontinuing during that period of time. The Ross Train arrived in the Salt Lake Valley three months later on September 3rd 1860. Unfortunately fifteen year old Tom kept no journal describing his trip across the plains. We do have however the reminiscence of Charles W. Nibley an eleven year old member of the same party. Nibley would immerge as an important church leader and business man and in later years a very close friend and business associate of Tom Dee's. Nibley recalled, quoting from his reminiscences, " The journey across the plains was of the usual ox team kind. There was little of special note that transpired. We traveled about ninety miles a week, which was an average of fifteen miles a day for six days a week. No traveling was done on the Sabbath. Of course there are inconveniences and more or less hardships in that mode of travel but I was a child and do not remember the hardship, on the contrary," he said, " I rather enjoyed the whole trip." In his reminiscences which were complied while Nibley was in his mid- 80' s he still vividly recalled walking barefoot across the plains sighting herds of buffalo and feasting as he says on their sweet meat. He also remembered the circling of the wagons, unrolling and rolling the bed rolls, and the Indians who were plentiful and sometimes he said " a little troublesome although we never had any conflict whatever with them." 6 No doubt Tom Dee shared similar memories of that trip, including the journeys end. The party camped near Parley's Summit and were greeted by Apostles George A. Smith, Wilford Woodruff, Lorenzo Snow and other leading brethren. The next Nibley recalled, " We came out of the canyon and on to the bench near Fort Douglas, and I could very well remember with what joy and pleasure each one of our company looked upon the growing city in the wilderness. We felt that all of our troubles and trial were practically at an end when, as a matter of fact, they had only just begun. The immigrants camped near what is presently the Salt Lake City and County Building then prepared to either stay there in Salt Lake City or move to one of the other outposts along the Mormon corridor. The Nibley family like the Dees headed north past the Great Salt Lake, which he noted " was very low that year." The wagon road from Salt Lake City lay considerably west of any green fields, right out in the alkali lake bottoms, as dry as a bone. While Nibely admitted he had no recollection of Ogden the Dees stopped to make their home. Tom Dee would spend the rest of his life here. Another aspect of the journey westward bears noting. About the time the Ross train made its final preparations for its final trip to Utah, another English convert, John Taylor, arrived at winter quarters with his wife Ann Faulkner Taylor, their two children and John's two daughters nine year old Mary and seven year old Annie, born to his first deceased wife Ann Standard. It is not clear whether Tom Dee and Annie Taylor met at this time. Annie records however that her train discovered a bleached buffalo skull which read, " Captain Ross Train passed here 7 July 15th. All is well." As we will see the paths of these two young people will definitely cross in the future. After getting settled Tom worked as a carpenter at times along with his brother in law James Taylor. He had learned carpentry skills as an apprentice in Wales and as noted he was listed on the Underrider's manifest as a joiner. Over time Dee became a successful building contractor as well, constructing both residential and commercial structures. Hard working and ingenious the young man began to make a mark in his community, but Tom Dees mind was not only on work. Tom had lived in Utah for a decade or so before he seriously considered Annie Taylor as a possible spouse. The two had met from time to time and according to some accounts at one family gathering Tom told the young Annie he was " gonna wait for you to grow up and then I'm gonna marry you." The Dee and Taylor families were close in part because as noted not long after their arrival in Utah Tom's sister Annie Dee had married James Taylor, Annie Taylor's uncle. Now gets a little confusing here, okay. Annie Dee Taylor and Annie Taylor Dee, hang with me here. In any event their courtship evidentially became serious around 1868 or so. In her charming book Memories of a Pioneer, Annie wrote that as a young girl she went to a Washington's Birthday dance in Salt Lake City where the dashing officers from Fort Douglass and their ladies added to the beautiful atmosphere. Tom Dee escorted Annie to this memorable party clad in his territorial militia uniform. Annie also recalled another Salt Lake event in January of 1870 celebrating a branch of the railroad from Ogden Tom and his mother 8 were in attendance. Annie remembered " Thanks to complimentary tickets from the railroad." At the conclusion of the celebration Annie and her sister rode the train to Ogden stayed a few days with the Dees and then returned to their Salt Lake home. The railroad she said, " Made people nearer neighbors." Reading between the lines, perhaps the railroad also facilitated a budding romance for on January 15th Thomas D. Dee wrote Annie's father John Taylor to request Annie's hand in marriage. We have this delightful letter and the reply to it in our Dee family collection here in the library and it's displayed in the back just for today. It goes back into the archives after today, in that cabinet back there. Tom wrote, " It has been known to you that for some time your daughter Annie and myself have been corresponding with each other, and that I have made occasional visits to her; well such things generally lead to something more important, and the object of this letter is to ask your consent for us to get married." Tom said that he didn't need to add more but hoped your favorable consideration. Actually I think it was the uniform. A few days later the perspective bridegroom had his answer when John Taylor replied that he could " find no reason why I should not give my consent to her to becoming your wife." Taylor told his future son in law he wished Annie to have a husband of her own choice, a man she could honor and respect. Therefore he wrote, " You have my permission and are at liberty to make your own arrangements." The marriage was performed on April 10, 1871 in a ceremony in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City when Brigham Young's counselor Neil H. Wells united twenty- six year old Thomas D. Dee and eighteen 9 year old Annie Taylor in marriage. The young couple then traveled to and settled in a two room adobe house on 22nd street, their home for the next decade. Over time as the family grew they need more space and relocated in Annie's word, " Out in the country" in a home near today's 8th street and Washington Boulevard. Even though he was working hard to support his family Tom Dee also took an interest in Ogden's civic affairs. Between 1879 and 1893 he served as assessor, alderman, Justice of the Peace, constable, and city councilman sometimes simultaneously. He became a municipal judge and thus was often referred to as Judge Dee. As his good friend Warren L. Wattis observed, " Dee served as a judged in the early days when the position had perplexities then financial rewards. He first allied with the Mormon controlled People's Party, but when politics was Americanized in the 1890' s Dee became a democrat. His daughter Maud called him, " a good democrat who discussed the Democratic Party as though it were a religion;" long time ago. During his adult life Tom Dee was an active and faithful Latter- day Saint. He spent more then thirty years serving as superintendent of the Sunday school in two different wards, but his efforts were not limited to Sunday alone. In June 1881, for example, Superintendent Dee led the saints of Ogden's third ward on a pleasant excursion to Lake Shore. The Ogden Standard reported that on the breezy shore of the Great Salt Lake ward members quote, " spent a most agreeable day sporting in the saline billows and on the grounds which have been much improved and embellished. Dancing was indulged in with vim, Watkins' band furnishing the musical accompaniment. The sports were diversified; 10 bathing, boat sailing, rifle shooting, swinging, etc," must have had a different meaning then. " And the pleasant party returned home in excellent spirits." In November of 1881 the Dee family relocated to the Mount Fort ward. Where Tom continued his service the Sunday school and later as a councilor to his brother in law Bishop James Taylor. His removal from the third ward was a sad day for ward members as a result they issued an elaborate framed scroll headed conomorea, and it too it to is displayed right here and if you have a chance I encourage you to take a look at it. It's really amazing. Dee was also active as a Weber Stake home missionary and as a high priest. As one considers Dees commitment to the Mormon faith, two questions arise. First it is interesting that he never served as a full time missionary a common occurrence for faithful men of the time. More importantly at a time when Latter- day Saint men were encouraged to take additional wives, some say as a sign of solidarity, Tom remained monogamous. This seems more than happenstance for Annie's father had three wives, including sisters he'd married after his first died. Tom's good friend David Eccles had entered into the principle as did many other local men. But it never seemed to have been on Tom's agenda. In any event Dee's commitment to the faith was never in doubt. Over time this friend David Eccles became a central figure in Tom Dee's professional life. It is not exactly clear when the two men first met. An article in the Deseret News implies that they became business partners as early as 1876, but other sources differ on that date. It is possible that the two men met around 1882 as Tom was leaving Ogden's third ward and David was moving in. Ogden 11 wasn't a huge town in those days, with a population of some 6,000 or so they may have known each other from a number of activities. They clearly known to each other by 1885 however, as both had served as Ogden alderman, Dee representing the fourth ward, Eccles representing the third. Business easily trumps civic service however as the many Dee- Eccles partnerships took shape. As Bertha Eccles later recalled, " Judge Dee occupied the closest association with David Eccles, More so that any other one." Initially their partnership evolved around lumbering, a natural for Dee as a carpenter and contractor. Overtime their business association broadened. A couple of things should be taken into account considering Dee's role in these business activities. First as vice president of Ogden's First National Bank he played a central role in the financing of many of these ventures. Second as I've examined the scope of Dee's business