By Michael Patrick O’Brien
If it’s true, as some say, that God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world, then the Good Lord must have carved out an exception for Mount Calvary cemetery in Salt Lake City.
The tallest monument there—for a beloved Irish Catholic saloonkeeper named James McTernay—dominates the 125-year-old graveyard’s skyline.
Mount Calvary is one of the oldest Catholic places in Utah. Salt Lake Mayor James Glendinning sold the 20 acre site for $1 to Bishop Lawrence Scanlan in 1897.
At the time, there were six parishes and only 8,000 Catholics in Utah. The Cathedral of the Madeleine was not yet built.
I visit the peaceful hillside cemetery overlooking the Salt Lake Valley often. My older brother Pete rests there, as do many friends and several Catholic priests I knew and liked.
No matter when or why I go to Mount Calvary, however, I find myself also paying respects to James McTernay’s monumental grave.
It’s hard to miss, marked since 1911 by a massive 27-foot-tall obelisk sculpted from Vermont granite. For years I thought McTernay must have been a prominent businessman or church official.
One day I learned he tended bars. So how did an immigrant (and never naturalized) Irish American Catholic saloonkeeper acquire what perhaps is the largest monument in the Salt Lake City cemetery?
McTernay was born in about 1845 in County Leitrim. It is a corner of northwestern Ireland where, according to the great poet William Butler Yeats, a “wave of moonlight glosses the dim grey sands with light.” (“The Stolen Child” 1889)
Although the North Atlantic landscape inspired lovely lyrics, McTernay left that island home in 1855 at a young age.
He emigrated—apparently with two brothers—in the aftermath of the devastating Potato Famine. The Great Hunger killed a million Irish and displaced another million or more.
After several years on the East Coast and then in Helena, Montana, a twenty-something McTernay arrived in Utah in 1867. He worked as a team driver and boarding house manager before discovering his true calling in 1872 when he took charge of a saloon serving silver miners in Alta.
Just a year later, McTernay purchased the bar at the Salt Lake Home, a hotel on Main Street where Mark Twain had stayed a few years earlier. McTernay spent the next four decades in the saloon business in downtown Salt Lake City.
He also was known for operating the bar at Delmonico’s Restaurant, owned by Utah pioneer James Dinwoodey, and for the Onyx Bank Bar on Second South just west of Main Street. McTernay was quite skilled at his chosen profession.
The newspapers of his day called McTernay a “genial mixologist,” a “polished proprietor,” and a “philosopher” whose views on life “have gone down as gems always to be remembered.”
The Intermountain Catholic said he was a “well known and respected resident” with “sterling qualities” such as “his honesty and charity.”
In 1910, the Salt Lake Tribune observed, “It was always said of him that were all drinking places conducted as he conducted his, the evils of the liquor traffic would be reduced to a minimum.”
Despite these many accolades, McTernay was far from perfect. His bars ran back room operations taking bets on local election results.
One old newspaper reported that he had “lost two or three fortunes” speculating in mines and mining stocks. He also got entangled in some well-publicized litigation.
There was a property dispute with the estate of one Salt Lake’s famous Walker brothers and a lawsuit over an allegedly stolen diamond. McTernay also litigated with a local priest over the return of funds said to be due back to an estate he managed.
In December 1909, the teetotaling Deseret News ran the prominent headline ”ONE MORE SCANDAL IN SALOON CIRCLES.” The story underneath detailed a lawsuit filed against McTernay—a lifelong bachelor—for breach of an alleged promise to marry.
At the time, the plaintiff Selma Swanson was the head waitress at the Kenyon Hotel on Salt Lake’s Main Street where McTernay lived. The DNews reported McTernay “had been intimate” with Swanson after an offer of marriage but then had refused to keep his promise.
McTernay denied the claims. The lawsuit ended when McTernay died the following spring at age 64.
He had been ill, on and off, with lung problems and pneumonia. Chronic gastritis also contributed to his demise on April 28, 1910, at the old Holy Cross Hospital.
A large crowd attended McTernay’s funeral at the cathedral. One of his pallbearers was William H. Dickson, a former United States attorney for Utah who founded the law firm—Parsons Behle & Latimer—where I now work.
Despite the public airing of his possible sins, a Salt Lake weekly newspaper eulogized McTernay as having “an honest heart and an honest disposition” and as someone who followed a path “lined by generous acts.” The writer concluded, “He had hosts of friends and no enemies that we know of.”
McTernay attracted almost as much media attention in death as in life. He had two wills and left behind a reasonably large estate, including some $25,000 (worth much more in today’s money) in cash on hand.
One of his wills bequeathed the bulk of McTernay’s estate to any heirs that could be found. The other, signed two weeks before he died, gave most of his money to charitable and educational purposes. Some probate litigation ensued.
McTernay’s friend (and Utah mine operator) Patrick Ryan sorted out the estate, and in the end, money went both to charity and to at least two confirmed nephews. Attorney Charles Stetson Varian, a member of the Utah Constitutional Convention and another early founder of my law firm, helped with the estate.
The big news about McTernay in 1911—a year after he died—concerned the erection of the formidable grave monument for, as The Salt Lake Tribune called him, “one of Salt Lake’s prominent citizens.”
The Tribune said the monument was “as handsome a shaft as may be seen in the west” and “probably the most expensive in any of the Salt Lake cemeteries.”
Local lore reported by the Tribune and the DNews says McTernay’s friends collected money to fund the construction and thus to remember a beloved man with no local family. It’s a good story, and it may even be true.
Yet, McTernay’s probate papers (which I found on Ancestry.com) also indicate that his estate could have paid for the obelisk. Both of his wills had set aside almost $2,000 for a grave marker.
We may never know all the details of how McTernay got his grand monument at Mount Calvary cemetery over a century ago. Still, I love this story for so many reasons.
If it’s true that McTernay’s friends paid for the marker to make sure he was remembered, then it’s a touching story of fellowship with a man who apparently never forgot his own humble origins.
If McTernay paid for the monument himself, then his is a wonderful rags to riches story, a great Irish American triumph over the horrors of the Great Hunger that brought him here.
Whiskey (and other substances) have decimated so many Irish lives in the distant and recent past. McTernay’s story may be one where this did not happen, where an Irish man found his footing, and his rightful place in the world, despite the invention of whiskey.
This St. Patrick’s Day, I’ll raise my glass of Jameson to any and all of those happy tales. Sláinte!
*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.
