Governor residence: Mansion to home, back to mansion

Many Utahns are familiar with the historic Kearns Mansion, located on east South Temple, as today's official residence of the state's governors.

But for more than two decades, from 1959 to 1980, Utah's governors occupied a large but nondescript ranch-style home in the Federal Heights neighborhood of Salt Lake City.

Known as the Governor's Residence, the 4,000-plus-square-foot, one-story home was built amid a bit of controversy.

The Kearns Mansion, which was built in 1902 by U.S. Senator Thomas Kearns, a prominent Utah mining magnate, had been donated to the state in 1937 by Kearns' widow, Jennie.

In 1957, Governor J. Bracken Lee thought a new governor's mansion in the Federal Heights area of Salt Lake City was in order. The Kearns Mansion was in poor repair and the state was paying from $25,000 to $40,000 a year to maintain the building.

(Photos that accompany this article were selected by North Salt Lake photo researcher Ron Fox from Deseret News archives.)

The suggested change in the governor's residence set off a beehive of controversy. Not everyone was happy with the proposed change.

The Ladies Literary Club of Salt Lake City, which circulated a petition to retain the Kearns Mansion as the governor's official residence, expressed concerns about plans to turn the building over to the State Historical Society

The petition read: "In 1937 the mansion was offered free by the Jennie J. Kearns family with the understanding that it would be used as a governor's mansion. In our opinion, any use contrary to the spirit of the gift and spirit of its acceptance is breaking faith with the donors and beneath the moral and ethical standards we expect in our government."

A letter accompanying the petition describes the mansion as "one of the finest if not THE finest governor's home in the United States."

Since the governor's residence is state property, all major decisions about the building must come in the form of a legislative bill. After lawmakers determined that a new residence was preferred, a legislative committee met in 1957 to select a site and build a governor's residence.

They chose a beautiful location at 1270 Fairfax Road, now just across the street from the Shriners Hospital.