They called it Zion. Not on the territorial maps, not on the railroad timetables, but in the hymns and the journals of the people who walked there. From the 1850s through to the turn of the twentieth century, if you climbed out of Emigration Canyon and looked down into the basin, you were looking at a city that did not exist five years earlier. Six granite spires rising out of a desert valley. A Tabernacle built like an upturned ship’s hull. And a story that began in upstate New York and ended at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains.
The Place
Salt Lake City sits in a high desert valley at about 4,300 feet, hemmed in by the Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west, with the Great Salt Lake spreading flat and white to the northwest. The streets run on a numbered grid radiating from Temple Square at the heart of downtown, a holdover from Brigham Young’s 1847 plat. South Temple, North Temple, and West Temple frame the original ten-acre block. The TRAX light rail and Interstate 15 thread through the valley today, but the bones of the city are still pioneer geometry.
How It Became Mormon
A New Religion in Upstate New York
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organised on April 6, 1830, in Fayette, New York, by Joseph Smith Jr. and a handful of early followers. Smith taught that he had translated the Book of Mormon from golden plates revealed by an angel, and within a decade the movement had thousands of converts.
Persecution followed almost from the beginning. The Saints were driven from Ohio, then from Missouri, then settled at Nauvoo, Illinois, where Smith built a city of around 12,000 people on a bend of the Mississippi. In June 1844, Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob at the Carthage Jail in Illinois.
The Trek West, 1846 to 1847
Brigham Young, then president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, took over leadership of the largest body of Saints and made the decision to leave the United States entirely. In the winter of 1846, the main body crossed the frozen Mississippi out of Nauvoo and pushed west across Iowa.
An advance company set out from the Missouri River in April 1847. Scouts Orson Pratt and Erastus Snow rode into the Salt Lake Valley on July 21, three days ahead of the main party. Brigham Young, slowed by illness, arrived on July 24, 1847, and according to tradition declared, “This is the right place. Drive on.” That date is now Pioneer Day, a Utah state holiday observed every July 24.
Within hours, the pioneers were turning the first soil and damming City Creek. By the end of 1847, nearly 2,000 Saints had reached the valley. By 1850, the figure was approaching 12,000.
Building Deseret
Young did not stop at one city. Over the next thirty years he directed the colonisation of a vast Mormon corridor that the Saints called the State of Deseret, stretching from southern Idaho through Utah and into San Bernardino, California. He sent settlers to found St. George, Logan, Manti, Cedar City, and hundreds of smaller towns. Salt Lake City was the capital of this religious commonwealth.
The Perpetual Emigration Fund, 1849 to 1887
The other half of the story arrived by boat. In 1849, Young established the Perpetual Emigration Fund, a revolving loan programme that paid the passage of converts from Europe to Utah. The convert would repay the fund after settling, and the money would carry the next family across.
Between 1852 and 1887, around 73,000 Latter-day Saints emigrated from Europe to the United States, and the Fund directly assisted roughly 26,000 of them. The largest contingents came from Britain, especially the industrial north of England (Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Midlands), and from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Wales, and Scotland. A small group of Icelandic converts from the Westmann Islands arrived in the final years. They sailed from Liverpool, crossed the Plains by wagon and, in the 1850s, by handcart, and walked into a valley most of them had only ever read about.
The 1890 Manifesto
The Church had publicly taught plural marriage since 1852, and by the 1880s the federal government had passed a series of anti-polygamy laws that imprisoned prominent Church leaders, disincorporated the Church, and seized its property. In September 1890, Church President Wilford Woodruff issued the Manifesto, a statement advising members to refrain from any marriage forbidden by the law of the land. The Church membership accepted it at General Conference on October 6, 1890. Utah was admitted to the Union as a state in 1896.
The Landmarks
The Salt Lake Temple, 50 North West Temple. Brigham Young chose the site four days after arriving in the valley. Construction began in 1853 under architect Truman O. Angell, Young’s brother-in-law. The granite was quarried from Little Cottonwood Canyon, twenty miles to the southeast, and hauled by ox team until a purpose-built railroad took over in 1872. The capstone went on in April 1892. The Temple was dedicated on April 6, 1893, exactly forty years after the cornerstone was laid. Six spires, walls nine feet thick at the base, and the Angel Moroni on top.
The Salt Lake Tabernacle, Temple Square. Built between 1864 and 1867, the Tabernacle is the elliptical-domed building on the west side of the square. Henry Grow, a bridge engineer, adapted a lattice-truss arch system to span the entire roof without a single interior column. Forty-four sandstone piers carry the load. The acoustics are so precise that a pin dropped at the pulpit can be heard at the back. It is the home of the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, formerly the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, which has sung weekly since the 1860s.
The Beehive House, 67 East South Temple. Built in 1854 as Brigham Young’s official residence as territorial governor. Truman Angell designed it in adobe and sandstone quarried from City Creek Canyon. The beehive on the roof is the Mormon symbol of industry, drawn from the Book of Mormon word “Deseret,” meaning honeybee. Young died here in 1877.
The Lion House, 63 East South Temple. Finished in 1856, the three-story Lion House sits next door to the Beehive House and was the family residence for Young’s wives and many of his children. Twenty-six bedrooms. The stone lion above the front entrance, carved by William Ward, gives the building its name.
