The Cahoon Mansion, an iconic dwelling located in the historic core of Murray City next to the new City Hall, is hard to miss if you’ve spent any time in Murray. Widely known as the Murray Mansion, it is set to have a big year in 2025. 

The home is turning 125, and to celebrate its long history, the Cahoon Mansion will soon open to the public as the Murray City Museum, a newly-renovated space dedicated to documenting and sharing the history and memories of Murray and Murray residents. 

The museum grand opening will occur in late March 2025, and the March edition of the Murray Journal will spotlight upcoming events. However, this article is dedicated to the history of the Cahoon Mansion itself. 

The Cahoon Family

The Cahoon Mansion was built by John P. Cahoon and his wife Elizabeth Gordon. Construction started in 1899 and the family moved in in 1901. It wasn’t their first house, as the couple had been married since 1877, but the mansion was a prize, a culmination of the success Cahoon had attained in a variety of business ventures. 

When the home was built, it boasted 33 rooms and was built using bricks manufactured by one of the companies Cahoon founded, the Salt Lake Pressed Brick Company.

Founded in 1874, the brick company was originally located on the east side of State Street near Big Cottonwood Creek, it moved to 3300 South and 1100 East (current site of Brickyard Plaza). 

It was the first commercial brick manufacturing plant in the Western United States, and in 1893, at the World’s Fair in Chicago, the company won first prize for the best red brick. In 1939, the company was renamed Interstate Brick and is still widely recognized as one of the premier commercial brick manufacturers in the United States. 

Cahoon’s additional business ventures included the Progress Company. Founded in 1897, the company generated and supplied electricity to many homes, farms and small businesses in Murray City. As such, the Cahoon Mansion was one of the first private dwellings to be outfitted with electricity. The Progress Company was sold to Brinton Electric, and later to Murray City.

Cahoon conducted business for these companies (and also other businesses in which he had an interest: Eagle Printing and Miller & Cahoon Company) in the mansion in his main floor office, a brightly lit room on the south side of the dwelling.

In the book, “Utah Since Statehood,” originally written in 1919 by Noble Warrum, Cahoon was described as such, “In a word he is a man of big business, the extent and importance of his interests well winning him classification with America’s ‘Captains
of Industry.’”

The book further describes him, “He is a member of no church but is liberal in his views and respects every man’s belief. He has concentrated his efforts and attention upon his manufacturing interests and has won a high place in the business world, his name being today a well-known one in manufacturing circles throughout the country. He has never stopped short of the successful accomplishment of his purpose and therefore knows the joy of success.”

Living in the “Big Yellow House”

The Cahoon’s had 10 children and one of their daughters, Vadis, was young when the family moved into the house. Before she passed, she recollected to her niece, Georgene Cahoon Evans, that they called the mansion the “big house” or the “big yellow house.”

According to Vadis, there was a kitchen on the main floor with a coal stove. She and her sister would watch their mother roll cookies, make pies and prepare the meals.

The majority of the bedrooms for the children were in the basement, along with a playroom and a laundry room with an exit to the back yard. They had a milk room and a dumb waiter for delivering things from the basement to the other floors.

There was also a fruit cellar where they would help their mother preserve jam in ceramic crocks, and there was always a keg of sorghum molasses and a can of honey in the cellar.

The home had an orchard in the back and a large garden, and in the winter, they’d flood the lawn for
ice skating.

There was an electric pump to carry water to the top of the house and fill a big tank in the attic, which allowed the home to have flushing toilets and running water in the kitchen. The tank was filled by an artesian well located on the property.

“It wasn’t long after we built our home that everyone started to use flush toilets,” Vadis recalled. “We had a cesspool before they put the sewage system in. When one would get full, they would have to dig another one.” 

After the Cahoons

In 1923, the Cahoon family moved out of the mansion and subsequently, the dwelling became home to many owners, renters and businesses. Over time, there have been six owners of the mansion. 

In 1983, the Mansion was placed on the National Registry for Historic Places, and the addition of the ballroom on the north side was built that same year by Bill and Susan Wright, to accommodate their reception center and dance studio.

