Ogden's Untamed Women Walking Tour

Some of the most amazing stories got left out.  For the whole history of Ogden, visionary, brave, scrappy, hopeful women have been walking these very streets.  Gilded Age Ogden had notorious Madams and Mormon Relief Society Presidents living across the street from each other. And I think we’re hungry for these stories, now, 100 years after the 19th Amendment.

We’ll walk in the footsteps of a wonderful variety of characters from Ogden’s history on this walking tour. We’ll explore downtown Ogden around the Junction and 24th Street, and hear the stories hidden within historic buildings, ballrooms, streets, and alleys. Hiding in plain sight are the incredible stories of fascinating women, as varied as Ogden itself.

You’ll experience:

• walking in the footsteps of Sarah Anderson, who attempted to vote in 1895, was turned away, and sued! The court case results make me proud to live in Ogden

• the home site of Jane Richards, a national suffrage leader (she should be famous around here!)

• tales of the most powerful person in Gilded Age Ogden: notorious Madam Belle London. The site of her parlor house is now a parking lot

• Electric Alley (the Victorian red light district), its hidden entrance, and the women who lived and worked there

• Victorian lawyer MaryAnna Coulter, the only female in her class in the 1880s

• buildings that once housed secretarial schools, knitting factories, and department stores— where working class women built their own futures

• local hero “Grandma Ruby” Price, first president of Ogden’s NAACP. It’s easiest to sum up her incredible life by asking What did she not do?

• the first Buddhist Church in Utah - now hidden behind a humble Mexican restaurant

• the now-shuttered Berthana Ballroom, built by two women and famed as the “finest in the West”

• the first bell to ring in Ogden, on Ogden’s oldest church, and the sad story of the woman it memorializes

…and much more!

We’ll start out tour in the middle of The Junction, zig-zag through downtown Ogden, and return again at the end, approximately 1.3 miles walk.

$200 for up to 20 people.