113 East 8680 South
Sandy, UT, USA

National Register of Historic Places - William W. and Christene Wilson House

Statement of Significance:

The William W. and Christene Wilson House, built in 1927, is significant for its association with the Specialized Agriculture, Small Business, and Community Development, 1906-46 category of the Historic Resources of Sandy City, Utah Multiple Property Submission. During this period, the city of Sandy changed from its nineteenth-century reliance on mining and smelting to a more diversified agricultural and small-business economy. The Wilson House is significant under Criterion A because of its association with William Wilson, a prominent citizen of Sandy who served as mayor from 1908-1922, justice of the peace, postmaster, and legislator, along with holding other business and leadership positions. The house is located close to the commercial center of historic Sandy in a residential neighborhood with houses from the turn of the twentieth century to the early decades of the twentieth century. The house is remarkably intact, retains its historic integrity, and continues usage as a private residence.

History Of Sandy City

Sandy is located at the base of the Wasatch Mountains thirteen miles to the south of Salt Lake City. People from Salt Lake City in search of agricultural lands for permanent settlement moved south to the Sandy area in the 1860s. Mining in the Big and Little Cottonwood Canyons to the east and Bingham Canyon to the west affected the character of Sandy and shaped the destiny of the city for the next few decades. Three major smelters were located in Sandy, making it a significant smelting center in the state, and requiring many people to staff the smelters. Railroad access to Salt Lake City in 1873 facilitated the shipment of the ore out of the area. Sandy was a boomtown during the smelter era, full of single men drawn there by economic opportunities, and its downtown area had hotels, brothels, and saloons to attract their wages.

Many of the mines supplying the smelters failed in the 1890s and the economy of Sandy changed from that of a boom town to that of a small Utah agricultural community. Sandy City was incorporated in 1893, partly to counteract the boom town influences, and developed a strong and active city government. By 1907 the streetcar line along State Street was extended to Sandy from Salt Lake City, providing thirty-minute access to the capital city. Many municipal improvements were completed in the decades after incorporation. Electricity was introduced in 1913 and by 1914 the city had a park and a cemetery. The population of Sandy remained quite stable at around 1,500 for the years between 1900 and 1940.

This house is located in the original one-mile square 1871 city plat that abuts what is now State Street to the west. The area was developed between 1860-1893 as a mining boomtown and later during a second phase of Sandy's growth from 1893-1910. The William W. and Christene Wilson House represents the economic, social, and architectural development of Sandy beyond its original mining/pioneer era, into that of a more diversified local economy. It is part of the Specialized Agriculture, Small Business, and Community Development Era that lasted from 1906-1946.

The historic city center of Sandy is unique in several ways. It is laid out in a grid pattern like other Utah towns but the streets are narrower and the blocks themselves are smaller than in the other towns. In addition, the scale of the buildings is relatively consistent. The buildings are primarily small commercial blocks and one-story single-family houses, mixed among buildings from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The older structures are scattered throughout the one-mile square area.

Many Sandy residents continued to live on their farms in the first half of the twentieth century. They combined subsistence farming with other occupations. By the late 1920s, no residents of Sandy claimed farming as their occupation in the 1927-8 statewide gazetteer. Streetcar access to Salt Lake City was provided in 1907 and State Street was paved in the 1920s for automobile traffic. The last streetcar in Salt Lake Valley was discontinued in 1946 and traffic became primarily automobiles and buses.

The Specialized Agriculture, Small Business, and Community Development Period in Sandy was an era of transition from agriculture and mining to quiet residential neighborhoods and small-town life. The buildings of the historic square mile of Sandy illustrate this and contrast with the later development of the city of Sandy. Since World War II Sandy has platted almost 300 subdivisions and annexed over 10,000 acres, making it one of the Salt Lake Valleys' largest suburban communities. The city center has moved to the south with the shopping malls leaving the historic downtown area as a distinctive reminder of the small town past of Sandy.

William Walker and Christene Wilson

William W. Wilson was a prominent citizen and businessman in Sandy in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth century. He served as the fourth mayor of Sandy from 1908 to 1922, justice of the peace, postmaster from 1902 to 1914, and a member of the first state legislature, as well as being president of the Sandy City Bank after its opening in 1907, member of the Sandy School board, the Sandy commercial club and director of the Farmers Implement Company and the Salt Lake County Water Company. While serving in the state legislature, he was a strong proponent of legislation supporting the eight-hour workday. He also held many offices in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon), serving as the first counselor to Bishop William D. Kuhre in 1900. Like many other residents of Sandy in the first half of the twentieth century, he combined small-scale farming with other occupations. In addition to his church and community responsibilities, he also farmed forty-nine acres of land. He was born in England in 1858, and came to

Utah in 1871 as a convert to the Mormon Church, and moved to Sandy in 1877. He married Annie E. Ostlund, his first wife, in 1883 in Salt Lake City. She died in 1921 in Sandy.

He then married Christene Hermina Thuesen, a widow with three children, in 1926 and built this house for her in 1927. Christene was born in Provo, Utah County, in 1870 to Daniel Peter and Hermina Petrine Jensen Thuesen. Christene married Julius Jensen, a pioneer jeweler of Provo, in 1888 in Manti, Sanpete County. They had three children together. He died in 1924 and she married William W. Wilson in 1926. Following Wilson's death in 1931 she married William Dobbie Kuhre, the local LDS bishop, in 1937, and transferred the title to the house to her daughter, Freda Joan Jensen. Christene Jensen Wilson Kuhre was living in the house with William Kuhre at the time of her death in 1953.
Freda Joan Jensen Lee

Freda Jensen was born in 1897 in Provo, Utah County, the daughter of Christene Hermina Thuesen and Julius Christensen Jensen.' After her father's death in 1924, her mother married William W. Wilson. Freda Jensen graduated from Brigham Young High and Brigham Young University in Provo and did graduate work at Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Utah. She later taught school in Provo and Draper (Salt Lake County) until she was appointed the supervisor of primary education at the Jordan School District in Salt Lake County. She held that position for thirty years. During the summers she taught education courses at the University of Nevada, University of Utah, Utah State University, and Brigham Young University. She was known for her love of children and dedicated her professional life to their education. During her career, she was active in professional education societies and the LDS church. Freda Jensen lived in the house until her marriage. She built the garage in 1941 and enclosed the front porch at an unknown date (between 1936 and 1958).

She married Harold B. Lee in 1963,10 then a member of the Council of the Twelve Apostles and later the eleventh President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. During their ten years together she traveled extensively with him on business for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She sold the house in 1968. Harold B. Lee died in 1973 and Freda Jensen Lee in 1981.

Architecture

The bungalow was the most popular house type in Utah in the first decades of the twentieth century. It was adopted by the middle class, and found in small rural towns, suburbs as well as large cities across the state.

The bungalows in Utah primarily occur singly among other house types or are isolated on rural lots rather than in large bungalow subdivisions.
The Wilson House is fairly typical in its representation of the clip-gable or jerkinhead-gabled bungalow, which was a variation constructed in the later 1920s that retains many of the characteristics of the earlier form of bungalow. It has a low-pitched hipped roof with cast-concrete sills, lintels, and coping on porch walls, emphasizing horizontality. The walls are clad in multi-colored striated brick, which was popular in the 1920s. The interior space is open, with arches delineating public spaces. As in the earlier forms, built-ins are found throughout the house, particularly with bookshelves around the fireplace and drawers and cupboards near the bath and bedrooms. The Wilson House retains its original fabric and contributes to the historic qualities of Sandy.