involvements I concur with the observation again from his good friend Warren Wattis, " No detail was too trivial, no task was too large to receive his personal attention." While it would be impossible to even list the many Eccles- Dee partnerships, not to mention others that involved Dee alone or with other partners, let me highlight just a few. One of the most important involved the Utah Canning Company. Organized by Isaac M. Pierce in 1888, the company grew steadily for several years but then went into bankruptcy in the recession of the mid- 1890' s as I think Tom mentioned earlier today was probably the second most severe depression in American history. Lots of people lost everything as a result. Toward the end of the decade in 1897, a group led by Eccles and Dee bring in a capital outlay of 12 $ 12,000 purchased the property and equipment and built a better facility and operated the company under the same name. Dee served as president of the reorganized company until his death eight years later. The company marketed its products under a number of brand names. One of the most prominent was Peirce's with red, blue and gold striped cans containing tomatoes, and catsup, and juice, and vegetables. But Utah Canning was perhaps best known for Peirce's Pork and Beans, sometimes called the daddy of them all. The company was also known for its rolly polly peas and temple brand tomatoes. At the same time Dee and Eccles also consolidated their holding in sugar, along with several other church and business leaders they created the Ogden Sugar Company on December 6th 1897 at a meeting held at the Weber County Courthouse. Upon the motion of H. H. Spencer, Dee was elected to chair this organizing meeting and later became the company's vice president. Additionally these men along with other created Logan Sugar and Lewiston Sugar Companies between 1897 and 1901. In 1902 the various companies were combined into Amalgamated Sugar. At that point the company produced 60,000 100 pound bags annually, while returning attractive dividends to investors. In 1900 Eccles and Dee formed the Ogden Rapid Transit Company, purchasing the Ogden Electric Railway Company which had gone into receivership. Under their control the company pushed ahead with a program of repair and modernization. Over the years this successful company expanded and improved the city street railways and extended service beyond the city itself. 13 For most of us here today however, it is Dee's involvement in Utah Construction that is of particular interest. He was the company's first president, a major shareholder and as the minutes demonstrate actively involved in company affairs. Moreover as Gene Sessions and Sterling Sessions write the immergence of Utah Construction brought Dee and Eccles into direct partnership with the Wattis brothers and marked the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship that would stretch across generations. Company records and other sources also reveal Dee's important relationship with all three brothers that stretch well beyond business to real friendship as well. While pursuing a successful business and political career Dee was also interested in improving the educational climate of his home town. Even though his own formal education was limited ranging from six week to two years depending on which source you consult, his daughter Maud noted that, " he was really an educated man because he was dedicated to self improvement and study. He loved literature, especially the classics and devoured good books." Not surprisingly he took an active role in developing a public library system here in Ogden. More over Tom Dee became the father of public education in this town, serving as a member of Ogden's school boards for thirty- five years. In 1890 Ogden schools were consolidated by the Utah Legislature into one district. Dee became a member of that first board and served as president of the board at the time of his death. It is also clear that Tom Dee was very popular with Ogden residence because of his efforts to further education. In fact as the Ogden Herald noted, " As Dee faced reelection to the board in November 1904 14 though a democrat, he would have gained the endorsement of Ogden republicans if the call from their convention had not distinctly specified that a republican candidate must be nominated." He won. As the Utah State Journal observed, " Dee always took a deep interest in educational matters, giving freely of his time and means to promote the welfare of public schools and his unselfish devotion to this great cause is at the root of the high standard of excellence of Ogden's schools." But Thomas D. Dee's life was not all work. Despite his many business, civic, political, and church responsibilities along with an abiding commitment to family he also really enjoyed life. His daughter Maud often describes him as " often buoyantly happy and a wonderful mixture of down right practical and idealistic. Though he could be a stern disciplinarian he delighted in his children and encouraged them in their pursuits." " He was," Maud admitted, " Not much of a dancer, but he danced just the same. Not much of a singer, but he sang just the same." And Dee played and loved to watch baseball. What more needs to be said? Despite this zest for living, Dee's life was not free of sadness and pain. Both of his parents died reasonably young, and he out lived his three siblings including his Elizabeth who died at the age of fifteen and the loss of his oldest child and his name sake Thomas Reese Dee who died in his early twenty's was devastating. Perhaps these sorrows these personal sorrows not only redoubled his efforts to uplift his family, but to improve Ogden as well. But his commitment to all of these concerns came to an abrupt end in July of 1905. While we do not 15 have any documentation to support it, one suspects that Tom, Annie and the children joined with other residence to observe that years July 4th celebrations according to the Ogden Standard, " the day broke clear and fine with scarcely a cloud in the sky and early parties could be seen working their way toward the canyon or boarding the street cars for a trip to the country," that would be the Dee- Eccles street cars you understand. Perhaps the Dees joined the largely attended celebration of Lester Park, which featured patriotic speeches and songs. If Tom picked up the Standard he would have seen and likely been offended by accounts of a meeting of radical unionist in Chicago, they had drafted a document favoring the general strike as the only means by which the working class could displace the capitalist class. He may have seen an account in the standard reporting the Western Pacific was considering dropping making Salt Lake City the eastern terminus of the railroad they projected building from Oakland to Oroville California and then east across Nevada. Perhaps in favor of Ogden, at least the paper reported the prospect of Ogden securing the road seemed brighter. Ultimately the Feather River route that we've talked about today became a major project that put the Utah Construction Company on the map as builders of western railroads. We do know that on Wednesday July 5th Dee along with H. H. Spencer and Mathew S. Browning took the latter's car to South Fork Canyon near Huntsville to look for additional sources of water for the growing city. As historians F. Ross Peterson and Bob Parson write, " As Ogden grew it suffered numerous epidemics of contagious disease and often people blamed the water 16 supply." In late 1879 the city council located a small reservoir on the bench to collect water from the springs there. A year later they constructed a reservoir on 24th street to collect more spring water. Pipes conveyed these waters to businesses along Washington Boulevard. In 1881 the Ogden Water Company controlled by the city piped water from Ogden Canyon to the city. Ogden's council bought out the water company in 1884 and then bought water rights to the streams coming from Strong and Waterfall Canyons east of the city. The fact that Dee and his colleagues were searching for additional water sources is understandable. For Dee had been interested in the question for many years. As early as 1881 he was nominated by Mayor Lester J. Herrick as a capable person to sit on the board of the Ogden Water Company and the council concurred. In 1900 the Ogden City council again called upon him to serve with a number of prominent citizens to advise them in matter of purchasing or building water works in Ogden City. Ultimately in October of that year, Dee was part of a group headed by David Eccles that purchased the financially strapped Ogden Water Works Company for an amount that would be paid in bonds of a reorganized company and ultimately the water works would be sold by Eccles to the city in 1908. Unfortunately Dee's commitment to Ogden indirectly led to his untimely death. A decade later Warren L. Wattis remembered the circumstances, " while undertaking assignment made for him, by him for the up building of Ogden," he wrote, " Dee slipped into a stream and contracted a sever cold. Initially Dee's condition did not seem grave and in fact his illness was not generally know, by 17 Friday July 7th however, when it became obvious that he was to ill to attend a regularly scheduled meeting of the board of education people were concerned. And in fact Dee's condition became the sole topic of conversation amongst the cities businessmen." In the early morning hours of July 9th surrounded by his wife and children, his physicians Edward M. Conroy, and Dr. Chester E. Coulter and two long time business associates H. H. Rolapt and C. C. Richards, Thomas D. Dee in Warren Wattis' words in the home he had builded with pride passed into the silent shadows of the dreamless sleep." Once the news of Dee's death was made public Ogden's citizens mourned as one. The funeral was held on July12th, using the words of Warren Wattis, " The mourners were of all creeds and conditions. The rich and the poor, the young and the old, the learned and the unlearned, the high and the humble, all united to do him honor." As mentioned, eulogies were given by Utah's Governor Cutler and LDS Church President Joseph F. Smith and others. The pallbearers included several of Dee's business associates, David Eccles, H. H. Spencer, C. W. Nibley, W. H. Wattis, and Neil Flygare. For Eccles Dee's death closed an important era of friendship and business success. In his taciturn way Eccles recorded the death in his day book for July 9th, simply noting, " Judge Dee died 1: 15 a. m." But the depths of his feelings were revealed in a death notice sent out by the First National Bank, " In the death of Mr. Dee this community suffers and almost irreparable loss." Dee's unexpected death also shook the leadership of companies like the Utah Construction Company and Amalgamated Sugar. 