How Logan began
June 1859 A fort on the river Named by fur trappers
On June 6, 1859, a small party of settlers sent north by Brigham Young surveyed a fort site on the bank of the Logan River and started cutting logs for houses. That fort is where Logan begins. The town took its name from the river, and by that November it had a bishop, William B. Preston. It was not the first camp in Cache Valley, but it soon became the principal one, because it sat near the center of the valley with more than enough water to turn mills and fill irrigation ditches.
The name older than the town
The valley already had a name when the settlers arrived. In the 1820s, a generation before the fort, mountain men working the streams for beaver used the valley to hide, or cache, their furs and supplies, and the name stuck. Cache is simply the English spelling of a French trapping word for a hidden store. Trappers like Peter Skene Ogden and Jim Bridger were on these rivers as early as 1825, and that fur trade story is kept alive today at the American West Heritage Center, covered on the region page for Cache Valley farm country.
Who was here first
Long before any of this, the valley was the homeland of the Northwestern Shoshone, who wintered along the Bear River and its tributaries and knew the land far better than the trappers who passed through it. That history predates the fort by centuries, and it is a part of Cache Valley worth naming plainly rather than skipping over.
The Logan Temple
Dedicated May 1884 Truman O. Angell, architect Dark siliceous limestone
The Logan Temple is the building most people picture when they picture Logan. It stands on the bench at 175 North 300 East, on rising ground east of downtown, and at that elevation it is visible from across the valley floor. It was the second temple completed in Utah Territory, after St. George and before Manti and Salt Lake, and it was dedicated in May 1884 by John Taylor, then the president of the Church, in services held over three days beginning on May 17.
Work had begun seven years earlier, in 1877, and almost all of it was donated. Cache Valley families gave their time, their teams and their materials, and the Church later reckoned that more than 600,000 dollars in labor, goods and cash went into the building, roughly half of it in volunteer work that was never paid. For a valley of a few thousand people in the 1880s that was an enormous undertaking, and it is the reason the temple reads less as a commission than as something the whole community hauled up the hill.
The design came from Truman O. Angell, the Church's head architect, who gave it more Gothic detailing than most of Utah's temples, which lean Romanesque or Byzantine. The walls are a dark siliceous limestone from the local quarries, chosen for a heavier, more European look than the pale sandstone and granite used elsewhere. Two castellated towers rise at the ends, and the dark stone against the snow line behind it is a large part of why the building photographs the way it does.
The details
The temple interior is not open to the public. Unlike the Tabernacle downtown, the Logan Temple is a working temple, and its interior is not open for public tours. What you can do is see it from the surrounding grounds and streets, which are free and open, and the short drive up onto the bench is worth it for the view back across the valley. For the rest of the historic core, the sibling pages below carry it.
The Logan Tabernacle
Begun 1865 Finished 1891 On Main Street downtown
Down off the bench, on Main Street at Center, stands the older of the two buildings: the Logan Tabernacle. Where the temple sits apart on the hill, the tabernacle is right in the middle of downtown, and unlike the temple it is open to the public, used for concerts, community gatherings and a family history library.
The tabernacle took even longer to build than the temple. Ground was broken in 1865, only six years after the fort, and a cobblestone foundation was laid for a hall about sixty by a hundred feet. Work stalled and restarted more than once. When Brigham Young visited the valley in 1873 he pushed the settlers to build bigger, and the plan grew. The main hall was in use by the late 1870s, but the entrance and the tower were not finished until 1891, when the completed building was dedicated by Wilford Woodruff. From the first stone to the last it was more than a quarter century of mostly unpaid work.
Like the temple it was built from local stone and timber by hand, and it is the plainest possible record of how the pioneers worked: slowly, together, and with whatever the valley could provide. It anchors the downtown blocks the way the temple anchors the bench, and it is the natural first stop on a walk through the historic downtown.
The details
The pioneer grid, and the bench
The 1859 survey Wide streets The bench pattern
The other thing the pioneers left is the shape of the city itself. The 1859 survey laid Logan out on the wide, square grid the settlers used across the territory: big blocks, streets numbered out from a center point, and room enough in each lot for a garden and an orchard. Drive the older streets today and the lots are still deep and the blocks still long, because the grid never had to be squeezed.
Logan sits where the valley floor meets the benches, the flat shelves of old lake terraces that step up toward the mountains on the east. The pioneers put the temple on the bench on purpose, where it would stand above the town, and over time the bench became the older, close-in part of the city while the valley floor filled in around it. That split between bench and floor is still the first thing to understand about how Logan is laid out, and the practical side of it, which streets sit above the winter air and what they cost, lives on the Logan city guide.
Downtown keeps a good deal of its pioneer and early twentieth century fabric: brick storefronts, the tabernacle, a 1923 theatre a block away, and streets of older homes on the near bench. Much of it is documented as historic, and the sibling pages below walk it in detail.
