By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Perhaps the most eventful lunch hour of my long career working in downtown Salt Lake City was ending. After Joseph Rawlins and William Dickson—two of the ghosts from my law firms past—evicted me from a quiet solo lunch in my office, I floated and strolled around on Main Street and met all sorts of interesting but long-dead historic figures. (See here for parts one, two, three, and four of this series.)
After finishing a discussion with renowned turn of the century businessman David Keith, I was about to cross Main Street to meet his good friend Mary Judge. Keith startled me by shouting, “Now watch out for the presidents!” I stepped back just as a large crowd appeared, surrounding a man who looked just like Ulysses S. Grant. They walked by me and towards the Keith Building.
Keith said, “President Grant stayed in the Walker House Hotel, which stood right here during his 1875 Utah visit. Five years later, in 1880, President Rutherford B. Hayes spoke to a crowd on Main Street from the Walker Hotel balcony. Civil War hero General William Tecumseh Sherman stole the show that day, however, by telling the crowd to be at least half as good as they knew how to be.”
Fascinated, I asked, “Who else slept near here, at least in terms of presidents?” Keith explained, “William Howard Taft stayed at the Knutsford Hotel a block from here in 1909. Woodrow Wilson stayed at the Church’s Hotel Utah up at the north end of Main Street in 1919, and Warren Harding visited there too in 1923. Both men were either debilitated or dead within a few months of their visits.” Keith paused, and observed, “I am sure that was just coincidence.”
As I turned back towards Main Street, I saw a large throng of 1890-era ghosts cheering for President Benjamin Harrison as he rode by in a horse-drawn carriage, surrounded by uniformed guards. A moment later, it was 1903 and the crowd waved as President Theodore Roosevelt passed by, also in a horse carriage. Teddy Roosevelt stood, grinned, waved, and doffed his top hat towards me.
Then another Roosevelt—Franklin Delano—drove by on Main Street in a mournful procession on its way to the Tabernacle for the 1936 funeral of Roosevelt’s good friend, former Utah Governor and Secretary of War George H. Dern. Finally, it was September 1963, and President John F. Kennedy drove by in an open convertible limousine, waving to a much happier crowd. The young president was in a much more somber motorcade in Dallas just two months later.
I looked back at Keith and said, “That’s a lot of American presidents for one three block radius.” Keith smiled and waved goodbye as I crossed Main Street to meet Mary Harney Judge. Mary was born in Canada in 1841 to Irish Catholic immigrant parents.
After she moved to New York, she met and married John Judge, a survivor of both the Irish potato famine and the American Civil War. They came to Utah penniless in 1876 so John could work at the territory prison in Sugar House and then in Park City’s mines, where John met and went into business with Thomas Kearns and David Keith.
They earned a fortune with the Silver King Mine. Kearns married John’s niece Jennie, making the Judges and the Kearns part of the same extended family. John worked in the mines right beside his employees and as a result, died from lung disease in 1892.
Mary took over the family business and expanded it into real property, particularly in downtown Salt Lake City, including the Judge Building on the southeast corner of Main Street and 300 South. When Mary died in 1909, her estate included some 15 buildings in the downtown area and was valued at $3,000,000.
Mary also was a generous woman, helping build the Cathedral of the Madeleine and what would become Judge Memorial Catholic High School. Local newspapers eulogized her as a shrewd business woman with a “strong virile mind,” but also as someone who was quite modest, a trait she confirmed right when I saw her ghost.
“I won’t talk all that much about myself,” Judge explained politely but firmly to me, “but let me tell you about Virtue Clift, Sarah Daft, and Jennie Judge Kearns.”
Mary continued, “Virtue Clift, originally from England, constructed the tall building kitty corner from here in 1920 in honor of her dead pioneer husband Francis, another merchant and miner. Francis came to Salt Lake City on an ox cart with the Walker Brothers. His wife Virtue came here in 1854. She died in the Newhouse hotel in 1925.”
