The historic Echo Church will commemorate America’s 250th anniversary with its own 150th celebration this summer.
The church, located at 60 Temple Ln. in Echo, will welcome visitors from 11 a.m.-4 p.m. every Saturday from May 23 to Sept. 5. It will also be open to the public Monday, May 25, and Monday, Sept. 7. Admission is free.
“It was built in 1876 out of handmade brick, is the second-oldest building in Summit County and the oldest one that the public can enter,” said Sandra Morrison, treasurer of the Echo Community and Historical Organization (ECHO) board of trustees. “The oldest building is the Kimball Stagecoach Station at Kimball Junction, which was built in the early 1850s, and it’s privately owned.”
To join the America250 celebration, the church’s board of directors brought in a traveling exhibit, “Becoming the United States,” which will be on display throughout the summer, according to Morrison.
The exhibit, curated by Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History — considered to be one of the great archives in American history — is a pop-up, seven-panel exhibit, she said.
“There will be copies of historic documents and images, especially from the Revolutionary War era,” Morrison said. “It has a copy of the Declaration of Independence and things like that. But there are no original objects. That would be a little difficult to ship from New York.”
ECHO worked with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History last year when it brought in the exhibit, “Immigration: An American Story,” which presented the history of immigration since the United States was founded, according to Morrison.
“It also included stories of Native Americans who were present before that,” she said.
Morrison has been busy curating another exhibit to observe the Echo Church’s own sesquicentennial.
“It’s an exhibit about the history of the church, and it will have a number of historical photographs from a number of collections that talk about the various people who were involved in building the building and its use over the last 150 years,” she said.
The Echo Church is originally believed to be built by the Congregational Church, although Morrison has read it was the Presbyterians.
“But the Presbyterians didn’t seem to have as active missionaries in Utah as the Congregationalists at the time,” she said. “However, the Congregationalists still found it difficult to convert people because a lot of the population of Utah were people who had converted to the Mormon Church in the British Isles and relocated to Utah.”
The Congregationalists found it a huge challenge to reconvert the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints members who basically changed their lives and moved halfway across the Earth, Morrison said.
“So, the Echo Church was also turned into a school,” she said. “People could go to church on Sunday and then send their kids to school Mondays through Fridays.”
The Congregationalists’ reasoning was to educate Mormon children because, at that point, there was no official education system, Morrison said.
“They thought they could convince the next generation that they needed a different religion,” she said.
The church was used as a school until 1914, according to Morrison.
“I found a lot of documentation from the 1880s and 1890s of the amount of money and time they were spending to operate the school in the Echo Church,” she said. “Interestingly, each town had their own school district, and the Echo School District, because of a property tax, received money from the Union Pacific Railroad that ran through town.”
The money was substantial — $300 a year, Morrison said.
“That went into running the school, and I suspect the school was quite well funded and the teachers were quite well trained and paid a living wage,” she said. “Hence the reason the pictures we have of the classes show a bunch of kids — 30 to 40 kids.”
By 1914, there were so many kids in Echo that the school district decided to build a new school, a two-room school, Morrison said.
The new Echo School, which was used until the 1940s, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997, she said.
“After the new school was built, the church was sold to the local Mormon ward who used it through World War II,” Morrison said. “Then it sat empty until the late 1970s, until the LDS Church began talks about tearing it down because they didn’t want to maintain it.”
At that point, the Echo Church had a hole in the roof and was pretty dilapidated, Morrison said.
“So, the townspeople got together and bought the building, and that’s when our organization, the Echo Community Historical Organization, got started,” she said.
Morrison unfolded some interesting tidbits during her research of the church’s history.
“I found second-hand stories about a guy who lived in Henefer, John Shill, who helped build the church,” she said. “Looking into his past, I found he was born in England and was a carpenter there.”
One of the stories is that Shill worked on the Crystal Palace, the iconic glass and iron structure built for London’s 1851 Great Exhibition, which showcased the latest technology from 38 different countries,” Morrison said.
“John had a brother who joined the Mormon Church and was one of the early settlers of Henefer,” she said. “So, when John decided to emigrate, he ended up in Henefer as well.”
Since the Echo Church opens for the season Memorial Day weekend, Morrison invites the public to take a walk through the church’s cemetery, and that invitation stands throughout the season.
“Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how many people are buried there,” she said. “As with a lot of Western cemeteries, the grave markers were made of wood, and they didn’t survive the elements throughout the year.”
Still, one of the graves that is clearly marked is where the remains of Constable Thomas Stagg lies, Morrison said.
Stagg died in a shootout at a cabin located at the Wyoming and Utah border with a band of horse thieves led by Patrick Coughlin in 1895, after a six-day manhunt through Echo Canyon and across Utah, she said.
Celebrating the Echo Church’s 150th anniversary means a lot to Morrison because the building still stands.
“It was built after the Union Pacific Railroad came through with the Transcontinental Railroad, which was one of the big turning points of America’s history,” she said. “Building the church was possible because of the railroad, and Echo back then was a thriving community. Everyone was working for ‘Uncle Pete,’ also known as the Union Pacific.”
Last year, the ECHO committee worked on upgrades so it could celebrate the church’s sesquicentennial with style, Morrison said.
“We spent last summer painting the entire exterior, and then we even had Fred Strasser, who helped with the bell tower restoration of St. Mary’s Chapel in Old Town, come out to Echo to check out our bell to replace the bell rope and make sure it was structurally sound,” she said. “We also have a number of programs coming up as well throughout the summer, starting in late June. They will touch on the different aspects of Summit County and Utah history, as they become part of the United States. And we’ll announce those once they are scheduled.”
For information about the Historic Echo Church, visit tinyurl.com/5yv5yax3.