Harem or Haven: Interpreting Brigham Young’s Houses

Historic houses named for famous men often ignore the women who lived in them.  Do wives matter in their own right? Or are they mere accessories to another story? That Brigham Young had twenty-seven wives not only matters to the history of nineteenth-century Mormonism but to the history of Constitutional law, religious liberty, and marriage in the United States. Yet because the history of polygamy, or “plural marriage” as the Mormons called it, is still an explosive topic today for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and their detractors, the memory of Brigham Young’s wives has been banished from the two houses so impressively preserved in his name on South Temple Street in Salt Lake City.

            The Beehive House, completed in 1854, was his official residence.  The dormitory-like Lion House, completed two years later, housed more than a dozen of his wives. In the nineteenth-century, he welcomed famous visitors, like the newspaperman Horace Greeley, to the second-floor parlor in the Beehive House, but the Lion House, often described as Brigham’s “harem,” was a private haven.  Today missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints offer free tours of the Beehive House. The Lion House is a popular restaurant, offering ample lunches to visitors and special treats like “Brigham Young’s donuts.” In neither house is polygamy a welcome topic.

That a subject of intense interest to visitors and genuine significance to American history is off-limits in the houses that might powerfully address it highlights both a problem and an opportunity. Building on an already well-developed scholarship on history and memory in Mormon studies, this paper will consider strategies for engaging students and the general public in discussions of a topic that is both intently present yet submerged.