Good Shepherd in Ogden wants to preserve historic landmark

Article Last Updated: 8/26/2005 10:35 PM

Good Shepherd in Ogden wants to preserve historic landmark

By Kristen Moulton
The Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake Tribune

OGDEN - The Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd has been in downtown Ogden since horses and buggies kicked up dust on the town's dirt streets. It was there before Union Station and the store fronts along 25th Street, before The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' tabernacle and temple, and well before the Ogden City Mall was built and, two decades later, demolished. And now, as Ogden begins its next wave of downtown development, Good Shepherd's parishioners have a plan that would preserve the old and embrace the new.
In a formal offer this summer, the Episcopal Diocese of Utah asked Ogden City to sell the land to the east of the historic church and its social hall. Good Shepherd wants to build a second, larger chapel that could accommodate the 400-plus members of the congregation and be surrounded by park-like landscaping.
Not only would such a church allow the parish to handle the big crowds it sees on holidays and for funerals, it would reintroduce Ogden to a piece of its history that has been virtually hidden behind the walls of the mall's parking terrace for a quarter of a century - the 130-year-old chapel.
"It's not just history," says the Rev. Adam Linton, rector of Good Shepherd. "We're very committed to downtown Ogden. It [the plan] makes us a real anchor and a resource."
Good Shepherd was built in 1874 and 1875, four years after Ogden's first non-Mormon clergyman, an Episcopal priest, came by train, living with his wife in a boxcar and preaching in a corner of the railroad station.
Over the decades, as downtown Ogden developed into a commercial hub, the church shared the block with family-owned shops.
When those were destroyed so the mall could be built along Washington Boulevard in the early 1980s, the church's place on state and federal historic registers protected it from demolition.
The mall's three-story parking terrace, however, was erected along the eastern and northern borders of the church property, leaving the church boxed in. The church faces Grant Avenue, which functions as an alley.
Ogden City bought the failed mall, and spent the past couple years demolishing it and the piece of the parking terrace to the east of the church. For the first time in more than two decades, parishioners have full sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows over the altar at the east end of the sanctuary.
Ogden plans a 20-acre complex with a high-adventure recreation center, theaters, restaurants, retail shops, offices and condominiums to replace the mall. Construction of the Treehouse Children's Museum is now underway.
Just how the church's plans will fit in with that complex is not clear, although church and city officials have been talking for three years.
Dave Harmer, the city's new director of community development, said he and his staff have been too busy this summer trying to line up financing for the high adventure recreation center to respond to the church's offer to buy property.
The church wants all the land, roughly a half block, between its existing property and Kiesel Avenue, a north-south road that will be re-established down the center of the new development. The city, however, wants retail shops to line Kiesel Avenue east of Good Shepherd, Harmer says.
City and church leaders figure negotiators will come up with a solution by winter.
Good Shepherd, says parishioner Matt Otten, is an asset to downtown. "Fifteen thousand times a year, Good Shepherd brings a human being to downtown Ogden."
Ogden's first Episcopal priest, Rev. James Lee Gillogly and his wife, Lucilia, came to Ogden in 1870, boarding with a Mormon bishop for a few months before moving into an unused boxcar during summer months.
Within a year, they'd bought the land where Good Shepherd still stands with a donation from Episcopalians in the eastern U.S., and it was other eastern benefactors who donated nearly $10,000 for the church and its furnishings, including the redwood pews still in use. The church was consecrated in February 1875.
The church's 1873 bell still rings out to announce worship in what parishioners believe is the oldest continually used building north of Salt Lake City. The original pulpit, altar chairs and lectern remain.
The granite, quarried at Mendon in Cache County, remains sturdy today because the congregation has always been vigilant about preservation, says Diane Lowe, who moved with her architect husband from Kansas to Ogden in the 1950s.
"Good Shepherd is a big part of why we stayed," says Lowe. "It sounds trite to say, but it's a family."
Good Shepherd hosts public concerts on its pipe organ regularly, and its social hall and basement were used for decades by 12-step groups and youth organizations.
Linton says the parish wants to build on its presence downtown with a new chapel that could seat 250 people at once. The church also needs more office, classroom and storage space.
The architecture would fit with the old chapel, which would remain the primary worship space for the congregation, Linton says.
"We regard this as a historic resource for ourselves and the wider community."