David Eccles Home

Built 1907 of brick and white stone trim for David and Ellen Stoddard Eccles.

Architects: Monson & Schaub of Logan
Renovation: 1972 by S. Eugene and Christie Smith Needham

The David Eccles Home is located at 250 West Center Street in the Logan Center Street Historic District in Logan, Utah, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places (#76001811) on July 30, 1976.

David Eccles built this home in 1907 for his second wife, Ellen Stoddard. It has 24 rooms and 11,000 square feet of living space. Emigrating from Scotland with his family in 1863, David Eccles became successful with interests in sugar, lumber, coal, and banking. The architects for the house were J. Monson and Karl Schaub. The style includes late Victorian, Chateauesque, and Neoclassical elements. Two large turrets and colonnades and a neoclassical porch dominate the façade of the beautiful structure. Of particular interest is the scrollwork on the front porch and the embossed abbreviation “D.E.” for David Eccles.

Throughout the house, decorative oak woodwork is prominent. Other features include 19 cut glass windows, detailed plaster cornice work, a large archway entrance to the living room, and hardwood floors. The house has been a university dormitory and fraternity and sorority house. Christie and S. Eugene Needham purchased it in 1970 and their renovation included adding a carport, a children’s play area, a formal garden, an art studio, and bedrooms.*

The David Eccles home represents several important themes in Utah and American history. As a poor emigrant from Scotland, the home symbolizes the successful business career of David Eccles and the important contribution he made to the economic development of the West. As the home of David Eccles’ second family, it is a unique part of the Mormon polygamy story. The home f s construction coincided with the end of the polygamy controversy after David Eccles became convinced he would be able to maintain both families in Utah without any interference. The home of Marriner Eccles during his last boyhood years, the site is also an important part in the history of this important figure in America’s economic history.

Architecturally the David Eccles residence represents the finer achievements of architects and builders responsible for the construction of the many late-Victorian period homes in the West Center Street area of Logan. The home is perhaps the best surviving residence designed by Logan architects Joseph Monson and Karl C. Schaub, both of whom were distinguished in their careers.

The David Eccles Home in Logan was constructed in 1907 at a reported cost of $75,000. The architects were Joseph Monson and Karl C. Schaub. Born May 12, 1849, near Glasgow, Scotland, David Eccles was forced to begin his business career at an early age when his father, a wood turner by trade, suffered almost a complete loss of sight from double cataracts on his eyes. Supplied with kitchen utensils made by his father and resin sticks used to ignite coal fires, the eleven year old David journeyed to neighboring towns to peddle his wares. In 1863, at the age of fourteen, David Eccles and his family emigrated to Utah with help from the LDS Church Perpetual Emigration Fund. After working in Utah and Oregon sawmills, and the Almy Wyoming coal mine, David took a contract in 1872 to supply logs to a portable sawmill. This venture led to further investment in the lumber industry first in Utah then Idaho, and by 1887 in Oregon. His success in the lumber industry made possible other investments in railroads, beet sugar refineries, food processing enterprises, construction, coal, land, livestock, banks, and insurance companies. After his death in 1912, his estate was valued at over six million dollars. During his business career he had founded 54 different enterprises. Because of his respect among both the Mormon and non-Mormon business communities, he was a leader in the secularization of business in the Mormon cultural region. His biographer, Leonard Arrington wrote:

To a poorly educated person from a family with no savings or social status, the only way out of poverty was hard work and careful use of time and resources. Eccles therefore concentrated his efforts toward the goal of accumulation. He did not expend his energies in “church activities,” nor in striving for social recognition, nor in unproductive political debate, nor in the pursuit of pleasure. Every moment, every ounce of energy, every expenditure had to count toward the goal of accumulation and profit. This was not a driving preoccupation but a a pattern of life he knew was right. He was neither tense nor humorless; he enjoyed his work and his endeavors to turn a profit. He worked with gusto, relished the attempt to make business succeed, found pleasure in investing in new enterprises. But he was careful, prudent, and shrewd. This was habitual with him and not just a “show” to induce a spirit of economy among his employees.
Leonard J. Arrington, David Eccles, pp. 126-127.

In keeping with the standard set by prominent men of good standing in the Mormon Church before 1890, David Eccles married two women. His first wife and her family lived in Ogden and their home, now known as the Bertha Eccles Art Center has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

David married his first wife, Bertha Jensen, in 1875. Ten years later, in 1885, he married Ellen Stoddard a young girl eighteen years of age. Because of the pressure by federal officials to arrest Mormon men guilty of unlawful cohabitation, the marriage to Ellen was kept a secret. Ellen was well aware of the necessity for secrecy especially when her own father, a polygamist with four wives, was arrested and forced to spend several months in prison. During the late 1880’s, Eccles moved Ellen, her mother, sister and two brothers to North Powder, Oregon, near a sawmill built by John Stoddard, but then owned by his son-in-law David Eccles. In 1890, Ellen returned to her family in Logan where she gave birth to her first child, Marriner. With the fear of arrest for unlawful cohabitation still a threat to her husband, Ellen continued to keep her marriage a secret and while in Logan, carefully hung drying diapers under sheets on the clothesline in an effort to maintain her secret. Ellen remained in Utah and Southern Idaho until late 1894 when she returned to Oregon with her three children, Marriner born in 1890, Marie born in 1892, and Spencer born in 1894. Her father, a business associate of David Eccles in the lumber industry had made his home in Oregon and Ellen remained there until 1907. During her sojourn in Oregon, five more children were born.

After Ellen’s return to Logan in 1907, David’s relationship between his Ogden and Logan families settled into a comfortable routine. Leonard Arrington writes:

Eccles necessarily divided what time he had for domestic matters between his two families, so the responsibility for rearing their nine children necessarily fell to their mother Ellen. The oldest son of this family, Marriner, recalled, “she reared us all to share her own view of David as a man who was to be respected and loved, and not to be annoyed by noise and tumults on the occasions when he was home with us.” And his sister Nora concurred, adding that, even though Eccles kept unorthodox hours–in his later years he often came home as late as ten o’clock in the evening–her mother would attempt to have a full dinner for him, and a family of happy, if tired, children to greet him. The children loved to wait for his arrival. He would play games with them, such as dropping nickels and dimes on the sofa for them to find. When they would bring the lost coins to him, he would reply in his Scottish burr, “Losers weepers, finders keepers!” and laugh heartily.
Leonard J. Arrington, David Eccles, p. 155. Marriner S. Eccles, Beckoning Frontiers: Public and Personal’ Recollections, (New York, 1951), p. 22.