Susan Wright recollected to the Murray Journal that when they bought the home, they were surprised that the brick was yellow, not gray, as years of soot from the nearby smelter had coated the exterior walls. They had it sandblasted to the original color before building the
ballroom addition.

Then in 2017, Murray City purchased the Mansion with the hopes of moving the Murray City Museum into the historic structure.

Mansion architecture and renovation

The yellow brick home sits on a raised grey sandstone foundation accented with heavy sandstone lintels and sills. Other decorative features include clear and frosted leaded glass in some windows and interior transoms. The main floor has 12-foot-high ceilings, ornate fireplaces, and decorative wood baseboards and trim.

“All of the wood floors you see in the Cahoon Mansion are original, in fact all of the moldings, trim and doors are original. Even the pocket-doors work,” Rowan Coates, Murray City Museum curator, said. “We rolled back the carpets and the fir flooring was in great condition. All four fireplaces and their tile hearths are original. We were even able to preserve the shellac on the wood mantles.” 

Over the decades the walls had been covered with layers of wallpaper, but during restoration they were stripped and the underlying layers of paint were analyzed then recreated in each room. “The colors you see are modern equivalents of the colors they had here, including the red room,” Coates said. “It seems like a bold choice, but the color is authentic.”

Originally, the home was heated with a boiler and cast-iron radiators. The boiler and radiators were still functioning when renovation started, but to bring the building up to code the boiler was retired. 

“When we started the renovation, I didn’t want to step foot into the boiler room,” Coates said. “There wasn’t a light in there and it looked like a place where they’d film a scary movie.”

After installing modern heating and air conditioning, the no-longer-functioning radiators in each room were polished and restored to their original appearance.

The basement and upstairs, though renovated, won’t be accessible to the public because they are not ADA-accessible. They will be utilized for city offices, conference rooms and museum workspace
and storage. 

“We didn’t want to jeopardize the historic designation by attaching an elevator to the side of the historic structure,” Coates said. “However, there is ADA access in the ballroom, and that will be the main entrance of the museum.”

The home architecture is high-Victorian Eclectic, and includes many ornamental details on the fireplaces and interior finishes, but the basic rectangular shape hints at the economy of design that produced
the bungalow.

The Victorian styling is different from the playful turret and stained-glass details found in the “Red House,” a Queen Anne Victorian built in Murray about the same time as the Cahoon Mansion, and spotlighted in the October 2024 issue of the Murray Journal. For that article, see the link: www.murrayjournal.com/2024/10/07/508583/standing-strong-three-victorian-homes-in-murray-celebrate-125-years

More mansion memories

“The place has been a big part of my own family history,” Max Reese, a lifelong Murray resident, said. “My grandma’s mother (Caroline Gordon) was the half-sister, through polygamy, to Elizabeth Gordon Cahoon, the first owner of the mansion.”

Elizabeth Gordon Cahoon, wife of John P. Cahoon and original matron of the Cahoon Mansion, was born into a polygamist family. Her father was James P. Gordon, and Elizabeth was the daughter of his first wife Mary Ballantyne. Caroline Gordon (Reese’s great-grandmother) was the daughter of James Gordon’s second wife, Mary Elizabeth Helm.

“My grandma (Ella Mary) was born in 1895 and was a little girl when the home when the home was brand new. Her mother (Caroline) would take her to visit the cousins, and they would race around the rooms of the mansion. The year was about 1903,” continued Reese.

Of note, while both Elizabeth Gordon Cahoon and Caroline Gordon Nester were born into a polygamist family, neither entered into a polygamist marriage.

“The house was always one of the grandest in Murray, and I always kept an eye on it through the years,” Reese said. “Then in 1990, when the Murray Mansion was a reception center, my daughter was married there. And now she’s writing an article about the mansion for the Murray Journal, so it seems full circle.

“I’d imagine I’m not the only one living in Murray with more than a few memories of the place,” Reese said.

(A note: this particular interview was conducted with the reporter’s father.)

Very soon, the Cahoon Mansion, Murray Mansion and now the Murray City Museum will re-open to the public and everyone can enjoy the history of the city and the home, for themselves. λ