The Tithing Yard was across the street from Temple Square, on the site of today’s Joseph Smith Memorial Building (Hotel Utah) and extending north toward where the Relief Society Building now stands. (The date of 1900 is a rough estimate: The temple has been completed and landscape is filling in, so it’s past 1893, probably by several years; it’s before 1909 when construction began on the Hotel Utah. I welcome a more precise date from readers who spot other clues or know of a documented source.)
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MLA: Parshall, Ardis E. "Tithing Yard, circa 1900." Keepapitchin.org, 24 Aug 2015, https://keepapitchinin.org/2015/08/24/tithing-yard-circa-1900/.
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11 thoughts on “Tithing Yard, circa 1900”
That is a 1902 buckboard wagon (the one with the Hemi), err…
I have no clue as to the year.
Maybe the tree height on the temple could be helpful?
With enough dated comparison photos, your hint would probably pin it down. Without comparisons, what can we deduce? Perhaps this: The trees are inside the temple wall, so would not likely have been growing there during construction, even once construction had shifted from exterior to interior — there would have been just too much waste around, and too many piles of building materials, and too much coming and going by workmen, I think. Landscaping probably didn’t begin until the temple was all but spit-polished.
On the other hand, the trees are large enough that they might have been growing there for several years — without huge trucks and hoisting equipment (whatever it’s called), trees that large would have been hard to transport and transplant, wouldn’t they?
This is all speculation on my part, without the slightest bit of claimed expertise. I just think it’s fun to try. Thanks for joining me, el oso.
That looks like a very big yard. Lots of coming and going. Tithing in kind was very big in those days. You can still call the Tithing In Kind Office, not sure what qualifies as kind now days. Maybe real estate, things like that. Very interesting picture.
I think you’re right, Mex — real estate, stocks, maybe even things like art works. Probably not a bushel of carrots anymore. 🙂 Pictures like this are certainly windows into different worlds, aren’t they? Glad you liked it.
I love the contrast between the busy tithing yard and the peaceful temple — God’s work, all of it.
I remember my brother telling me about handling tithing in kind as a branch clerk in Ukraine on his mission, not too many years ago. In some places, we’re not too far out from the bushel of carrots model. I don’t remember the exact details, but it involved something like the branch using fast offering funds to buy the tithing potatoes, so that tithing was converted to currency and fast offerings were used to feed the hungry.
Very late to comment on this one, but I have a little to add. The top of the wall in the left part of the photo is clearly missing the top layers of bricks. It would probably be in good repair, unless it was already known that the tithing yard would shortly make place for the Hotel Utah.
The same image is available online here (unfortunately a reverse image search didn’t find it, but a manual query of the database did), along with two other photos by the same photographer. One unrelated photo has a date before 1900, the other is of the Union Pacific Station (built 1908, according to wikipedia). If this photo was taken near the same time, that would put it after 1908.
If this complete and utter speculation hasn’t convinced you, there’s also a map of the tithing yard (really, who puts this stuff online? It’s great.) that labels the area this photo is taken from as a feed corral- not the usage in this photo. All of that seems to put this photo at the end of the tithing yard’s lifetime.
Love those Sanborn maps, although that one leaves a person wondering why the Deseret News had a “few hand grenades” in the office. (!)
Haha! It isn’t what you think at first, Amy — they were fire-fighting devices, so something you might expect a night watchman to have, and appropriate for noting on a fire insurance map. The ad is from the 8 March 1895 Salt Lake Herald. The globes were filled with water, or with sodium bicarbonate, or with chemicals that *may* have helped put out a fire but which certainly were as deadly as fire to anyone too close — carbonic acid! (chlorine gas) carbon tetrachloride! (which forms dead phosgene gas in the presence of — get this — heat).
(Not an expert. Just a Googler.)
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My grandmother had some of those hand grenades (I never heard anyone call them that) in her house. They looked like pretty, red ornaments on fancy little silver holders hung on the walls. They had a lead and wax plug in the bottom so a fire would melt the plug and it would spray out the liquid inside. Or you could pick them up and throw them at the flame, breaking the glass. I only know that because I read the instructions one day. Now I wonder that no one ever told me to stop touching them. I was very little.
Wow. Who would have guessed! I never have read a history of firefighting, except in regards to Benjamin Franklin. From a quick glance it looks like the definitive work is Bruce Hensler’s Crucible of Fire: Nineteenth-Century Urban Fires and the Making of the Modern Fire Service, and it also looks like there’s room for additional treatments of the subject.
Interesting change in meaning with grenades, I have a hard time imaging they would be very effective, unless the fire had just started.
The insurance map labels the corral as Sheets Bro’s, was that separate from the tithing yard?
That is a 1902 buckboard wagon (the one with the Hemi), err…
I have no clue as to the year.
Maybe the tree height on the temple could be helpful?
With enough dated comparison photos, your hint would probably pin it down. Without comparisons, what can we deduce? Perhaps this: The trees are inside the temple wall, so would not likely have been growing there during construction, even once construction had shifted from exterior to interior — there would have been just too much waste around, and too many piles of building materials, and too much coming and going by workmen, I think. Landscaping probably didn’t begin until the temple was all but spit-polished.
On the other hand, the trees are large enough that they might have been growing there for several years — without huge trucks and hoisting equipment (whatever it’s called), trees that large would have been hard to transport and transplant, wouldn’t they?
This is all speculation on my part, without the slightest bit of claimed expertise. I just think it’s fun to try. Thanks for joining me, el oso.
That looks like a very big yard. Lots of coming and going. Tithing in kind was very big in those days. You can still call the Tithing In Kind Office, not sure what qualifies as kind now days. Maybe real estate, things like that. Very interesting picture.
I think you’re right, Mex — real estate, stocks, maybe even things like art works. Probably not a bushel of carrots anymore. 🙂 Pictures like this are certainly windows into different worlds, aren’t they? Glad you liked it.
I love the contrast between the busy tithing yard and the peaceful temple — God’s work, all of it.
I remember my brother telling me about handling tithing in kind as a branch clerk in Ukraine on his mission, not too many years ago. In some places, we’re not too far out from the bushel of carrots model. I don’t remember the exact details, but it involved something like the branch using fast offering funds to buy the tithing potatoes, so that tithing was converted to currency and fast offerings were used to feed the hungry.
Very late to comment on this one, but I have a little to add. The top of the wall in the left part of the photo is clearly missing the top layers of bricks. It would probably be in good repair, unless it was already known that the tithing yard would shortly make place for the Hotel Utah.
The same image is available online here (unfortunately a reverse image search didn’t find it, but a manual query of the database did), along with two other photos by the same photographer. One unrelated photo has a date before 1900, the other is of the Union Pacific Station (built 1908, according to wikipedia). If this photo was taken near the same time, that would put it after 1908.
If this complete and utter speculation hasn’t convinced you, there’s also a map of the tithing yard (really, who puts this stuff online? It’s great.) that labels the area this photo is taken from as a feed corral- not the usage in this photo. All of that seems to put this photo at the end of the tithing yard’s lifetime.
Love those Sanborn maps, although that one leaves a person wondering why the Deseret News had a “few hand grenades” in the office. (!)
Haha! It isn’t what you think at first, Amy — they were fire-fighting devices, so something you might expect a night watchman to have, and appropriate for noting on a fire insurance map. The ad is from the 8 March 1895 Salt Lake Herald. The globes were filled with water, or with sodium bicarbonate, or with chemicals that *may* have helped put out a fire but which certainly were as deadly as fire to anyone too close — carbonic acid! (chlorine gas) carbon tetrachloride! (which forms dead phosgene gas in the presence of — get this — heat).
(Not an expert. Just a Googler.)
.
.
.
My grandmother had some of those hand grenades (I never heard anyone call them that) in her house. They looked like pretty, red ornaments on fancy little silver holders hung on the walls. They had a lead and wax plug in the bottom so a fire would melt the plug and it would spray out the liquid inside. Or you could pick them up and throw them at the flame, breaking the glass. I only know that because I read the instructions one day. Now I wonder that no one ever told me to stop touching them. I was very little.
Wow. Who would have guessed! I never have read a history of firefighting, except in regards to Benjamin Franklin. From a quick glance it looks like the definitive work is Bruce Hensler’s Crucible of Fire: Nineteenth-Century Urban Fires and the Making of the Modern Fire Service, and it also looks like there’s room for additional treatments of the subject.
Interesting change in meaning with grenades, I have a hard time imaging they would be very effective, unless the fire had just started.
The insurance map labels the corral as Sheets Bro’s, was that separate from the tithing yard?