A Modest Homestead: Life in Small Adobe Homes in Salt Lake City, 1850–1897 - Softcover

Laurie J. Bryant (author)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607815257 ISBN 13: 9781607815259

Publisher: The University of Utah Press, 2017

Synopsis

Stories of the ordinary people who helped build Salt Lake City emerge from a study of their often humble adobe houses. Rather than focusing on men and women in positions of power and influence, the emphasis here is on the lives of people who built their sturdy, simple homes from mud.

A Modest Homestead provides architectural descriptions of ninety-four extant adobe houses. They are as basic as the people who built them―small tradesmen and farmers, laborers and domestics. Author Laurie Bryant discusses the neighbourhoods in Salt Lake City where adobe houses have survived, often much renovated and disguised, and she showcases the houses not just as they appear today but as they were originally built. Almost all the houses now have additions and improvements, and without some dissection they are not always recognisable, often being both more comfortable and pleasant than might have been the case in the nineteenth century. What emerges through Bryant’s research is an enlarged picture of the roughhewn life of many early Utahns. Includes 120 historic and contemporary photographs.

About this title

About the Author

Laurie J. Bryant is a transplanted Californian and retired paleontologist. After living in Salt Lake City for ten years, she was drawn to the city’s adobe buildings and to the people who built them.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of Utah Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1607815257
• ISBN 13: 9781607815259
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 296