Deseret News | Historical treasures in the attic: Pioneer Craft House tour leads to 'scholarly' find

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Historical treasures in the attic: Pioneer Craft House tour leads to 'scholarly' find

13 comments | Read story

aww | 2:41 p.m. Nov. 14, 2009

some more artifacts...how sweet..now watch out for hanti-virus!

Anonymous | 2:52 p.m. Nov. 14, 2009

If you look at the pictures you notice they have ventilators. Are you always this negative?

geedub | 10:07 p.m. Nov. 14, 2009

That would be hanta virus and respiraters.

Comments continue below

lls | 8:38 p.m. Nov. 16, 2009

Thank you Officer McCullough for figuring out there might be something above in storage, who knows how many more decades it would have gone undiscovered. I hope the families of these students are located that some of these things can be shared with them.

Altes Haus | 11:19 p.m. Nov. 17, 2009

Let's check the chewing gum to see if there is any DNA left. Maybe a particular desk belonged to the John Scott family that originally built the first school house on that property. . . This is fun, a few octogenarians have already come by to check out one of the school desks on display. Confirming with huge smiles, that they used to sit at desks just like this.

JMT | 5:54 a.m. Nov. 19, 2009

This is world class neat! I hope they somehow display this formally. They should take the letters and scan them into pdf files so they could be read over the internet.

I wonder how many other urban treasurers like this are waiting to be discovered?

Matthew | 8:29 a.m. Nov. 19, 2009

Cool, but I doubt the students were using quills in the 1890's. I'm sure they were using brass nibs on a wooden pen or holder. Fountain pens were available, but were likely to expensive and fragile for students to use. The ball-point pen didn't become practical until World War II and even then didn't replace the fountain pen for a number of years. Some of the desks that I used in elementary school in the 1960's and early 1970's still had ink wells in them, even though we never used them.

Anonymous | 9:17 a.m. Nov. 19, 2009

Were there any seer stones found?

Jeanie b. | 10:23 a.m. Nov. 19, 2009

So... do you take the gum off or not?

barbara | 10:50 a.m. Nov. 19, 2009

to geedub: that would be respirators.

Anonymous | 1:43 p.m. Nov. 19, 2009

I was in 1st grade in Hyde Park in 1949 and some of the desks that we used had holes in them for ink wells.

What an interesting find .. I hope they do another article and include pictures and tell who all of the students were. I hope that they can find the great-grand children.

bestgrandpa | 2:40 p.m. Nov. 19, 2009

That would be cool if they found some old baseball cards! Great story!

Altes Haus | 10:14 p.m. Nov. 19, 2009

Our pre war desks in Germany had spaces for wells also, but no gum. I think that is an American thing? We'll see about examining it. . . . .
One of the desks is already on display now. You can come and see it this Sat between noon and 5 p.m. We'll even let you sit at it, but quietly, we have an art show and cello performance going on. We have gone high class :-) Any written work has to be cleaned first and since we have three events coming up we won't have time until after Christmas.
Does anyone know what the initials S L B Y on a baseball shirt could have stood for in 1890? May be Salt Lake Baseball Youth?

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3 photos

Brian Nicholson, Deseret News

John Riedel lowers a desk found in the attic of the Pioneer Craft House in South Salt Lake on Saturday. Teaching materials from the 1890s and 1900s were also found.

Gallery (3 photos)