18 A special meeting of Utah Construction's board of director was held on August 7th 1905 at request of vice president W. H. Wattis to make an official announcement of Dee's death and to elect a successor. Adam Patterson was unanimously elected a member of the board and David Eccles upon the motion of James Pingree was elect president and he would direct the company until his own sudden death in 1912. At the same meeting W. H. Wattis suggested that a committee be appointed to draw resolution to respect to the memory of the late Judge Dee. Composed of Eccles, Joseph Clark and Warren L. Wattis the committee drafted a resolution to be embodied as part of the meeting and transmitted to the Dee family. It said in part that the company directors deplored the untimely death of their late president and cherishes his worthy of constant emulation. His ideals of personal and business honor, his unswerving loyalty to every trust and business obligation imposed upon him as an officer. And that they recognized the splendid ability and loyalty which he brought to the affairs of Utah Construction Company as important elements in the company's success. The resolution was signed by Warren L. Wattis and W. H. Wattis as secretary and vice president respectively. A month later a sadden board now under the direction of David Eccles met to approve the minutes and resolution of respect and to move on with company business, particularly the construction of that Feather River Route. Similar sentiments are found in the minutes of Amalgamated Sugar. This time Joseph F. Smith announced that, " On the ninth day of July A. D. it pleased providence to remove from our midst the honorable Thomas D. Dee." Smith 19 noted that, " The board had learned to appreciate and respect Judge Dee because of his many attributes and his decisive methods. He was an excellent supervisor of corporate interest because of his clear, just and impartial judgment. He was a distinctive conservative mind, building successfully where others hesitated or failed. He was a desirable associate because of his loveable and cheerful disposition. He was an esteemed citizen because of his broad mindedness and his devotion to his fellows and the interest in developing the country's resources." Smith went on to say that, " Dee's devotion to his wife and children had become proverbial among all who knew him and as a Christian his love for his neighbor was limited only by the universe." A committee consisting of H. H. Rollap, Fred Keisel, Adam Patterson, Joseph Howell and H. H. Spencer was appointed to deliver the resolution to the family. Stockholders Mathew S. Browning and W. H. Wattis were appointed to the board of directors to replace Dee as well as his long time friend Charles W. Nibley, who had resigned his post previously. H. H. Spencer who had moved to elect Dee chair at the company's original organizing meeting that I mentioned and recommended that he be his first vice president was selected to replace Dee himself as vice president. These appointments constituted the only items of business conducted at the meeting. Thomas D. Dee's tragic and untimely death did not forever end his impact on the Ogden community. In the years since his family has expanded on his commitment through a wide range of civic and philanthropic activities. Here in the Stewart Library we are particularly proud of our Thomas Dee reading room which is behind you. The Dee Events center, the site of sports, cultural and civic 20 activities, is prominent and popular. Perhaps the best known however is the hospital that bears the family name. Since its founding in 1911 this hospital has served the health needs of the local community, responded to new medical realities and provided employment to Ogden citizens. While we do not have sufficient time today to examine the many ways the decedents of Thomas D. Dee have acted in this communities best interest, it is abundantly clear that they too have been founders, builder and public servants. Thank you. © 2007 WSU Stewart Library, All rights reserved.

The WSU Stewart Library Annual UC-UI Symposium took place from 2001-2007. The collection consists of memorabilia from the symposium including a yearly keepsake, posters, and presentations through panel discussions or individual lectures. ; Audio Recording ; The Evolution of a Managerial Style: Marriner Eccles in the Public and Private Sector a commemorative lecture presented at the 2006 Utah Construction/ Utah International Symposium Uncommon Vision by Dr. Stephen Francis Wednesday, October 4, 2006 2 Good morning. It is my pleasure to be here. Before I start I would like to thank the generosity of those that made this symposium possible. It is really a great event that we have here, and the ability for scholars to come and study and do those, and I think that is magnificent for those that put this on. Also I think we need to thank those that put countless hours into making this symposium possible. Over the summer researching, I know the amount of hours that also went on the other side of putting this all together, and I am quite impressed with their work as well. As Dr. Sessions mentioned, my field is Tudor England. So you may say, " What is he doing here?" and I ask that same question myself many times. But I am from Ogden and I realize that from a very early age I have had a connection with the Eccles on a very peripheral level, but grew up one road down from Eccles Avenue. As a small child my first bank account was at First Security, went down there and did all that. Growing up later I realized my father would tell the story of coming home from a Bear River football game going 85 miles an hour and then he saw in his rear- view mirror lights and realized that Spence Eccles was going even quicker passing him; so I heard that story. My sister had a reception at the Bertha Eccles Center and I grew up going to church with John Eccles and his family who was Marriner" s son. I would never have guessed as a small child sitting in Sunday School looking at Sarah Eccles that one day I would actually be doing research on her grandfather. So there is a connection there and I am very interested in the Eccles family and their impact in the Ogden and then not only national but international levels. So I guess somehow that is how I come 3 a field from the Tudor era. Although I have realized from this why I so enjoy Tudor England, and that is that if I were to ever give a lecture on Elizabeth the 1st, I don" t have to worry that Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh are actually in the audience and correcting me when I get things wrong. So I will gladly go back to the sixteenth century after this. It is my pleasure to be here and to talk to you today about Marriner Eccles. As a historian we often then have a specific thesis or idea that we are trying to get across in research. Again because as Dr. Matt said yesterday we were talking about men that we have never met to people that know them quite intimately. That can be a good thing and that can be a bad thing. Sometimes I think maybe we get a little bit more objectivity, but at the same time as the apostle Paul said, " We see through a glass darkly". I think that is somewhat accurate of historians in general. So I hope that what I have to say has some meaning and works okay. One of the things I liked about Marriner Eccles is that, and sometimes I do this as well, is that you get the sense with Marriner Eccles that if something was true or at least he thought it was right and true, it didn" t matter how you presented it, everybody should just see that it is true and jump on board. I sometimes fall into that, so I am going to treat Marriner Eccles in a Marriner Eccles fashion and just lay out my presentation and my thesis and then I will say that it is right, and then I will let Sidney stand up and tell me how wrong I am, but that" s okay. Today specifically what I am going to be looking at is Marriner as a manager. We have often… most of the writing that has been done on Marriner 4 focuses on his ideas, especially what he was doing in Washington D. C. as the Federal Reserve Board Chairman. There is no doubt about it. This man had an amazing grasp of ideas, of how they could be implemented, and really was very impressive in his view of what should take place in the future. But what I am looking at more specifically is how he was as a manager in dealing with not only then corporations, but also then Washington years and this broader idea. We see this very prevalently in our society, this idea of the business man going into the public sphere and then coming back out of the public sphere and how does that affect the companies that they work for. That is, this transition is very popular I think. I think this is actually quite timely in the sense that Alan Greenspan just retired from the Federal Reserve Board and is probably one of the more famous Federal Reserve Board Chairmen mostly because of what Marriner did with the Federal Reserve back in the 30s and the 40s, and there is this interest of " Well, where do they go now". There is this idea that Senators then go and sit on boards after they are done and there is this real interest in the two spheres transferring in there. I just saw on the Daly Show not too long ago President Clinton talking about moving into the private sphere and the affect of that. So I am hoping this is kind of an interesting subject; I found it interesting, of how did this affect Marriner? The premise of my remarks actually comes from a quote from Marriner Eccles. He said, " I think most American businessmen have gone through a similar kind of self examination on being offered a public post. Despite their materialism and their drum- fire criticism of all politicians and bureaucrats, 5 governmental service has an attraction for a great many of them. Let them get a taste of the position and the flavor remains with them forever. Most other things afterward seem flat or jaded." And I think that is a true statement and I think that is true in his life, so we are going to try to look at that, and that is really a long introduction to my ideas, but let" s then jump right into them. Marriner Eccles as many of you know was born in 1890 to David Eccles and Ellen Stoddard Eccles. Dean L. May in his book " From New Deal to New Economics" posed the idea that one of the reasons that Marriner Eccles had this kind of broad view of what the economy should do, he is going to claim that it is actually his Mormon background. That even though Marriner may not have been doctrinally interested in the Church, the social culture of Mormonism affected the way he looked at things and saying about this collectivism of Mormonism, that that affected this kind of economic policy. And I am going to start of right there by saying that I don" t necessarily agree with May" s vision of that. I am going to, though, say that yes, Mormon culture had an affect