Utah Stories from the Beehive Archive

Demand for copper in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reshaped Utah’s once-rural Bingham Canyon into an enormous open-pit mine supported by thriving company towns. But that same demand for copper went on to consume those same company towns.

Today, remote learning usually happens over a computer. But did you know that Utah colleges once used airplanes to bring professors directly to classrooms in rural areas? These "flying professor" programs represent just one chapter in a longer history of distance education.

When local officials in southern Utah's Grand County declared independence from the federal Bureau of Land Management in 1980, they took rhetoric of small government and individual freedom to a whole new level.

When you think of Utah's desert lands, do you picture a pristine wilderness or an arid waste? How we treat this landscape depends on the value that we assign to it.

Every autumn, large crowds descend on the small rural town of Brigham City for "Peach Days." It's the oldest harvest festival in Utah. And it all started with a one dollar investment in peach pits back in 1855.

The United States federal government controls about 65% of land in Utah. The goal of maintaining these lands for public use tends to polarize Utahns. But there was a time when Utah leaders were not averse to federal regulation of public lands. (Wait...what?)

Canyonlands is more than just Utah’s third national park. Its designation in 1964 occurred after a fight over who exactly public lands are meant for. 

If you could provide drinking water for thousands of people by displacing twenty-seven farming families, would you do it? Utah leaders faced this very dilemma in the 1950s. Find out what they decided 

When Carbon County coal miners from the National Miners Union went on strike in 1933, their wives, sisters, and daughters were right there beside them. These women proved to be formidable adversaries in the fight for workers’ rights. 

Urban spaces in twentieth century Utah are known for their vice -- gambling, prostitution and more. But did you know the last brothel to close in Utah was actually in a rural town?