Weber Stake Academy, 1889
Near Ogden, Utah
On January seventh, eighteen eighty-nine, approximately one hundred students walked into a red-brick meetinghouse on the southwest corner of Grant Avenue and Twenty-Sixth Street in Ogden. They were enrolling in the first day of classes at Weber Stake Academy, a school founded by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to provide formal education to the families of northern Utah.
The school was named for Weber County, which was named for John Henry Weber, a German-born fur trapper of the eighteen twenties who may or may not have actually trapped in the Weber Valley. The record is inconclusive, but the name stuck. The first president of the academy was a man named Louis F. Moench, who organized the curriculum and ran the institution through its early years.
The school changed its name several times as it changed its mission. Weber Academy in nineteen two. Weber Normal College in nineteen eighteen, a teachers' college training the educators northern Utah needed. Weber College in nineteen twenty-two. In nineteen thirty-one the Utah Legislature moved to acquire it from the church, and by nineteen thirty-three it had become a state-supported junior college, serving students who could not afford to travel to Salt Lake City or Provo for university education.
J. Willard Marriott, who would go on to build one of the largest hotel companies in the world, enrolled here in the early nineteen twenties. The school's president at the time helped Marriott make up credits he had missed working his family's sheep ranch.
The institution became Weber State College in nineteen sixty-two, and Weber State University in nineteen ninety-one. It sits on the east bench of Ogden today, above the valley, with about thirty thousand students enrolled. The red-brick meetinghouse where those first hundred students gathered is long gone.