The Family History Library, 35 North West Temple. The Genealogical Society of Utah was founded on November 13, 1894, under Wilford Woodruff. It began as a single upstairs room at 58 East South Temple. The current five-storey building opened in October 1985, and is now the largest genealogical library in the world. Anyone, of any faith, can walk in free of charge and read microfilms gathered from parish registers and civil records across more than a hundred countries.
This Is the Place Heritage Park, 2601 Sunnyside Avenue. A 450-acre living-history park at the mouth of Emigration Canyon, marking the spot where Brigham Young first looked down into the valley. The granite-and-bronze monument was sculpted by Mahonri M. Young, Brigham’s grandson, and dedicated on July 24, 1947, the centennial of the pioneer arrival.
The Conference Center, 60 North Temple. Across the street from Temple Square, the Conference Center opened in 2000. Twenty-one thousand seats. Twice a year, in April and October, the Church holds General Conference here, broadcast in dozens of languages to a worldwide membership.
Where They Came From
The first wave were American Saints: New Englanders, New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians, and the converts pulled in across Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois during the Church’s eastern decades. They were the Carthage refugees and the Nauvoo pioneers, and they walked or rolled into the valley between 1847 and 1852.
The second and larger wave came from Europe. The British contingent leaned heavily on the industrial north: Lancashire mill towns, Yorkshire coal seams, the Birmingham Midlands, and the textile villages of the West Riding. Welsh converts, many of them from the coal valleys around Merthyr Tydfil, came in such numbers that early Salt Lake City had Welsh-language hymn singing as a regular feature. From Scandinavia, the largest single national group was Danish, gathered in Copenhagen and the rural parishes of Jutland and Zealand. Swedes followed, then Norwegians, then a small Icelandic group from the Westmann Islands. Scottish converts came from Glasgow and the Clyde valley.
They all funnelled through the same route: Liverpool to New Orleans or, after the Civil War, Liverpool to New York, then rail to the Missouri River, then wagon or handcart across the Plains. The Church chartered ships and ran organised companies. Your great-great-grandmother probably crossed the Atlantic with a hymnbook and a Church passenger list in the same trunk.
Salt Lake City Today
The LDS Church is still headquartered here, and is now a global faith with around 17 million members worldwide, most of them outside the United States. The First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve still meet in offices around Temple Square. General Conference still fills the Conference Center every April and October.
Salt Lake City itself has changed. Since the 2010s, the city proper has trended toward majority non-LDS, as Utah’s population has diversified with arrivals from California, Latin America, the Pacific Islands, and refugee communities from Africa and Southeast Asia. The Greater Salt Lake metro is still strongly Mormon in flavour, but the urban core is now genuinely pluralistic, with a substantial secular and progressive population alongside the Church’s institutional footprint.
The enduring gift of Mormon Salt Lake City to people of every faith is the Family History Library. Forty years before most countries had a national genealogical archive, the Saints in Utah were systematically gathering parish registers, ship manifests, and census returns from the places their grandparents had left. Walk into the library today and you can pull microfilm from a Welsh chapel or a Danish parish on the same afternoon. The pioneers who walked into this valley in 1847 built a city. Their descendants built a memory of how everyone else got to where they are.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Mormons settle in Salt Lake City?
The Mormons, formally the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, settled in the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 because Brigham Young chose it as a remote sanctuary beyond the reach of the United States, where the Saints had been persecuted and where the Church’s founder Joseph Smith had been killed in 1844. The valley was arid and unclaimed by other settlers, which Young saw as a feature, not a flaw.
When did the Mormons first arrive in Salt Lake City?
Scouts Orson Pratt and Erastus Snow rode into the Salt Lake Valley on July 21, 1847. Brigham Young, the Church’s second president, arrived three days later on July 24, 1847. That date is now celebrated every year as Pioneer Day, a Utah state holiday.
What are the most famous Mormon landmarks in Salt Lake City?
The Salt Lake Temple (1853 to 1893) and the Tabernacle (1864 to 1867) on Temple Square are the spiritual heart of the city. Nearby stand the Beehive House (1854) and Lion House (1856), Brigham Young’s residences, and the Family History Library, the world’s largest genealogical archive. The This Is the Place Heritage Park monument at the mouth of Emigration Canyon marks the spot where Young first saw the valley.
Where did the Mormon converts in Salt Lake City come from?
The first wave were Americans who had followed the Church from New York through Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. The second and larger wave came from Europe via the Perpetual Emigration Fund (1849 to 1887): English converts from the industrial north (Lancashire, Yorkshire, the Midlands), Welsh from the Merthyr Tydfil coal valleys, Danes, Swedes, Norwegians, Scots, and a small Icelandic group from the Westmann Islands.
Is Salt Lake City still majority Mormon today?
The Greater Salt Lake metro area remains strongly Latter-day Saint in character, but the city proper has trended toward majority non-LDS since the 2010s as the population has diversified. The Church itself is still headquartered downtown around Temple Square and has around 17 million members worldwide.
What was the Perpetual Emigration Fund?
Founded by Brigham Young in 1849, the Perpetual Emigration Fund was a revolving loan that paid the passage of European converts from Liverpool to Utah. About 26,000 of the roughly 73,000 Latter-day Saints who emigrated from Europe between 1852 and 1887 received direct assistance from the Fund, which was disincorporated under the federal Edmunds-Tucker Act in 1887.
If your family’s story passed through Salt Lake City, or any of the places the Latter-day Saint pioneers gathered from, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Lancashire mill town or a Danish parish, to Liverpool, to the wagon trains and handcart companies, to the valley they called Zion.