on him, but it actually wasn" t the collectivism of Mormonism, but actually the isolation of Mormonism at that time. The polygamist system actually creates more isolation than it does collectivism. Marriner" s mother was the second wife of David Eccles and therefore really was left on her own. You get this sense, then, of again in Marriner" s writings, in his memoirs, he is discussing this idea of in a way kind of being upset that the Mormon Church asks people to come to Utah and then just kind of dumps them here. Then in his mind he found the Ogden Valley to be this kind of harsh climate that wasn" t really very friendly. He was a great person of 6 forecasting the future, but on that one he got it wrong. He said there was very few people living in Huntsville and he never saw that place growing beyond what it was then. But now, he didn" t I guess see ski resorts and that of showing Huntsville off. But he saw that as kind of harsh that you were isolated in this area. Again being the child of the second wife of David Eccles, there is that isolationism, because you really get a feeling that Marriner really didn" t know his father very well. He is going to come into contact with him every now and then, rarely has a very long conversation. They will be moved up to Oregon to kind of get away from polygamist laws and persecution, and then his father dies. He is left to take care of his mother. So if anything, I don" t think there is this idea of Mormon again taking care of each other as a community. I think more Marriner felt this responsibility from a very young age to take care of his family because he was really in a way alone. He is the oldest child. Even when his father was alive, his mother is pretty much there by herself, so he is already the man of the house even before his father dies. I think that weighs quite heavily on him, this responsibility to take care of his mother and his family. And that responsibility, I think he feels, like he has to go it alone. I liked how Sydney Hyman represented him as a " lone walker" and I think that is such a very true statement of Marriner Eccles. So my premise is that before his Washington years when he is running the family businesses he is really seeing it in that sense, that " I have to take care of these people and my family". He is then much more interested in the specific running of those businesses. Now he is going to get involved in the family 7 business of the lumber company. He is also going to get involved with Utah Construction. He will get involved in Amalgamated Sugar, and then in the 20s he will form First Security Bank Corporation. When you look at his management style in these areas before Washington, I think he has always had this kind of understanding of the big picture, but it is much more, he is much more involved in the running of these companies. His stories which are great stories, especially with First Security, when the Depression hits, the stock market crashed. Later then, they are fearing runs on the bank and in my mind I always see the " It" s a Wonderful Life" Jimmy Stewart and people running in. I don" t remember runs on the bank. I" m not that old. So I have to somewhat tie it to Hollywood. But the great story is that he is coming in and he is going to stand up on the counter and tell people " Calm down. We" ve got funds to cover this. The Federal Reserve in Salt Lake City has money". Now he says in his memoirs that those two statements were true, he just didn" t tell people that they weren" t necessarily connected. Yes Salt Lake had money, but that doesn" t mean that it was going to come to his bank and it was going to go out to them, but they don" t need to know that. He then tells his tellers, " Take as long as possible. If somebody comes and wants money, even if you have known them your whole life, tell them that you have to go back and get their signature card to make sure that the withdrawal is appropriate. Pay them in very small bills and count them out very slowly so that we can close on time and not have to shut down the bank". So he tells them this and then the next day when there was another fear then he says, " Okay now what we" re going to do…" and this I think is quite ingenious, so then he says " The 8 next day open up as soon as possible and no matter what they say do it as quickly as possible and pay in large bills, because we don" t want anybody on the second day to see a line. We want people to think that this business is just this bank running normally. There is no one waiting in line. We are calm, cool, and collected". So a total turn around. So you see he is getting involved on a very fundamental basic level of explaining to these tellers how to do this. He is the man up on the table, if you will, bringing everybody together being under control. You also see in these earlier years that he is more involved in the actual aspects and running of these companies. There is evidence as we were looking in some of these documents that, for example, in Utah Construction, he is actually going out and will make a report to the company saying, " Well, I was out at this site and it seems that the concrete is coming in. They are pouring it very well. I was out there. Things seemed to be going along very well." It was the same thing with Amalgamated Sugar. He is off looking at sites, maybe where they can have a factory or something, again more on this level of actually looking at the production and process of these companies. Another one specifically going with the milk company he started. He found out that he was going to work all of this. Thirty- three percent of the stock in the company was held by a Mr. Radcliff of Los Angeles. Marriner went to L. A. and asked Radcliff to meet him in his hotel room where Marriner proposed buying Radcliff" s stock. Radcliff said that he needed a day to think about it. And this again is what I love about Marriner. He says, " Well, I" ve got to leave tomorrow. Let" s not think about it. You know that this is a good deal. You know I" m giving you a good deal. Let" s just do it right now", 9 because he was worried that the Chicago group might come and talk to Mr. Radcliff to buy his shares. So Radcliff is like, " Well Okay but we at least need a lawyer to draw this up". And he says, " Look, this is a basic no- brain concept. You" ve got stock, I" ve got money. We can just write it up right here and sign it". And Marriner then says that he is probably glad that Mr. Radcliff didn" t think much of lawyers because he sat down and just on hotel stationary wrote out two copies of the contract and they both signed it and off he went. Again this is to me very specific intervention in a company trying to run it. He is the man in charge in this period. With the coming of the stock- market crash, this is going to be the event that changes Marriner" s life, and this is where he sees even a bigger picture. I believe that even up until this point in time Marriner really has been focused on running these companies for the benefit of his family, and that is the scope of where he is looking, and is more involved then in the running of those companies. But now with the stock- market crash and especially then the ensuing great Depression, he sees that…" You could try to run the company the best you can, but because of these bigger events that you can" t control, companies can fail. Well, maybe then you can control these bigger events". And this is where, then, Marriner begins to look at even a bigger picture and starts to have these ideas of how to fix the economy by massive government spending; that you can" t leave it up to businesses to fix themselves because it is too big of an issue. You can work all of your life like his father did and make this amazing company, but if other things affect it that you have no control over, no matter how hard you work, 10 it may fall apart. So therefore, we need to come up with these bigger ways of solving the problem. And often times he gets referred to as this policy of massive government spending to prime the pump is often considered to be Keynesian economics, although he is proposing this before Keynes does. Because he is a businessman and a very successful businessman, he is asked to come back to Washington to discuss these ideas, well not specifically those ideas, but just where the economy should go before a Senate Committee; and this is where he then proposes these ideas. And again, as is often stated in books and memoirs, this isn" t some long- haired radical economic professor coming with some wacky idea; this is a millionaire businessman proposing these ideas. And this catches the attention of the Washington think- tanks, if you will, and he is asked to come back and work in the Treasury. You can tell again in his memoirs, it is kind of the put- up or shut- up position. Here you have been talking about all these things, now are you going to accept an active role in the public sphere. Marriner decides that yes, this is what he needs to do. Now today, if the person were to go back to Washington and eventually end up on the Federal Reserve Board, you should get out of all your business dealings, you only had to get out of banking. You couldn" t actively be in banking, but there was nothing else to stop you from being in all these other things. To me, that is what I find fascinating, is that he doesn" t divest himself from these other activities. And it is not just divest himself. It is not like he has to sell his stock or anything, he is still the President of many of these companies. It is not just as if, " Well, we" ll just keep him on the board"; no he is going to be President 11 of Amalgamated Sugar. While he is back there he is going to be President of Utah Construction. And in his mind he sees no conflict of interest, and to be honest as I have looked through these things, it doesn" t seem that there was a huge conflict of interest, but it still is interesting that he is trying to keep both feet in those spheres. He is not completely going into the public sphere. He wants to hold onto that private sphere. As was said last night and definitely true, I think one of Marriner" s greatest strengths was his ability to pick good managers for those companies. If you look at his again personal memoirs, he is kind of proud of the fact that he has never read an economic theory book, that he isn" t that college educated. But at the same time I think that maybe bothered him a little because he was very clear on making sure that his managers had educations. So as much as he was talking about his informal education and that this was just kind of through observation and experience, he was going to make sure that the men who ran these companies had those educations. For example his brother George received a business degree from Columbia University and ran First Security during Marriner" s absence. Later Spencer Eccles would also then go