Utah Stories from the Beehive Archive

Joe Hill has become a deeply ingrained part of Utah folklore. The Wobbly songwriter was executed for murder in the state in the early 1900s.

Many people know about the Japanese internment camp Topaz, but Utah also held Italian and German prisoners of war during World War II.

Learn about Utah's convict labor system and how prisoners actually formed the backbone of some of our early public works projects – especially road construction.

The creation of the Spanish Speaking Organization for Community, Integrity, and Opportunity in Salt Lake City sought to identify problems of the Spanish-speaking minority. This group worked on behalf of the community to improve equality and access to opportunity in Utah.

The story of an ambitious and successful young woman who lived in polygamy.

Mormon women wrote and published a newspaper for and about Mormon women. The paper had a small circulation and was replaced with the Relief Society Magazine shortly after the newspaper declined. 

After Elizabeth Wood Kane arrived in Utah with her husband, her letters home became the manuscript for a book about Utah culture. Her writings shed some important light on the frontier and Mormon social customs. 

The early political history of Utah women began with the 1870 law that gave women the right to vote. 

 Female Methodist missionaries in Utah forged relationships with women across religious lines, protecting and advocating for women in need throughout the state. 

Voters from Utah went crazy for Democratic presidential hopeful William Jennings Bryan in the election of 1896. 

The presence of the Ku Klux Klan was not just limited to the southern United States. In fact, the KKK had grown enough to march through the streets of Salt Lake City in the early 1920s.

The old Hotel Utah has a storied history of hospitality that is shadowed by the racial prejudice common throughout Utah right into the 1960s.

In the mid-nineteen eighties, global pressure was mounting against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Learn how persistent student activists at the University of Utah forced their campus to confront its connections to an oppressive regime half a world away.

Welsh immigrants brought with them valuable skills that laid the foundation for Utah's early mining industry. 

You've seen her. She wears the red bandanna and a blue collared shirt, flexing her bicep with a look that says, “get to work.” She's Rosie the Riveter, and Utah had an army of them.

The United States has a long history of limiting immigration and managing migrants once they are here, including a campaign to register non-citizen immigrants living in Utah.  

Over long years of colonization, the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation faced severe setbacks. But the Tribe continued to adapt to new conditions and found ways to preserve their culture and traditions. 

Utah's snowy peaks and valleys became the stage for athletes from around the world during the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake. But the Games were much more than a sporting competition. 

Utah history isn't just about the people who lived and worked here. It's also about some of the oldest living organisms in our state – trees! Learn more about our arborous elders.

Nine Mile Canyon contains an estimated 10,000 rock art sites created over a thousand years ago, and that's just the beginning of the canyon's historic and cultural value. But natural gas exploration and extraction nearby pose challenges to preservation efforts.

When you flip your light switch, do you know which part of rural Utah your electricity is coming from? Historically, fuel for the energy grid came from rural areas in the form of fossil fuels. But even as utilities transition to alternative energy, that energy is still sourced in rural Utah.

The switch from Utah being a net importer of turkeys to becoming a substantial exporter in the 1920s can be attributed to the efforts of one man -- Benjamin Brown -- and the poultry co-operative he organized. 

Today, we have 24 hour news channels and TikTok to share breaking news and current trends. But for Utahns isolated by distance in the early 20th century, the radio did a tremendous job of connecting residents in rural communities to each other and to the larger world.

In the late nineteenth century, the local Granary building in Ephraim gave women an unusual public presence on Main Street, and became a proud symbol of early female autonomy, economic success, and charitable endeavors.

Just like alfalfa fields and amazing vistas, art is easy to find in rural Utah. It is also a major economic driver.

Living in a historic home can be lovely – but for Spring City residents in the 1970s, the influx of so-called "outsiders" sprucing up pioneer-era historic dwellings was a source of contention.

Running underneath Cedar City is a concrete tunnel that is now a hang-out for adventurous kids and graffiti artists. But, what was this secret pathway originally intended to do?

