Salt Lake City, Utah: The Capital That Lost Its "Great"

For its first twenty years, Salt Lake City had a longer name: the pioneers called it the City of the Great Salt Lake, and the word Great stayed until 1868. The name itself was never a mystery. It came straight from the lake.

A council in August 1847

The first company of Mormon pioneers was camped in the valley by July 22, 1847, and they settled the name within a few weeks. Edward Tullidge’s History of Salt Lake City, written for the city council in 1886, reprints a pioneer account of those first weeks. In mid-August, it says, “the quorum of the Twelve decided in council that the name of the city should be the ‘City of the Great Salt Lake.’”

Then the settlers voted on it. On Sunday, August 22, at a general conference, “the public assembly resolved to call the city the ‘City of the Great Salt Lake.’” The same meeting voted to fence the city for farming the next year. Naming the place and fencing the fields were on the same agenda.

From “City of the Great Salt Lake” to Salt Lake City

In everyday use, the name got shorter. The church historian Andrew Jenson, in his Church Chronology, lists the town as “Great Salt Lake City, 1847-1868.” Read his entries for those years and you’ll keep running into an even shorter version, “G. S. L. City.”

The cut came from the legislature. Jenson’s entry for January 29, 1868, reads: “A legislative act was approved, changing the names of Great Salt Lake City and Great Salt Lake County to Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County.” The county lost its “Great” on the same day as the city.

The lake keeps the word

Here’s the thing: the lake never gave the word up. Henry Gannett, the government geographer who compiled a 1905 book on American place names, says the city and county were “named from Great Salt Lake,” and the lake was “named from the salinity of its waters.”

So the city dropped the adjective and kept the noun. If you look at the U.S. Geological Survey map of 1885 above, you’ll see the short form already in print, seventeen years after the change. The lake, in Gannett’s book and on maps since, is still the Great Salt Lake.

The settlers had wanted a bigger name for the whole territory, too. That story, about Deseret and the honeybee, is in how Utah got its name.

Sources & further reading

• Edward W. Tullidge, History of Salt Lake City (1886), p. 49. The council of the Twelve choosing “City of the Great Salt Lake” and the conference vote of August 22, 1847.
• Andrew Jenson, Church Chronology (2nd ed., 1914), pp. 4, 77 and index. The advance company entering the valley on July 22, 1847; “Great Salt Lake City, 1847-1868,” and the legislative act of January 29, 1868, that shortened the names of the city and county.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (USGS, 1905), pp. 143, 272. The city “named from Great Salt Lake,” and the lake named for its salt.
• GNIS feature 1454997 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal record for Salt Lake City, capital of Utah.