Our town is quiet this time of year. Most tourists and many locals opt to stay away while Mother Nature conducts a set change.

But for those who stick around as spring gives way to summer, there is a spectacular treat in store: the brief but prolific bloom of wild yellow roses.

These hearty plants typically bloom for a few weeks in mid-June and are widely abundant in the Old Town neighborhood. They are often spotted in the side yards of homes or in locations where the earliest homes of our area once stood.

Pioneer life in the 1800s was replete with hardship. The women traveling westward knew their new lives would be defined by hard labor and their success measured by self-perseverance.

Despite little room to travel with extraneous goods, many of these women carried cuttings from a plant that produced yellow roses as a cheerful reminder of the homes they were leaving behind. 

As they advanced determinedly toward unknown futures, their cuttings may have been stowed in rain barrels, rooted in potatoes, nestled in teacups or wrapped in their long skirts.

The name of the plant the pioneer women carried with them is the Harison’s Rose, after George Folliott Harison, a reclusive New York attorney who in 1824 created a new hybrid through the chance crossing of seedlings of a Persian yellow rose (Rosa foetida) with another variety, most likely the Scotch briar (Rosa spinossima), or perhaps the Burnet rose (Rosa pimpinellifolia).

In the mid 1830s, a New York nurseryman took cuttings of the Harison’s Rose to propagate into new plants. Success with his propagation efforts, coupled with his marketing savvy, quickly popularized the yellow rose bush.

As the Harison’s Rose bush spread across the West, it acquired colloquial names, including the Oregon Trail Rose and the Pioneer Rose.

In Texas, it was so widely planted that it was believed to be a native species and became known as the Yellow Rose of Texas.

The plants that produce these cheerful yellow flowers are extremely hardy and resistant to pests. They possess distinctive thorn patterns whereby the sharp thorns are closely spaced along the stems. The flowers are clustered, with each flower producing up to 25 petals. Given adequate space, the bushes grow large in diameter due to the suckers that form on the roots.

With proper care and some luck, the Harison’s Rose can be propagated in our local climate. 

According to Wendy Schmidt, a contributor to the Oregon-based paper Le Grande Observer, “New bushes can be started by carefully digging a sucker or two, being careful with the tender new roots and immediately planting and watering your new plant.  When you relocate those newly separated suckers to a new planting site, bear in mind that the average [plant] reaches the height and width of 3.3 to 5.7 feet; and they’re hardy to minus 35 degrees, or a USDA zone 4.”

Keep an eye out for the annual bloom of the Harison’s Rose in the coming weeks!

The Park City Museum is hosting a lecture titled “Rooted in Tradition: Native American Food Sovereignty,” given by author, humanities philanthropist and former Chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation Darren Parry on Wednesday, May 20, from 5-6 p.m. at the Museum’s Education and Collections Center at 2079 Sidewinder Drive.

Janet Spence Holland is a Park City Museum researcher.

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Park City was home to two opera houses in the late 1800s. The first was Society Hall, later known as the Park Opera House, in the Society Building at 354 Main St.. Construction of the public building and hall, also planned for use by the “secret societies,” was accelerated by a forthcoming meeting of the Grand Lodge of Odd Fellows of Utah, scheduled for April 1884 in Park City.

The Society Building was incorporated and funded as a public building. Society Hall held its first event — a society ball — on Thanksgiving Day 1883 even before the plastering was in place. The hall was officially ready for occupancy when it held a New Year’s Eve ball the following month.

In the ensuing years, the hall hosted a wide variety of community events including dances, masquerade balls, live theater, and holiday celebrations.

A second opera house was envisioned years before it materialized. In the early 1890s, developers sought stock solicitations to finance the construction of a project that would include an opera house and a hotel. Although those efforts never came to fruition, interest in a new opera house was intensified when fire damaged the Society Building in March 1896.

The fire started in the adjacent Mantor Building, which was destroyed, and the hall — by now known as the Park Opera House — sustained fire and water damage. Fortunately, firemen were ultimately able to save the structure.

The Park Record reported on the efforts of one such fireman, stating that “while combatting the flames in the attic of the opera house [he] thoughtlessly set his lantern upon a live wire and was rudely shocked for his action. He will avoid live things in the future.”

Following the fire, three local lodges of the Ancient Order of United Workmen (AOUW) announced plans to develop a joint lodge room and modern opera house and signaled they were motivated to act, with or without cooperation: “Our people realize the need of such a building and if the owners of the [current] opera house do not fall in with the present progressive idea such a structure will be built anyhow during the coming summer on the site now occupied by the livery barn opposite City Hall.”

