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Pioneer Property in Salt Lake City
Glen M. Leonard
The Latter-day Saints left Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1846 with clear memories of a contest between competing land agents. In the Salt Lake Valley, Brigham Young established an orderly land distribution system to limit the profit motive. Each family received without cost a 1.25-acre city plot, one of eight in each 10-acre block. Men with plural wives could claim additional lots. Farm plots south of Ninth South were 5, 10, and 20 acres. Settlers agreed not to divide or sell their property, a provision not long enforced.
With the initial survey launched on August 3, 1847, members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles selected their city lots near the temple block. Brigham Young eventually built his office and homes east of a corner reserved for the Deseret Store and Tithing Office. Heber C. Kimball claimed the next block north, while Willard Richards, the other counselor in the First Presidency, picked lots just south of Temple Square. Other General Authorities built nearby. TogEther these Church officials owned most of eight blocks surrounding Temple Square. Recorder Thomas Bullock charged a $1.25 recording fee, but owners received legal title only after the U.S. government established a land office in 1873.
Other 1847 pioneers, wintering in the log fort on Block 48, waited a year for building lots. After Church leaders returned from Winter Quarters in September 1848, they allocated city lots through a lottery. The 1847 migration had numbered 2,000 immigrants; the arriving 1848 migration would double that number. The city expanded to meet growing needs. To supplement the useful lots in the 113 blocks of Plot A (22 blocks on the northern hillside were not assigned), Church leaders immediately added Plot B with 63 blocks to the east. Surveys in 1849 and 1850 added 24 blocks to the west (Plot C) and 240 smaller, four-lot blocks (18 of them set aside for a cemetery) on the slopes to the northeast (Plot D). Only one-third of Brigham Young's pioneer party of July 1847 received lots in Plot A; many of them settled elsewhere in the expanding city or in other communities (some single men were not ready to claim lots). Returning Mormon Battalion veterans who claimed lots in Plot A settled mostly in the northernmost tiers or west and south of the fort. So did a few of the Mississippi Saints, but most of that 1847-1848 immigrant company settled ten miles away, on a plot created for them at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon.