Brigham City is one step closer to being put on the National Historic Places.
BRIGHAM CITY-Alana Blumenthal Brigham City Museum Director was ecstatic after being notified yesterday morning The Utah National Register Review Board unanimously supported their request for designating for the city to be named a historical place.
Brigham City is one step closer to being on the National Register of Historic Places. They should no in 45 days.
“One of the first orders of business when I got the job here was to move forward with getting the designation of the historic district,” she said. “The process took 3 years, 2 grant cycles, 1,813 site surveys, and 100s of hours to make happen, all to benefit the unique historic character of our town.”
The oldest structure in the town is a 1855 resident at 13 N. 200 E. the Christen Hansen residents. There are over 1,000 other buildings including the Tabernacle dedicated in 1897. The county building and the train depot that also falls within the district.
“This whole process has been supported by the city council and administration from the first day,” Blumenthal said. “This was community effort we’ve had a volunteer board and we worked with the Utah State Historical Office the whole way.”
More than 60 percent of the buildings in the new historic district are considered “contributing,” that’s almost unheard of, and goes to show just how historically important Brigham City is to the history of the state.
“We owe a huge thanks to the members of our Historic Preservation Committee, our contractor: Angie Abram of Storiagraph, and Brigham City for supporting this important work,” she said.
Blumenthal said they worked with the state historic office and their contractor Abram during the process.
“This been long overdue,” she said. ”Brigham City is a unique city, there is nothing like it in the state of Utah.”
Brigham City was the first industrialized city in the state
The 33 page application had a number of pictures of buildings attached.
The application includes a physical description of the earliest buildings as classical architecture prior to 1869 and Late Victorian Eclectic architecture after the arrival of the railroad in 1869.
The Box Elder county seat has a very well preserved and highly varied selection of both vernacular classical Utah residential architecture and Late Victorian architecture.
The varied architecture shows the economic prosperity of Brigham City during its cooperative period between 1864-1879 as well as its connection between northern railroads and the transcontinental railroad between1871 and the completion of the Lucin Cutoff in 1904.