to Columbia. Marriner sent his own son Campbell to the Wharton School of Business. Eccles had H. A. Benning who ran Amalgamated Sugar. He went to the Rochester Business Institute. A. E. Benning who later ran the company attended Yale University. And as we said, Dr. Matt was talking about yesterday, later after he comes back from Washington, Ed Littlefield from Stanford is going to run Utah Construction. So as much as he is talking about this self- made man who hasn" t had a formal education, he is going 12 to put those key men into those positions. I think this is a huge shift in that he is forced to allow these men to do their thing. You can not micromanage, or at least it is very difficult to micromanage two thousand miles away. So instead of being this active participant in these companies, he is forced to delegate that authority. That is going to change the management style of these companies. The other thing is that once he gets back to Washington, as much as he may be proud of the fact that he never read an economic professor" s ideas, he will rely on them still in his role as Federal Reserve Board Chairman. One of the great ones will be Lockland Currie, a Harvard PhD who had a founding in traditional economic concepts. So as great of a thinker as Marriner was, he still needed these people to kind of formulate what he already had his mind in this kind of technical language. That is where his management style is going to change. Currie is I think is one of the more fascinating people in his Washington years. Lockland Currie was hired by Marriner Eccles. Again, Marriner" s ability to find people of quality, intelligence, and capability. Lockland Currie again was a PhD from Harvard and Marriner wanted to bring him in as the head of research for the Federal Reserve Board. The problem was that there was already a head of research and… well, I don" t think it is a very big mystery of those who know Marriner. He is not a very political man. He is not one to play the game, and here he is in Washington. I mean this is the biggest game in the country. And he just, I think he is just struggling with this idea of, " Why can" t I just get rid of this guy and put in the guy I want", but it doesn" t work that way in Washington. So he said, 13 " Well, I" ll just make you an assistant research director but you don" t really have to kind of answer to this guy. You just answer to me. Well, that" s going to tick both off and it was kind of ugly. But they did work well together. Currie stated, though, and again I think this gives us some insight into Eccles… He says, " Although a fluent talker, Eccles had some difficulty expressing himself forcibly and coherently in writing. His mind was so active that one thing would suggest another and this a third, and there was always a danger that the original point would get lost in the shuffle". He then later stated, " Eccles would doubtless be astonished if someone told him that he was not the easiest man in the world to work with or under. I had to smile, though, ruefully, in reading his stories of his difficulty in getting over a point to President Roosevelt, as I experienced exactly the same difficulties with him." And again, Marriner would come back and go, " Why, why, doesn" t FDR see this truth?" You can just see Currie going " Why, why, don" t you see this truth that I" m trying to get across to you?" That having been said, Currie goes on to say, " These criticisms, however, are minor. I both admired and was personally very fond of Eccles". But I think that demonstrates his management style that Marriner had. I think this is something I can relate to, and probably my students can relate to too. If you" ve got an idea, you" ve got back it up. If you can" t back it up, I don" t care how great your main statement was, if you can" t back this up, then we" re not going to have a good discussion. He was willing then to openly discuss matters, but it had to be on this very rational level, and I think this is somewhat a similarity that I at least admired in him or maybe just saw some of myself in. Not that I" m trying to put 14 myself on the same level as Eccles, but I do like things more verbally. I would rather sit and hash it out in a conversation, than sit down and write it and have somebody critique that. A lot of my ideas are formulated through discourse. The same thing was true of Marriner. He liked this idea and on a management level that can somewhat be frustrating for those underneath him because again, as Dr. Matt was talking about last time, in this evolving corporatization of America where you are trying to streamline and make things more efficient, sometimes just sitting and hashing things out at least some people might not find that the most efficient form. In fact Currie got very frustrated with this idea. " Why can" t I just write this up, you look at it and say okay, and move on?" Whereas that wasn" t really working; at least when he did write he had to keep it very to the point. Again don" t go off with all this flowery crap. Currie said, " So most of my memoranda to him were short, simply worded, and action oriented; and were passed personally to Eccles usually unsigned and even undated, which may explain in part both their character and the relative lack of memoranda by me in the official archives. Some of my most influential work left no record at all as it took place in the preparation of speeches and statements by Eccles. While I enjoyed writing, he much preferred talking, and it was in these interminable discussions that accompanied the preparation of each speech and statement, and that often lasted late into the night with revised drafts to be prepared the following morning for other and successive sessions that I most influenced his thinking and he mine." 15 Now if you" ve got a man like Currie who is willing to do that, management goes well. But if you are trying to run later companies, this probably isn" t really great. A lot of people may want to be home with their family, as Ed Littlefield told Marriner. He said, " Yes, I" ll join Utah Construction" But basically Ed Littlefield told Marriner, " But I" m not going to be you. I" m going to go home at night". I think again, if you" re that same kind of character as Marriner, " Yeah, no, we" re going to stay here until two in the morning and we" re going to hash this out and work this out", and I think for Marriner that was fun. That was exciting. Currie is just like " Oh, here is my third draft, come on. Let" s go home". In his relationships with those around him, he could be abrasive and often times that tends to be the adjective describing Marriner. And this here again is an example of where the man was a businessman and a thinker, and not a politician. He had some struggles and specifically with Henry Morganthou, who was the Secretary of Treasury under Franklin D. Roosevelt. The two just didn" t see eye to eye because they really were wrestling for power over the monetary system. Marriner is wanting to turn the Federal Reserve Board into an independent organization that can really direct monetary and fiscal policy and basically the Secretary of the Treasury was not real happy about this and felt that he was encroaching on his power. You can see though, that in the end Marriner wins. Again, most of us had at least heard of Alan Greenspan and Bernacky and the Secretary of the Treasury is kind of fading in our collective " who is he?" So he wins not just for himself, but in the long run Eccles wins, but that doesn" t mean he didn" t ruffle some feathers along the way. 16 Here is an example. In July of 1936 Morganthau was livid that Eccles had increased Reserve requirements by 50% without notifying the Treasury. Morganthau called Eccles and railed against Eccles" actions, and Eccles claimed that Morganthau had just been out of town, and " Sorry I didn" t mention it to you, but I was going to do that, but I did have President Roosevelt" s approval". Again, not the most tactful. Morganthau then wrote in his diary after railing on Marriner he says, " I certainly put the fear of God into him, and I doubt if he will ever pull another fast one". He wasn" t such a good predictor of the future. Lockland Currie here once again is like, " Oh crap, what has happened here", and he writes to Marriner saying, " Make overtures to the Secretary. Tell him you do not question his authority, ability, or (…?) in connection with monetary control. I know that you put ideas and objectives above personalities. Since the contribution you can make rests in the final analysis on the degree of cooperation you can obtain from the Secretary, I think you will be prepared to make real sacrifices for the sake of your wider objectives". Then again, here is an underling telling Marriner, " Mellow. Try to work with this guy. If you want to make a difference, you have got to work with him." Eccles at least at that time must have taken Currie" s advice, because Eccles had been vehemently fighting Morganthau over a particular policy and the two had decided… and I love this. You can just see them in this argument. " It" s like, yeah, well, we" ll just take it to Roosevelt and see who wins." So they both go to Roosevelt. Morganthau gets to meet him in the morning and Morganthau explains his policies and FDR says, " Well, that" s good, but let me hear from Marriner, and then I will make my 17 decision". Marriner comes in and basically explains the exact same thing that Morganthau had and so he is now, after weeks of fighting, he comes in and presents Morganthau" s ideas, and Morganthau is just standing there, just blown away. Later Morganthau told his staff, " In my whole experience I have never seen anything like it. And the thing that frightens me is that a man can so completely reverse himself." I think he was not necessarily trying to placate Morganthou, because that doesn" t strike me as what Marriner would do, I think, again in his mind, this is where I think he is kind of clueless in a way about… I think he thought this was a great argument that he and Morganthau were having. This is how you come to solutions. This is how you come to ideas. You don" t take it personally. Whereas, Morganthau takes it very personally. I think Marriner walks away from all of these kinds of things thinking, " Well, I don" t understand why you" re upset with me. That was just a fun exchange of ideas and I finally saw your side of it." Morganthau is just stunned that this is going on. I think that is the part in management that Eccles never really saw, is that maybe you have to be a little political to soften things. And really, you know, he was extremely successful, so I" m sure in his mind it worked find, but again, Currie said for example, " Our failure to get open- market operations transferred entirely to the board was due in turn to Chairman Eccles" failure to court Senator Glass in the early days. So there