Summertime is a great season to get a glimpse of the past at the historic Echo Church.
The church, located at 60 Temple Ln. in Echo, will welcome visitors from 11 a.m.-4 p.m. every Saturday from May 24 to Aug. 30. It will also be open to the public Monday, May 26, and Monday, Sept. 1, said Sandra Morrison, treasurer of the Echo Community and Historical Organization (ECHO) board of trustees.
“We like opening on Memorial Day because we have the Echo Cemetery right next door to the church,” she said. “We do get quite a lot of people, descendants, who come to decorate the graves. We love to hear the stories because a lot more people lived in Echo in the past than who live there today.”
The Echo Church, which was built in 1876 out of hand-made brick, is the second-oldest building in Summit County and the oldest one that the public can enter, Morrison said.
“The oldest building is the Kimball Stagecoach Station at Kimball Junction, which was built in the early 1850s, and it’s privately owned,” she said. “The church will also turn 150 years old next year, which coincides with the 250th anniversary of the United States.”
This summer, the Echo Church will be adorned with a traveling exhibit called “Immigration: An American Story,” Morrison said.
“It presents the history of immigration since the United States was founded, and it also includes stories of Native Americans who were present before that,” she said.
The seven-panel exhibit highlights the different waves on immigration that have impacted the country:
- Panel One: Immigration: An American Story
- Panel Two: 1492 to 17th century
- Panel Three: 18th century
- Panel Four: Early 19th century
- Panel Five: Late 19th century
- Panel Six: Early 20th century
- Panel Seven: 1965 onward
“It explores where we came from and how public attitudes about immigration have changed throughout the country’s history,” Morrison said.
The exhibit hails from the New York-based Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, which is considered to be one of the great archives in American history, according to Morrison.
“They have a very extensive collection that relates to the United States and have provided us with duplicates of historic photographs and documents,” she said. “There’s a reproduction of the U.S. Constitution, a letter written by Christopher Columbus to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain about his discovery of numerous people, who he named Indians, because he thought he was in India. And another duplicate is of the receipt for the land purchased from the Six Nations by the Penn family, which resulted in the creation of Pennsylvania.”
The exhibit also explores different settlements in the 1700s that various different European groups established, Morrison said.
“The French settled in the Northern territories by the Great Lakes, and the Spanish showed up in the Florida area,” she said. “Then the Dutch settled in the New York area.”
The exhibit also documents the arrival of Africans, who were brought to the country as slaves, Morrison said.
“There is also a reproduction of a cargo plan for the slave ship that shows how to transport as many slaves as possible,” she said.
The panels also depict the 1800s, when the floodgates opened and people flocked to the United States from Europe to pursue the American Dream, according to Morrison.
“This, of course, happened with the expansion of the country, starting off with the Louisiana Purchase,” she said.
By the late 19th century, as immigration soared, prejudice began to appear, and laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 were passed, Morrison said.
“That mindset continues through the early 20th century when Congress established the Quota System, limiting how many people could be let into the country,” she said.
In conjunction with the historic document reproductions and photographs, Morrison added her own reproductions of historic glass-plate negatives depicting immigrants who lived in Echo and Northern Summit County during the late 1800s.
“Some of these were taken by Andrew.J. Russell in the late 1860s and early 1870s,” she said. “He photographed the Transcontinental Railroad as it was being built through Summit County, and he loved taking photographs of people.”
Shortly afterwards, another photographer, George Beard, arrived in the area and settled in Coalville, Morrison said.
“He also took a lot of photographs in Summit County, and one of those photographs is of his daughter with her bicycle, dressed up for the Fourth of July Parade,” she said.
The originals of these glass-plate negatives are currently stored at Brigham Young University, Morrison said.
“They will be scanned at a high resolution, so the details will be amazing,” she said.
“Immigration: An American Story” will be displayed in the Echo Church’s main floor and basement, Morrison said.
“That way, people will be able to explore the entire church,” she said. “We are also working on scheduling lectures and other presentations during the summer. We just have to finalize dates.”
For information about the Historic Echo Church visit tinyurl.com/5yv5yax3.