WCF Featured Title -- "Ogden Anecdotes," by Irene Woodhouse

A week or two ago, I traded a series of emails with one of our Weber County Forum regulars, regarding a suggested essay on an Ogden City downtown story -- one with a particular historical twist. Not being much of an Ogden historian in my own right, I immediately went to my bookshelf to drag out the book I always turn to when I need to bone-up on early Ogden City history -- Ogden Anecdotes -- Stories and Photos from Our First 50 Years, by Irene Woodhouse. When it comes to Ogden history, this book is my bible.

I've owned my own first-edition copy of this book for about a dozen years. During this period, I've read it cover-to-cover just about as many times, and used it as a research reference more often than I can count. It's truly a fantastic book, crammed full of historical details, photos, quotes, plot-twists -- and humorous anecdotes. If there's any book that's available which truly captures the early history and culture of Ogden City, this is it. It also says a lot about the unique cultural "nuances" of Ogden City, which presently sets it so very far apart from other Utah cities, I believe.

The truly great thing about this book, aside from its abundance of fact and detail, is its sheer readability. Rather than drone on in my own words though, I'll now take the liberty of incorporating Irene's own book "Introduction," which illuminates her style and sets forth her intended message far more accurately than I ever could. I'll let Irene Woodhouse speak of her book (and the town she so obviously loved,) in her own words:

This is a story about the first 50 years of Ogden City. It's not your common run-of-the-mill history, however. You'll not find footnotes, nor bibliography. Nor is it a book about heroes. Ogden Utah has never revered the past nor enshrined flesh and blood citizens.

Frontier towns are handmade and their people are rough and sturdy as the hand-hewn timbers that make their shelters. By present standards they seem a breed apart, but their old journals tell it matter-of-factly. I have tried to recapture the personality of those people -- what they ate, wore, liked, hated and put up with.

The information in this book is true. Personal interviews with men and women whose parents lived in that time have furnished insights and stories which were common but not shared. To fit these people into the proper time I have used the public records, repeating bits from city council minutes and private journals and histories.

The story of Ogden during the first 50 years reminds me of the old-timer who, when asked how he managed to plow the rocky hillside without destroying himself or his plow, said, "It's all in knowin' when to 'gee' and when to 'haw'." Ogdenites learned to gee and haw properly during the time they were fighting the environment and each other, knowing full well they had to get along with both.

Their success was incredible. They changed the mud, rocks and sand into a place to raise kids, with excellent schools, and at the same time we were able to build a Grand Opera House that presented the best entertainment directly from the east and west coasts.

Those days are gone forever, the following years were nothing like the first 50. But it's still a pretty good town. It's my town. I was born here.

-Irene Woodhouse.

My most recent reference once again to this book has led to something very positive, in the natural course of blog events; or so I hope. After a little googling, one thing led to another. For the convenience of Weber County Forum readers, I've since located and worked out an arrangement with Dian Woodhouse, and her husband Matt, who've graciously given me permission to provide a secure online "order button" at the top of the Weber County Forum sidebar. I'm quite proud to have it there, I'll add. I'd like to help out in their effort to see this book disseminated as widely as possible. The button has been situated in the sidebar for about a week now, along with some other useful information, but some of last night's reader comments alerted me to the fact that it's somehow escaped the attention of at least a few of the readers here. I'm thus posting this article, as a "heads up" for those who routinely ignore WCF's always-wonderful sidebar ads and announcements.

For additional information on this exceptional book, you can visit Dian and Matt's Woodhouse Publishing website.

This book is now in its second printing, thanks to the efforts of Matt and Dian. Get your copy now. When the last printing sold out, it wasn't available again for another twenty years, except as a "rare" collector's item.

It also strikes me that this book is as much about the development of a railroad "boomtown" in the early west, as it is a particularly craftsman-like history of Ogden, Utah. Railroad and western history buffs might thus also want to take a "long look" at this fantastic work themselves. The same can be said for folks who are interested in information on one of the earliest Utah Mormon settlements. There's certainly plenty of that in this book. All-in-all, Irene Woodhouse's work is deserving of a surprisingly wide readership, I believe. I sincerely hope everyone who visits here will take the time to check it out.