was this idea that, " Yes we accomplished a lot", and Currie may be wrong, but in Currie" s mind at least he is saying, " Yes we accomplished a lot but we could have done so much more if you had just tried to soften a little". Of course 18 you could argue that if he tried to soften a little, he wouldn" t be Eccles and maybe wouldn" t have gotten what he did get. Sam Carpenter who was the Secretary of the Federal Reserve Board said, " Because Eccles was not a politician, he didn" t think like a politician. He thought of getting things done and I think that is one of the things that got in his way when he was working on the Banking Act of 1935. He thought if he came up with the right ideas everybody would say, " Come on, let" s do it", and he didn" t think of it in the sense of getting a thing done politically. He goes on to say, " Marriner" s biggest problem was himself. He was abrasive in the extent that he knew what to do and the other people resented his pushing and saying, " Come on now, let" s do this". But in a way I also thing that is exactly what made it that he did get an amazing amount of things done, and I think those that worked for him respected that idea but he wasn" t always the most fun to work with. Once he comes out of Washington, I do think that his first statement is true, and no offense to the companies that he had, but I don" t think they seemed as exciting as what he had been doing. Because he really had been formulating national and therefore international policies and as greatly… I mean definitely in my mind the Federal Reserve Building should be named, and it is named the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Building. He does in reality create the Federal Reserve System that we have today. That is so true; one of the most influential men in American history from an economic point of view. He will get involved in the World Bank. He is going to get involved in the Federal Housing Administration. I mean these are huge things, and again I am not trying to 19 diminish the companies he had here, but I think in his mind, it is not as exciting, that is not as fun. So when you see him come back from Washington, there is a more distance in the running of those companies. His management is not as hands on. He is now more going to allow those men underneath him to more actively run those companies, and now he is going to kind of sit back in a way and things will be brought to him. He is still more than happy to have those conversations, but I don" t think you see what you saw before Washington. He is not going to, and this may have something to do with age as well, maybe he feels like he has earned his stripes. But you are not going to see the man going down and telling people how to run things. He is going to be more than happy to tell people what he thinks about policy and where they should go, and he may not pick the exact right moment to do that. One of my favorite stories over the summer was from Justin Eccles saying that at a family reunion, he is going to decide instead of to talk about David Eccles, he is going to stand up and talk about birth control. Because again, this is right, this is true, you should just listen to me. Generally Mormon polygamist family reunions are probably not the best place to talk about birth control. So there is this kind of struggle with bringing up these points that he wants. But at times he is going to have to step in and I think that is going to happen in Utah Construction. He is going to be concerned about the way that Christensen is running the company. So when Christensen is running the company in Utah Construction, you actually see memos again where Marriner is going to discuss " should be buy these huge ore ships that are going to transport things". Again this 20 seems to be a very mundane issue, but he is going to have to do that. Once he puts Ed Littlefield in control, you do not see those same kinds of memos. Again, it" s like " Okay I had to deal with this, but now that I know that this person is in control, he can take care of that and I don" t have to worry about it", and I think I really appreciated that in Ed Littlefield that he could then go on and do what he wanted to do. The same thing is true of First Security, I think in his brother George he had no worries that First Security was running correctly. He does seem to get a little bit more involved in Amalgamated Sugar. And it is not that the Bennings were bad, because really he still left the Bennings to that. I think it is one of his older companies and you will still see him kind of go out and look at new factories, where again you don" t see him really going out and looking at the sites of Utah Construction. One of the things, though, that I think was not as affective then in his managerial skills, is because he allowed these men to run things, you don" t see the cross fertilization if you will of these companies. He really lets them run independently. In a way that" s good but on another level, you would think that to have a manager in all these companies, they could use their collective knowledge to help the other companies. But Marriner seems to be much more, " No, I" ve given you this responsibility, you take care of it". For example in the 1960s Amalgamated Sugar was discussing if they should get in the cattle feeding business and Marriner said no they shouldn" t because we tried that in the past and it didn" t work. Mr. Alan on the board said, " Well, I don" t think we should make 21 decisions on the future based necessarily on just what happened in the past". I would love to be in that board room to see someone take on Marriner and say that, and then Marriner quickly, I mean the man had a very good grasp of things, said, " Okay, well because of this reason, and this reason, and this reason, that is why it is not effective". But he never said, " And it didn" t work economically for Utah Construction". Utah Construction also had cattle. He didn" t pull on that information to make his point with Amalgamated Sugar. The same thing is true again with Amalgamated Sugar. Ed Littlefield is going to corporatize Utah Construction in the late 1950s and into the early 1960s as Dr. Matt talked about last time. Amalgamated Sugar does the same thing but about ten years later and it doesn" t seem that there was any discussion, " Well, this is what we did in Utah Construction. Maybe that will help in Amalgamated Sugar", which I think is a great story and on one level is great management. There was discussion in Utah Construction about getting a loan at the prime rate and Ed Littlefield had gone off and found that the Bank of America would give them the prime rate, so they have all located. George Eccles, his brother, wasn" t there. When George finds out that they had gone to the Bank of America and not to First Security, he loses it and says, " What were you thinking? How dare you do this?" Again, I would love well, not to be a fly in the room. I don" t want to be actually there, I would get really stressed. But they went at it, and I guess other members of the board were like, " Oh, this is going to be fun. Let" s watch the Eccles boys go at each other". But I like the fact that Marriner was saying, " No in this situation, I am wearing the hat of Utah Construction and he tells George, 22 " You know that if you can" t give me the prime rate from First Security, Bank of America will". And George was like, " Okay" in the end. So in that sense I think this is very beneficial because he does believe that, " No I am wearing the hat of Utah Construction and I will fight hard for the best deal, even if my brother and my own company is First Security Bank". But at the same time I think that I think demonstrates that attitude that these companies are separate and I" m not going to mess with saying " This is how we did it here, this is how we did it there so maybe you should work from that". I think that kind of independence and isolation is what I talked about before. Finally, I think one of the things that I find very interesting is that he still was interested in these bigger issues and policies. I briefly mentioned birth control. Very interested then in birth control because again he saw the economy on this big scale and he is saying, " As these other third world countries over populate…" and again I think this is very future sighted. " Eventually you are going to out- source and labor is going to go to those other places and that is going to cause economic problems. We need to reduce the size of labor" So through birth control. The other thing was that he saw Vietnam as a big waste of money and said that… well, here" s a quote. I love this. He says, " The most important issue before the country today is our involvement in Vietnam. If affects every facet of our lives and our relationship to the rest of the world. Considering the financial and monetary aspects of our involvement, it is primarily responsible for our large budgetary deficit which is causing inflation. It is mainly responsible for the large and increasing deficiency in our balance of payments." Now I think this is a great 23 quote of saying, here is against Vietnam and the problems it" s causing. Guess where this statement comes from? The Annual Report of First Security Bank. This is not a speech to a big, and I love this. If you read the First Security Annual Reports, this becomes his bully pulpit. Whereas other companies, I have looked at Zions Bank, the only thing in the letter from the management is " this is how many loans we made, this is our…" I love these from First Security because there is always this section on where I think Marriner gets to kind of go off and talk about these. Spence I" m sure can correct me but I would love to have been one of the stockholders at First Security getting my annual report. Any means he has to listen to his bigger message he will use. And again I think he honestly believed, and I am not disagreeing with him, that as a stockholder of this bank, you should be looking at these bigger issues. You should be seeing how this fits into the bigger picture. Marriner was always a big picture man and he will let the rest of these people underneath him deal with the details. I think again from the public sphere to the private sphere, that public sphere affected the way he looked. I think he was always the big picture, but public service broadened his big picture, and I think in some ways that definitely benefited the companies he had after, but also in other ways there were some issues where he could have maybe made them orchestrate better but because he wasn" t interested it didn" t happen. So in a way, he started his life in isolation with the weight in a way of the world on his shoulders, and in the end he finished his life as an isolated man still with the weight of the world on his shoulders. 24 © 2007 WSU Stewart Library, All rights reserved.

