Daughters of Utah Pioneers celebrates history

For the first few decades in the Salt Lake Valley, the Mormon pioneers were too busy working to pay much attention to what they had done.

From the 50-year milestone, however, they began to look back and take stock of their remarkable achievements. It was time for a Jubilee.

There had been some nice Pioneer Day celebrations previously, but nothing like the 50th anniversary, which, as the Deseret News of the day proclaimed, was "a pageant of magnificence never before approached in the West."

Six days of parades and processions celebrated not only the arrival of the pioneers but also the recent completion of the Salt Lake Temple and even more recent designation of statehood.

That extraordinary celebration left a number of legacies, one of which was a more concerted effort to honor the pioneers and to collect and preserve pioneer artifacts. Another was a society to encourage and carry out those duties.

For the Jubilee, a call went out asking for the donation of pioneer artifacts, which were then housed in a special building — designed to look like the Greek Parthenon. Artifacts that arrived included personal effects of Brigham Young, the first volume of the Deseret News, copies of the Times and Seasons, Bibles and other books, a collection of canes owned by prominent pioneers, photographs and daguerreotypes, needlework, household items, musical instruments, chairs, tools, guns and cannons, prehistoric and modern Indian artifacts, pioneer wagons, William Clayton's roadometer and more.

After the Jubilee, the relic hall was torn down and the artifacts moved to a number of locations.

Meanwhile, the spirit of the Jubilee led a group of pioneer descendants in Provo to form a patriotic society known as the Sons and Daughters of the Pioneers of Utah County. Three years later, a number of Salt Lake women wanted to organize a similar society, but with membership confined to daughters only. The Daughters of the Utah Pioneers was born.

In time, especially because one of the early aims of the DUP was to collect relics, many of the artifacts from the Jubilee came to the society, and they began to add more and more items to the collection. Early on, they dreamed of building their own relic hall, a goal that was finally realized in 1950.

The story of this artifact collecting and stories behind many of the artifacts and the people who owned them will be told in a new series of books titled "Museum Memories," which is being published by the now International Society Daughters of Utah Pioneers.