All aboard! Union Pacific Depot turns 100

In early August 1909, Salt Lake City was gearing up for what would be the largest convention in the city's history: the 43rd Encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic.

Perhaps as many as 70,000 Civil War veterans, their families and other visitors would arrive in the city, and most would come by rail.

Salt Lake's rail yards received daily notices of special trains and special cars that would be bringing delegates to the convention, and the city was all set to put on a grand spectacle for them.

Passengers arriving on the Oregon Short Line Railroad or the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad would be greeted with a spectacle all their own: a brand-new depot, which had opened just days earlier at "the foot of South Temple street."

The Deseret News called it a building erected on an "elaborate scale" and noted it was "one of the finest passenger stations in the entire West" and "an ornament and credit to the city."

The paper gave a further description: "The structure itself is of reinforced concrete. The building is in three parts, the central portion being free from inside columns and containing a general waiting room … The finish of the building is dignified and harmonious."

The "Grand Hall," 136 feet long by 100 feet wide, had a round vaulted ceiling. Two large oil-on-canvas murals, one at each end, had been painted by San Francisco artist John McQuarries. One showed Brigham Young declaring "This is the place," and the other depicted the "Driving of the Golden Spike" at Promontory Point in 1869.

The west wall of the waiting room, which overlooked the tracks, had five stained-glass windows done by another San Francisco artist, Harry Hopp, showing mountains, trestles, agricultural scenes and forms of transportation.

"The lighting of the building is a feature in itself," noted the Deseret News.

"Each arch is illuminated by 18 incandescents, and a row of closely spaced lights runs all around the room."

Several side rooms were originally used for separate male and female waiting areas. The building also housed an emergency hospital, lunch room, baggage rooms, offices for the two railroads and a newsstand, which was believed to have been located in the northwest corner.

Perhaps some of those first visitors to the depot stopped to look around in awe. One hundred years later, modern visitors can still do the same.