The WSU Stewart Library Annual UC-UI Symposium took place from 2001-2007. The collection consists of memorabilia from the symposium including a yearly keepsake, posters, and presentations through panel discussions or individual lectures. ; Audio Recording ; " You Can't Get Anywhere Without Coming to Ogden: Railroading in the American West" a commemorative panel discussion presented at the 2004 Utah Construction/ Utah International Symposium Making Tracks by Dr. Kathryn MacKay Thursday, October 7, 2004 2 Thank you. Let me add my thanks for the invitation to be here today. It is always an honor to be asked to speak at a public forum. I also acknowledge that some of my students have even decided to show up and I am particularly honored by your presence. Let me put my nostalgic credentials on the table first. My grandfather worked for the Union Pacific which meant that as a child I used to take rides on the Union Pacific with my grandmother. There are still stories told in the family about those various trips and about taking lunch down to the Union Pacific depot for my grandfather and so I also have these nostalgic railroad credentials. In fact that may be the extent of my credentials about the railroad, I need to admit to you that the railroad is not my field of study. I have been drawn into this study more recently with a project at the Golden Spike museum with a group of students. As a public historian I supervise students who do curatorial work, archival work, and we had a chance to redo an exhibit that talked about the Chinese workers on the Central Pacific. I then went on to help the park do curatorial work on their collection and it raised again the issue that is always an issue in museum, libraries, historic sites and reenactment places, and that is how do you present the past to the public in the present? How do you help the public understand the past was as complicated and as messy as the present? And how do you bring to the attention of the public the best of the current scholarship? So with those issues in mind I turn to some discussion about new scholarship on the Union Pacific railroad. Let me bring to your attention three major areas of new scholarship about the Union Pacific and about railroads in the 3 west in general. They really do come out of the last 20- 25 years of historical research that can be both labeled social history research and new western research. The social historians have asked us to consider the past from the bottom up; from the lives of ordinary people. For the railroad, that means we are much more interested in the lives of the workers. And for the Union Pacific, that is the Irish immigrants, expendable because there were so many of them, expendable because they could be replaced, and literally expendable because they kept being blown up and having accidents, etc. Thousands of workers over six years of time worked on this transcontinental railroad and we are struggling to tell the story of their lives, both to find the information but also to present it to the public at our museums, and our public events. The social historians remind us that the story of the transcontinental railroad, the story of the Union Pacific, is not just a story of triumphalism; it is a story that is also about despair and hardship, ethnocentric discrimination, and a lot of stories lost. We are trying to find those. I also wanted to bring to your attention new scholarship that geographers are asking. One area of scholarship is to look at town planning that the railroad companies did. The Union Pacific, for example, had a specific town plan for Cheyenne. The geographers, in looking at towns in the west, are bringing to our attention increasingly, some understanding of major town plans; the Pueblo Indian villages, the Mormon town plan or the plan of Zion, and the railroad plan, Cheyenne being one of the most important examples of this. What, for example, has caught scholars attention about the railroad town plans is that they are 4 deliberately planned off center, they are slightly askew. The speculation is, well, does this have to do with sunshine; does this have to do with surveyors who did not know what they were doing? But, nonetheless, there is a particular pattern and the scholars' are curious about that, and bringing to our attention that we need to be mindful of the railroad as a town planner, not just as a railroad builder. But they really did affect the way that the land looked in the west in terms of town planning. Furthermore, again as the geographers go back and take a look at the rights of way and the roots, the impact that they had on the environment, on the ecology, on the land itself. There is a lot of new scholarship to look at. One of the fascinating fields, for example, is that because the railroads became the second largest land owner in the west, second only to the Federal government that, of course, took the land in the first place and held a lot of land. If you want to find certain seeds and certain kinds of plants that have not been particularly disturbed for hundreds of years you follow the railroad tracks. That is where the seed researchers are gathering native plants and seeds that have not been hybridized. So again, the geographers bringing to our attention new services. And then the new western historians are weighing in… I noticed that Richard White, one of the most distinguished of the new western historians is now turning his attention to the railroads particularly in terms of their corporate power and influence, and is looking at the first big businesses in the United States which were the railroads, and looking at the connections between their economic power and their political power. In this time, which for some historians 5 is being described as the " New Gilded Age," the historians are looking back at the previous Gilded Age and looking at the railroads as a particular player in this world that has become so familiar to us, a world of big business and the influence of big business on the government. I want you to know that these three areas of scholarship are areas that scholars, historians, and geographers are particularly interested in. Again, bottom up history, town planning and the impact on geography and environment, and the relationship between big business, corporate interest and the government. That is where we are going to see some of the richest new scholarship. The challenge for museums and public organizations is going to be to present that new scholarship to the public. Thank you very much.

The WSU Stewart Library Annual UC-UI Symposium took place from 2001-2007. The collection consists of memorabilia from the symposium including a yearly keepsake, posters, and presentations through panel discussions or individual lectures. ; Audio Recording ; " You Can't Get Anywhere Without Coming to Ogden: Railroading in the American West" a commemorative panel discussion presented at the 2004 Utah Construction/ Utah International Symposium Making Tracks by Dr. Richard Roberts Thursday, October 7, 2004 2 I am happy to be here today. But at my age I am happy to be anywhere! I will spend a few minutes talking about railroading in Ogden. I am going to work from slides, but in kind of a limited time. I will not have a lot to say about each one of them. The main idea I am looking at is the building, development, and decline of railroading in Ogden. It is kind of like this idea that civilizations go through birth, infancy, adolescence, and death decline. The history of railroading in Ogden is much that way. This first slide, of course, is the joining of the rails at Promontory on the 10th of May, 1869. This is a significant event in American history and the history of Utah. The building of the transcontinental line did a great deal to change the nature of our country and especially our community here. Ogden, up to this time, was nothing but an agricultural Mormon community. And now a whole new aspect of life would come into affect with the joining of the rails. Brigham Young did not go there. He was upset because the railroad… went around the north end of the lake instead of around the south end as they were predicting they would do when they started out. As they got closer, they decided that the most economical and best route would be to go around the north end of the lake. This in many ways made Brigham Young angry. He did not attend the joining of the rails. The three representatives Ezra T. Benson, Chauncey W. West, and Lauren Farr went. They were interested, of course, later in building the railroad on the western part coming into Promontory. This indicates another thing that was happening at the time. Corinne had shot up through Malad Valley to the markets up in Idaho and Montana. That 3 gave them a particular point on the railroad that started a competition between Corinne and Ogden and other places to be the main central junction of the railroads. Remember the Union Pacific was coming from the east and the Central Pacific from the west. Corinne took on a period of some development but did not amount to much because it would soon be done in essentially by Brigham Young's desire not to have Corinne be the major junction point. Corrine was challenging also to try to be the political center too. Back then the Liberal party, the non- Mormon party, established itself up in Corrine in 1871 with the idea of driving the government and also the business aspects of Utah up to that area. So it was quite a competition story. What Brigham Young did though, he came to Ogden, acquired one hundred and thirty- one acres of the land down where the present station is and turned that over to the railroads on the condition that they would make Ogden the terminal or the junction point of the two railroads and that happened. The Central Pacific had to buy forty- eight and a half miles of track from Promontory to Ogden to make that their junction also. Corinne then was one of the challenges to the development of Ogden. Freighting wagons and also passenger wagons could take people from Uintah to Salt Lake because the railroad did not go around the Salt Lake it had gone north so there was no connection. Brigham Young got together and organized a company known as the Utah Central which became then a railroad from Ogden to Salt Lake. So Uintah was challenging Ogden to be the center also. 4 As time went on, the stations were built in 1872. It was described as a violent red, clapboard building where you could buy tickets, have a little waiting room and wait for the train. People who came traveling and wanting to go on west or east had to transfer trains here. On the left hand side were the tracks of the Union Pacific coming from the east from Omaha, and on the right are the tracks coming on the Central Pacific from Sacramento. So people would come here and make their exchange on the trains. There were rooming houses and restaurants where they could have refreshment or wait if they had a layover, or some reason to stay in Ogden, this is where they would come. Railroading was pretty tough at this time. Robert Louis Stevenson, the famous author, traveled on one of these trains and he said, " You know, it got pretty rancid coming some five or six days on the train from the east. The room started to smell or the car that you were sitting in was really bad." When he got to Ogden he thought he could make a switch and was really happy to get a new car. He said you got on that car and it was just the same way just going different directions! They solved the Salt Lake City situation. Brigham Young with the Utah Central will finish that. That was completed in 1870. Their station was located in the mid- block between 24th and 25th street on the east side of the road. The train would come in going east and then it would back around on a Y- track that would turn them around and send them back to Salt Lake. Tickets usually on the Union Pacific included a trip or an extra trip from Ogden to Salt Lake as part of the ticket cost if you wanted to go to Salt Lake. 5 As Kathryn was mentioning, the railroads dictated how a city would be laid out. As you can see this is an 1890 schematic showing Ogden City, how it was laid out, and all the tracks that were coming in. You can see that Ogden is taking on quite a major role now as a railroading center known as the Junction City. In fact, Ogden was very proud and very confident they were going to be the