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A Rare Early Plan of Salt Lake City - with the Lands of Charles Popper Shown

Highly detailed map of Salt Lake City, published in 1888.  The map extends to North Salt Lake and Jordan in the northwest, Glendale Park in the southwest, and the Fort Douglas Reservation, Emigration Canyon Creek and Quarantine in the southeast.

The map shows street railways, canals, ward and plat boundaries and a few statistics. Of note, includes tentative Latter Day Saint ward areas outside of Salt Lake City proper with listings of major land owners.

The tract of land north of Camp Douglas owned by Charles Popper is noted on the east side, the area which would become known as Popperton Park.

Charles Popper

Charles Popper who was one of the earliest Jewish settlers in Salt Lake City.   Charles Popper ran a butcher shop in 1864 and organized Utah's Order of Odd Fellows.  Popper set up a slaughter house near the mouth of Dry Fork Canyon, the first canyon north of Red Butte, and regularly supplied meat for Camp Douglas and for the people in the city. In the early 1880s, he applied for title to the land under the homestead Act of 1862, and in 1885 Congress granted his petition because he had made numerous improvements on the land and had lived there for nearly twenty years. The area was originally known as “Butcherville” for obvious reasons and later became known as Popperton.

Fort Douglas

Camp Douglas was established in October 1862, during the American Civil War, as a small military garrison about three miles east of Salt Lake City, Utah, to protect the overland mail route and telegraph lines along the Central Overland Route. In 1878, the post was renamed Fort Douglas and remained open until 1991.

Rarity

The map is extremely rare.  OCLC locates only the copy in the Family History Library (SLC) and a copy at the National Library of France (along with several modern photocopies of the map in other libraries).   We acquired a copy in the Heckrotte sale in 2017.

In descriibing this map, Heckrotte notes:  There is a large size, 49"x 51" with a scale of 0.2 miles to an inch, and smaller size, 24"x 28" with a scale of 0.4 miles to an inch edition of the map; neither agrees with mine in scale or size. Phillips Maps, p772 lists the larger size.