Judge added, “Like Mrs. Clift, Mrs. Sarah Daft lost her husband in 1881 but then built her inheritance into an even larger fortune with smart investments in real estate and mining. You can see one of her beautiful buildings on Main Street just north of my nephew-in-law Thomas Kearns’ building. There’s a pub in there now. Brigham Young’s expert watchmaker—John Daynes—bought that building from Daft shortly before she died in 1906.”
I asked Judge, “Who started the Sarah Daft Retirement Home on 1300 East Street?” Judge responded, “Mrs. Daft’s wealth financed that too, but after she died. Sarah often said she wanted there to be a place where ‘lonesome old people can go to live out their lives without worry where the next meal is coming from, or where they are going to get the winter’s coal or necessary clothing.’”
“Now don’t forget about my niece, Jennie Judge Kearns,” Mary continued. “She managed her family’s business affairs capably for over two decades after Thomas died in 1918. She had offices in both the Kearns and Tribune Buildings on Main Street, and was president of the Kearns Corporation, which owned the Salt Lake Tribune and the Salt Lake Telegram. When she passed away in 1943, her estate was worth over $2 million.”
“Jennie helped build the Catholic cathedral downtown and cared about all children too. She founded and supported the St. Ann’s Orphanage. The city named Gallivan Plaza, right by your office, for her nephew Jack, the former publisher of the Tribune. Jennie took Jack in and raised him in the Kearns mansion after his mother, Jennie’s half-sister, died.”
I listened while Mary talked, but I also googled Jennie Kearns on my phone. (Yes, the internet does work in mystical realms.) Mary died before Jennie, so I read to her what one newspaper wrote when Jennie died:
“The span of Mrs. Kearns’ years in Utah included numerous exciting, romantic, dramatic, and sometimes bitter episodes in the growth and industrial development of Utah. So closely associated with all of this, she [Jennie] moved serenely as a wife, mother, businesswoman, and friend of the orphan. The good things said about her upon her passing testify to the quality and scope of her contributions down through the years.”
Mary listened carefully, and then said, “That’s all true. I also have a question for you…how is my Judge Memorial Miners Home?” Recalling the suffering of her miner-husband John, in the early 1900s Mary’s planning and investment had built a beautiful building on a hill overlooking the city where disabled and retired miners could live.
I told her, “I just finished serving on the board of what now is Judge Memorial Catholic High School, which evolved from your miners home and recently celebrated its centennial. Right now we are making plans to build a new high school right next to the St. Ann’s orphanage. The urban school campus will unify the great legacies of the Judge and Kearns families.”
For the first time during our paranormal encounter, Mary Judge smiled. She said, “I am pleased,” and then she was gone. A moment later, the two old attorneys who started all this—Rawlins and Dickson—appeared before me. They grabbed my arms.
Without a word, the three of us took flight and soared over downtown Salt Lake City. At first, the city appeared as it had some 200 years ago, but when the two ghost lawyers each waved a fountain pen and sprinkled magical ink, the city began to grow and change right before my eyes, just as it had done over time.
We reached the top of Main Street just as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Temple rose out of the ground and took magnificent shape as it had in 1893. I reached out, almost able to touch the angel Moroni’s golden trumpet at the very peak of the sacred edifice.
From there, I watched in awe as Salt Lake transfigured, from the historic city of the past that I had just learned so much about into the one I knew so well in the present.
Rawlins and Dickson then raced back down Main Street, high in the sky with me in tow, and flew towards the side of my office building at One Utah Center. Convinced we all were going to crash into the granite skyscraper, sixteen stories up, I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, I was sitting at my desk alone in front of a half-eaten ham sandwich and an empty bag of chips. I shook my head and pinched my arm, certain I had fallen asleep and dreamt up my entire lunch time local history odyssey.
There was no sign that anything was askew; no proof of my unusual adventure. Then I noticed that one of my framed photos had changed. Instead of depicting my alma mater—the University of Notre Dame—the photo showed something else, three figures shoulder to shoulder together.
Over time, I’ve noticed an odd feature of this new photo—whenever someone other than me enters my office, the photo reverts to its previous Notre Dame form.
When I am alone, however, the framed portrait shows me, smiling, and standing right between Rawlins and Dickson.
I am the only one who ever sees it.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