center of Utah commerce. In the 1870' s, if you read the Ogden papers, they thought they would surpass Salt Lake and they would be the great center of Utah. That, of course, never quite happened. Anyway, Ogden did become the major junction of the transcontinental line. Of course, one way to show its importance was to build a station that would merit the title or the idea of being a prosperous community. Henry Van Brunt, a well known architect in Kansas City, was hired by the Union Pacific to do several stations along their line. Actually, the Union Pacific built six stations in this time period, the 1880s. This is his rendering of what the station in Ogden was going to be like. The architects rendering does not usually get put in to form and it does not quite match up to that rendering but it was quite a building. Here is the laying of the cornerstone. The Masonic Order is doing the Masonic ceremony which is common in those days. This was November 7, 1888, the laying of the cornerstone of the Union Station. It is called a hotel station, you can see the dormer windows, those were all rooms that would be rented to people who were coming through and on a layover or an evening stay in Ogden. It was quite an important building. It was built, completed, and put in to use in 1889 and lasted until 1923 when it burned down. 6 It got to be a tremendous station. In fact, at its height there would be sixteen passenger tracks where people could unload, plus the freighting areas. The steam engine and all the confusion and bustle of the station really created a lot of, well kind of excitement and a situation. I want to tell a little story here that happened in Ogden. It has to do with a preacher who was traveling across country with his son, about a ten year old boy. As they went across the country his father was talking about heaven and hell, and how confusing and terrible hell was. They ended in Ogden in the middle of the night and had to change trains. So he took his son by the cuff of the neck and walked across the tracks to get on to the next train but going across these tracks, the trains were putting out steam, smoke, and a lot of noise, clatter, and confusion. They boy asked his father, " Father, is this hell?" The father says, " No son, this is Ogden!" The Chamber of Commerce's usual theme " You Can't Get Anywhere Without Coming to Ogden" or, " You Can Go Anywhere from Ogden" was another version of that, or " The Gateway of the West." So this became quite a station, always something going on there. In fact, one of the favorite past times of people was to go down to the train station and watch people who got off the train. There were always some famous kind of people; it had U. S. senators, generals of the army, Indian chiefs, all kinds of things. So that was a past time for many people to go down and watch things happen. Another thing that happened down at the Ogden station were a group of industrial workers in 1894 who came from California on their march towards 7 Washington D. C. to get some relief from their unemployment, they were going to march on Congress. They got to Ogden on the Central Pacific but the Union Pacific would not pick them up and take them farther East because there was a fine of $ 2.00 for every unemployed carrier brought into the states to the East so they would not take them. So these men sat down in Ogden Depot for about eight days and finally marched out up Washington Boulevard, over the hill, took over a train of the Union Pacific at Weber Canyon and went on their way to Washington. After a period of time we had about six trains stolen in Ogden Depot and the National Guard chased them up the canyon several times trying to stop those kinds of things. Another thing that happened at this station was the going and coming of soldiers during the Spanish American War, World War I, and World War II. The station burned down on February 13, 1923. I believe it was started by leaving an iron unattended and it caught on fire and burned the station. They debated whether to rebuild and finally decided to rebuild the station. The last function of this station was on August 14 when the funeral train of Warren G. Harding came through and people crowded down to the station, it was completely overrun with people to see the funeral train. Of course, Harding's reputation hadn't broken out yet about his corruption so he was highly honored on that funeral train. The new station was built in 1924. The architects were John and Donald Parkinson. They had also been the architects for the Hotel Utah, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the Los Angeles Station, and the Los Angeles City Hall, so they were well known architects. 8 This is said to be an Italian Renaissance although it has a lot of Spanish influence. Some call it Spanish Renaissance style. The escargot tile roof had a lot of bright colors on the inside that had been painted over and pretty much removed. Again, railroading was big in this new station. The 1920s, 30s of course was the time of the depression. Railroading dropped off. One man said, " First time in my life on a railroad ticket I could have a car to myself." In the depression time people just did not travel. They did not have the money. It picked up again in World War II. It has been estimated that a hundred nineteen passenger trains a day went through Ogden carrying troops and other things during the war years of World War II. They also had a big ice plant here in Ogden that would restore the cooling systems into the freight cars that carried fruit and other perishable goods to different markets. So you get an idea that railroading was big. Probably at one time as many as three fourths of the population of Ogden was somehow engaged in railroading or its subsidiaries. It is a time period you cannot neglect. I am happy that in 1978 the Ogden City took over the stations. It was going broke, all railroads were in terrible fixes. Rather than seeing the station demolished, or done away with, the city took it over and made it into a community center which houses a nice museum. If we can talk Mayor Godfrey into not destroying it then we might have a jewel here that will last for many years and remind us that railroading in Ogden was an important event especially from 1869 to the mid- 1950s. Thank you very much.

The WSU Stewart Library Annual UC-UI Symposium took place from 2001-2007. The collection consists of memorabilia from the symposium including a yearly keepsake, posters, and presentations through panel discussions or individual lectures. ; Audio Recording ; " You Can't Get Anywhere Without Coming to Ogden: Railroading in the American West" a commemorative panel discussion presented at the 2004 Utah Construction/ Utah International Symposium Making Tracks by Dr. Richard Sadler Thursday, October 7, 2004 2 I grew up on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley and often was involved with, including a couple of summers, working on the railroad that went from Bingham to Magna that carried copper ore from the 1920s, and continues today to carry a concentrated copper that is milled at Copperton to the smelter and refinery on the north end of the Oquirrh mountains. In 1960 I traveled on a one way ticket from Salt Lake on the Western Pacific Railroad on the Feather River route. And as we talked about the Western Pacific I was telling my friend John Sillito I traveled that route, I can tell you what it was like. For many of us railroads are nostalgic. As I thought about us coming together today I thought some of you may have heard Peter, Paul, and Mary saying, " If you miss the train I am on, you will know that I am gone. You can hear the whistle blow…" How far? "… a hundred miles." Some of you will have heard Arlo Guthrie singing, " Riding on the city of New Orleans" traveling from Chicago through Tennessee to New Orleans. Some of you may have seen Gene Wilder in the film Silver Streak. We have railroads in both history and folklore. One hundred and fifty years ago people were talking all about John Henry, that steel driving man, who put himself up against a machine to see who could lay track the quickest. How about Casey Jones the engineer. And how about songs like, " I've been working on the railroad, all the live- long day. I've been working on the railroad to pass the time of day." Of course the live- long day may have meant a twelve hour working 3 day. " Don't you hear the whistle blowing; rise up so early in the morn. Don't you hear the captain shouting, Dina blow your horn." In 1765, the same year that the British Parliament passed the Stamp Act, which would lead, in part, to independence in America, James Watt, a Scotsman, invented an efficient steam engine. Seventeen years later in 1782 he patented it a steam engine that had pistons that would both push and pull and allow energy to be transmitted both ways when it pushed and pulled. The first important railroad in the United States was the Baltimore and Ohio which was begun in 1827 and then, in 1829, Peter Cooper, a New York manufacturer, built a steam engine he called the Tom Thumb. The Tom Thumb was an embarrassment to him because it lost a race against a horse because a belt slipped! It was still not powered in a way that locomotives would soon be powered. In 1833 when the Baltimore and Ohio had 133 miles of track, that was the longest stretch of track in the world. One American who dreamed of a transcontinental railroad and pushed for it in the decade of the 1840s was a man by the name of Asa Whitney. And, of course, two decades later Ogden would become the junction center for the first transcontinental railroad in the world. Railroads in the 19th and early 20th centuries were, to those folks, what today automobiles, rockets, and airplanes are all in one for us. So when we consider how important railroads were for those people, there is some nostalgia attached to it. For example, Carl Sandburg in his poem about Chicago said, " Hot butcher for the world, toolmaker, stacker of 4 wheat, player with railroads, and the nations freight handler, stormy, husky, brawling, a city of big shoulders." Not everyone loved railroads. Henry David Thoreau writing at Walden in 1846 said, " We do not ride upon the railroad, it rides upon us." So there were alternative points of view. I also liked him writing in Walden, " Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes." Another author, Philip Guedalla said, " The true history of the United States is the history of transportation. In which the names or railroad presidents are more significant than those of Presidents of the United States." Bret Hart writing about the May 10, 1869 joining of the rail said, " What was it that the engines said there, and for us we would say at Promontory, touching head to head, facing on a single track, with half a world behind each back?" Here we are in the area of the first transcontinental railroad of the world. Edna St. Vincent Malay and her poem entitled " Travel" said, " My heart is warm with the friends I make and better friends I'll not be knowing. Yet, there isn't a train I wouldn't take, no matter where it's going." And finally Langston Hughes, black poet with great feeling, wrote in his poem " Homesick Blues," " De railroad bridge's a sad song in the air. Ever time the trains pass I wants to go somewhere." So that whistle that still blows in Ogden, and Sacramento, and Omaha, and that even sometimes wakes us up at night, my friend Leisel Large up in Oregon, I am sure it blows a whistle up there too. We are going to be introduced today by my colleagues. I am delighted to introduce Dr. Kathryn MacKay, a member of our history faculty here at Weber, who is going to bring us to Ogden from the East and the Union Pacific Railroad. 5 She will be followed by Dr. Stan Layton, also a member of our history faculty but formerly the editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly for three decades. Stan does not look that old but he started young. He is going to bring us to Ogden from the West and talk about the Central and Southern and Western Pacific. And then our colleague Dr. Richard Roberts, emeritus professor of history, is going to talk about the Utah Central railroad and Ogden as a railroad center so we'll turn the time to these folks. Then we'll ask you for some questions and end up the discussion in that fashion. Does that sound alright? Thank you, Dr. MacKay.