In her book “Selling Sex in Utah: A History of Vice” — featured this week in a Salt Lake Tribune article — historian Eileen Hallet Stone provides readers with a fresh look at early Utah’s version of the world’s oldest profession.
While the sex trade in the Beehive State dragged many prostitutes down to disease, despair and destitution, the author says, it also gave rise to some formidable madams who not only knew how to lure men to their bordellos but also were equally adept at courting public favor and playing on politicians’ greed to stay open.
One was Rachel Beulah Hayden, known as “Mother Urban” to her working girls and their clients in Park City, which was booming in the late 1800s and early 1900s due to the large numbers of miners working there.
She married carpenter and mine owner George Urban and, in 1907, the couple constructed “the row,” a string of 16 side-by-side houses on what is now Deer Valley Drive, where the women entertained miners and satisfied their carnal appetites. Urban’s own home near Swede Alley, the Purple Parlor, was much more upscale.
(Park City Historical Society & Museum, Bea Kummer Collection) Mother Urban's "row" of one-room houses for her working girls.
She kept in city leaders’ good graces by going to City Hall once a month to pay the hefty fines levied against her illegal business, much as she would if she were paying overdue book fees at the library. The money helped fill city coffers, fuel the economy and provide police with a reason to ignore or pay scant attention to the more unsavory aspects of her business.
In her book, Stone further recounts some of Mother Urban’s efforts to give back to the community, such as aiding those who had been injured or lost their jobs, supporting schools, paying her respects at funerals and consoling the grieving. She also hosted an annual Christmas party for single miners, gave candy to switchboard operators and promoted the efforts of the volunteer fire department.
“There was a certain sophistication in some of the brothels,” Stone says. “For instance, there were learned prostitutes who knew how to read, writing letters for [illiterate] miners, which the men could send to their loved ones back home.”
Read more here about Stone’s book and Utah’s seamier past, including how ballerinas skirted an edict from Brigham Young, how a photographer of Latter-day Saint leaders supplemented his income with a sexy side business, and how madams got the green light to operate in red-light districts.
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) History writer Eileen Hallet Stone, who has a new book out titled "Selling Sex in Utah: A History of Vice,” sits for a portrait and talks about the world’s oldest profession and Utah’s more unsavory history on Wednesday, July 12, 2023.
