'Gigantic grandeur': Vintage photos detail first marketing of Zion National Park

On May 15, 1920, the gate officially swung open for the new Zion National Park. It had been a monument for some time and had been visited before, but now it was a member of the National Park system.

Sitting on the gate as it swung wide were five University of Utah coeds and one California teenager with Utah ties who had been invited by the Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad to be the park's first official tourists and to participate in a promotion campaign to introduce the "gigantic grandeur" to the world.

The six were Anna Gaarden Widtsoe, Isadora (Dora) Montague, Elizabeth Mildred Gerrard (who went by Mildred), Agness Ellen (Nell) Creer and Melba Victoria Dunyon, all students at the U.; and Catherine Alice Levering, who had recently moved to California to study dance.

The opening of Zion National Park and its first tourists were widely covered by the press, not only in Utah but worldwide. Yet it is a story that has largely been forgotten — until now.

Melissa Clark likes to go online to look at vintage photographs. "They are usually pretty expensive, so I don't buy them." But as she was looking at old photo albums in the summer of 2008, she came across a photo of a John Fairbanks painting in what was obviously Zion National Park.

"My grandfather was Calvin Fletcher, and he took classes from John Fairbanks," she says, "so I thought it might be worth looking at."

The blurb for that album mentioned a companion book about a "trip taken to Zion by five U. of U. girls. There were only one or two pictures shown, which was unusual, but I was intrigued enough to put in a bid."

Often these vintage scrapbooks are quite costly. "There was one recently about the Alaskan Gold Rush that went for over a thousand dollars." So, she was quite pleased when she got both books for a total of $131.66, even though she had no idea what she was getting.

"I expected something with typical snapshots of the day. What I got was a book filled with professionally taken photographs and a variety of news clippings." It was the scrapbook of one of the girls who had been on the promotional trip to Zion.

She and her husband, John, who works as a graphic designer at the Deseret News, scanned and printed some of the pages and took them to Zion. They showed them to the curator of the Human History Museum. She had never seen them. Lyman Hafen, "who has studied the park and everything about it for the past 20 years, saw them, and he had never heard about it. That's when we thought maybe we had something," John says.