In April 1896 efforts to consolidate interests seemed optimistic, according to the paper: “All in all, the indications are extremely favorable that the present agitation will result in the erection of a magnificent building especially as a number of citizens who have plenty of the wherewithal stand ready to subscribe for liberal blocks of stock as soon as the books are thrown open.”

The cooperative spirit captured in April must have dissipated soon thereafter. The AOUW pressed forward independently with their new Grand Opera House project, purchasing land the following June. Meanwhile, the Park Opera embarked on renovations, with improvements including the construction of a larger dance floor, modernization of the facility, and new theater chairs.

The Grand Opera House, finally erected and considered to be one of the finest buildings ever built in Park City, hosted its first public event March 1898. Just three months later, Park City’s Great Fire of 1898 destroyed both opera houses. The infant Grand Opera House, valued at $50,000, was woefully underinsured and the policy had lapsed, making it one of the costliest losses of the Great Fire.

The fraternal orders pledged to rebuild. The paper reported: “The trustees of the different secret organizations of the city got together Wednesday evening and took the preliminary steps looking to the erection of a new opera house and lodge room building. That such a building will be erected there is no doubt as the dozen or more lodges of the city must have a place to meet. Let the good work go on.”

In time, the fraternal orders’ interest in the project waned, and although they and others announced plans to construct new opera houses, none were built. In 1899, live theater was restored to Park City when the Dewey Theatre opened as the town’s new cultural center.

The Park City Museum is hosting a lecture, “The Opera in Utah,” given by composer and conductor Benjamin Beckman, artistic director of Park City Opera, on Wednesday, Aug. 13, from 5 to 6 p.m. in the Museum’s Education and Collections Center at 2079 Sidewinder Drive. It is free and open to the public.

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In 1897, the year after Utah achieved statehood, the state Legislature approved funds to build a “State Miner’s Hospital” in Park City. For political and financial reasons, local mine owners and some residents were not eager for a new hospital to materialize. Politically conservative Parkites and mine owners were wary of unions’ influence on laborers. Additionally, some mine owners had vested interests in Salt Lake City hospitals and did not want to disrupt those relationships.  It would be seven years before Miners’ Hospital would open its doors.

Organized labor arrived in Park City in 1901 with the formation of Local No. 144 of the Western Federation of Miners. Reliable health care was chief among miners’ concerns: miners regularly sought care from local doctors and herbalists to augment home remedies, but serious issues requiring hospitalization led to an arduous (and sometimes lethal) journey to Salt Lake City by horseback or stagecoach.

Miners’ Hospital received broad support when it finally opened its doors in 1904. Although the majority of the hospital’s patients were miners, the hospital also served their families and other residents of the local community. Hospital records reviewed by the Utah Historical Quarterly indicate 500 patients were treated at the hospital in its first year – a patient census that would double in just seven years’ time. Historical records suggest that the hospital capably met the medical needs of its community.

In 1919, a woman named Kittie Witherow Berry was admitted to Miners’ Hospital. In addition to being a patient, Kittie served as a hospital matron, a term ascribed to the most senior nurses on staff at Miners’ Hospital. Although not seriously ill, Kittie’s condition required surgery. She was 30 years old when she underwent a “successful” operation performed at Miners’ Hospital — one that she did not survive. The Park Record described her as a popular matron who herself became a patient for whom an untimely death befell.

Kittie and her family had moved to Park City from Massachusetts when she was 14 years old; when she was 18, she married William J. Berry. A member of the auxiliaries of the Women of Woodcraft and the Ladies of the Maccabees as well as the sister-in-law of Sam H. Raddon (whose father Sam “Dad” Raddon was the longtime owner/operator of The Park Record), Kittie was prominent in social and lodge circles.

In her obituary, the Park Record stated that “seldom has death called one so universally loved and respected.” So popular was Kittie that the local lodges of the Benevolent Protective Order of the Elks and the Knights of Columbus, two orders to which her widower belonged, “took entire charge of arrangements for the family and rendered every service possible.”

Strife between mine owners and the labor union led the hospital to close in 1919. It reopened in 1920 under the ownership of the Sisters of Holy Cross and subsequently under the ownership of several individual physicians.

Ultimately, the closure of local mines and resulting population decline, coupled with the construction of a new highway to Salt Lake City, clinched its obsolescence as a viable medical center. The building was sold to condominium developers in 1956 and would be repurposed again and again, serving as a hostel and a bar. The building became city property and was relocated in 1979 (from its original location near Park City Mountain ski base) to 1354 Park Avenue where it served as the city library from 1980 to 1993. Today, Miners Hospital operates as a community center for group functions and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

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