- Salt Lake City celebrates 175 years since its incorporation on Friday.
- Originally named Great Salt Lake City, it became Utah's capital in 1856.
- Seraph Young cast the first U.S. female ballot in Salt Lake City.
SALT LAKE CITY — Pioneers settled in what would become Salt Lake City in 1847, and the land has ties to the ancient Pueblo people and Native American tribes well before that, but this year marks a pivotal anniversary in the city's history.
Salt Lake City officially became a city 175 years ago on Friday, when the city incorporated. A little more than 6,000 people lived in the entire county at the time, a fraction of the city's current population that is now estimated to be over 215,000 and counting.
In honor of its dodransbicentennial, the following are a few facts about the city's history.
Salt Lake City wasn't originally Utah's capital
Utah's capital city wasn't always Utah's capital city. The city incorporated only months after the U.S. designated Utah as a territory, but Fillmore — a little more than 125 miles to the southwest — was originally Utah's capital city.
Although Salt Lake City was Utah's largest city and cultural center in 1850, territorial leaders created Fillmore in 1851 because it was the territory's geographic center. They even went so far as to partially build a Capitol building that remains a state historic site, but territorial leaders never completed the project because they never received the funding, and they realized that Fillmore was too far away from resources.
"Legislators complained about the lack of housing and adequate facilities in Fillmore," Yvette Ison wrote in a 1995 edition of History Blazer. "Rather than being the thriving capital city that many had imagined, Fillmore remained a small rural community with little outside communication or industrial development."
It reached a boiling point in 1856, when leaders paused their legislative assembly to reconvene in Salt Lake City. By the end of that session, they agreed to designate the city as the new capital. It's stuck ever since.
The city shortened its original name
The city's name today is a bit shorter than it was in 1851 or even when it became the capital city. It was initially Great Salt Lake City, as a nod to the shores of the Great Salt Lake, but the city dropped "Great" for "practical purposes" in 1868, the late John VanCott wrote in the book "Utah Place Names."
Territorial leadership actually finalized this process, which appears in old newspapers at the time. The Deseret News appears to be among the first to acknowledge this change, dropping "Great" from its masthead the day after it reported on it.
It has very unique blocks
Salt Lake City isn't alone in having a grid system, but its blocks stand out from other cities.
Its 660 feet by 660 feet block dimensions are among the largest in the nation. The podcast "99% Invisible" highlighted this in 2016, noting that some blocks are longer, but none are as uniformly large as Salt Lake City's primary grid.
This predates the pioneer settlement of 1847 by over a decade. Joseph Smith designed a plat for the "City of Zion" in 1833, that called for the large city blocks stacked together. Brigham Young and other pioneers took that vision with them, using an adapted version of the design that they proposed within days of settling in the valley, per Craig Galli, a Salt Lake City attorney who wrote about the plat's history for BYU.
On top of the large blocks, some streets were designed to have 132-foot-wide streets, which were designed to be wide enough for a wagon team to turn around without "resorting to profanity," as the Deseret News noted.
This unique design was immortalized in uniform. Real Salt Lake unveiled a "Grid City" kit last year, paying homage to these blocks.
A center of transportation and communications
Salt Lake City earned the nickname "Crossroads of the West" because of its location on the railroad, but its national significance came from other major communications advancements. It's also been at the center of many achievements since.
Salt Lake City was a vital stop on the short-lived Pony Express, a venture that ended largely because of the transcontinental telegraph that was completed in Salt Lake City in 1861, as noted by the Utah Historical Society.
When the transcontinental railroad was completed north of Salt Lake City in 1869, it didn't take long for Salt Lake City to connect to the line. The city's railroad corridor, which still exists today, was established in the early 1870s.
U.S. 89, I-15 and I-80 would ultimately link the city with the rest of the country by road as the automobile gained popularity. It also played a role in aviation history, serving as one of the stops on the first transcontinental air route.
It was also at the center of the online era. The University of Utah was part of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, which ultimately paved the way for the internet.
Salt Lake City has a place in women's suffrage history
Wyoming was the first territory or state to allow women to vote, but because of election timing, history ended up taking place in Utah.
Seraph Young, a schoolteacher, cast her vote in a Salt Lake City mayoral election in February 1870, making her the first woman to cast a ballot during an election with equal suffrage law.
The room where it happened still exists, but in a different part of the city. The historic Salt Lake City Council Hall was ultimately relocated from the corner of 100 South and State Street to across the street from the Utah Capitol, making way for the Wallace F. Bennett Federal Building in the 1960s.