Today, Salt Lake City's urban sprawl and poor air quality are noteworthy, but the problem isn't exactly new. Public parks were once seen as an antidote to the bad effects of increasing urbanization -- kind of like a little bit of the "country" in the city, if you will.

Every weekend across Utah, dancers fill nightclubs twisting to the latest tunes. But did you know that one of the most extravagant and celebrated dance halls in the Beehive State was found in the remote town of Delta? Learn what all the fuss was about.

Demand for copper in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reshaped Utah's once-rural Bingham Canyon into an enormous open-pit mine supported by thriving company towns. But that same demand for copper went on to consume those same company towns.

Today, remote learning usually happens over a computer. But did you know that Utah colleges once used airplanes to bring professors directly to classrooms in rural areas? These "flying professor" programs represent just one chapter in a longer history of distance education.

When local officials in southern Utah's Grand County declared independence from the federal Bureau of Land Management in 1980, they took rhetoric of small government and individual freedom to a whole new level.

When you think of Utah's desert lands, do you picture a pristine wilderness or an arid waste? How we treat this landscape depends on the value that we assign to it.

Every autumn, large crowds descend on the small rural town of Brigham City for "Peach Days." It's the oldest harvest festival in Utah. And it all started with a one dollar investment in peach pits back in 1855.

The United States federal government controls about 65% of land in Utah. The goal of maintaining these lands for public use tends to polarize Utahns. But there was a time when Utah leaders were not averse to federal regulation of public lands. (Wait...what?)

Canyonlands is more than just Utah's third national park. Its designation in 1964 occurred after a fight over who exactly public lands are meant for. 

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

When Carbon County coal miners from the National Miners Union went on strike in 1933, their wives, sisters, and daughters were right there beside them. These women proved to be formidable adversaries in the fight for workers' rights. 

Urban spaces in twentieth century Utah are known for their vice -- gambling, prostitution and more. But did you know the last brothel to close in Utah was actually in a rural town? 

In the 1940s, new roads, affordable cars, and an interest in national parks meant that more Americans were packing up their vehicles and hitting the open road. For Black travelers driving through rural areas of Utah, the Green Book was a vital resource for getting around safely. 

There are only three roads in Utah that bridge the Colorado River, and only a handful of crossings. The ghost town of Dewey is one of those places and early settlers of the region made good use of this crossing.

A former railroad and ranching hub, the tiny settlement of Cisco became a ghost town after highway travel through the remote area was rerouted. But is Cisco still a ghost town today?

Down a bumpy canyon road in the Book Cliffs of southeastern Utah, curious travelers can find the ghost town of Sego. Named for Utah's state flower, it's a dusty coal town with a colorful past. 

Saddles, denim, country music, and… drag queens? It's an unexpected combination but an important one for community and belonging in queer rural Utah. 

So, you are a giant aerospace company and you want to build a rocket plant: what do you look for?  This week, learn how one Utah town met all the requirements to become a center for the US rocket industry and how that decision forever changed its future.

In 1928, a women's club in Moab adopted an official song that crowed: “In this little town of ours, we have a literary club, and we derive from it everything good, it helps the town and public in numerous ways.” Learn more about these women and their service.

Do you know where your food comes from? Utahns once depended on local butchers for fresh meat. But, in the early 1900s business boomed for the Ogden Union Stockyards, signaling a shift in how and where Utahns purchased their food.

Just around 45 miles west of Salt Lake City is a vast landscape shrouded in mystery and controversy. It's also a holding place for some of the US military's deadliest materials.

Potato growing clubs became all the rage in the early 20th century as interest in a formal agricultural education grew.

World War II and the Cold War brought the military to much of rural Utah, transforming those places in the process. The economic boost that followed was long-lasting in some communities, but devastatingly short-lived in others.

Rugged individualism is practically synonymous with the American West, and mountain men are the embodiment of that ideal. But the ideal tends to mask the real significance – and legacy – of mountain men in Utah.