Brigham City's Great Experiment: Lorenzo Snow and the Cooperative Commonwealth
Near Ogden, Utah
The town you are passing through was once the most ambitious economic experiment in the American West, a place where an entire community agreed to abolish the market and replace it with themselves.
Brigham City was settled in eighteen fifty-one by Mormon pioneers and led from eighteen fifty-three by Lorenzo Snow, who had been sent by Brigham Young to build a self-sufficient settlement in the Box Elder Valley north of the Great Salt Lake. Snow gave the town Brigham Young's name and gave it something else: a vision. He believed that a people who depended on outside merchants for everything were not truly free. He intended to make Brigham City independent of the entire outside economy.
In eighteen sixty-four, Snow opened a cooperative mercantile store. Over the following decade the organization grew into the Brigham City Mercantile and Manufacturing Association, incorporated in eighteen seventy with seven directors and one hundred twenty-six stockholders. Department by department, the cooperative absorbed the economy of the town. A woolen factory. A tannery. A boot and shoe shop. A carpentry department, a dairy, a sawmill, adobe and brick yards, a harness shop, a butchery. Workers were paid not in dollars but in scrip, internal notes redeemable at any department of the association. Money, in the conventional sense, barely circulated.
By the mid-eighteen seventies it was working. Brigham City was producing nearly everything its residents needed. Visitors came from across the territory to study the model. Lorenzo Snow's cooperative became the template for similar ventures in Mormon settlements throughout Utah and attracted the attention of observers far beyond the church.
Then reality asserted itself. A series of financial disasters struck between eighteen seventy-six and eighteen seventy-nine. The cooperative staggered, and by eighteen ninety-five it went into receivership. The experiment was over.
What Snow had demonstrated, and what Brigham City remembers, is that the idea of a cooperative commonwealth is not merely a utopian fantasy. For nearly thirty years, in the desert of northern Utah, it actually worked.
