Stories of the ordinary people who helped build Salt Lake City emerge from a study of their often humble adobe houses. Rather than focusing on men and women in positions of power and influence, the emphasis here is on the lives of people who built their sturdy, simple homes from mud.

A Modest Homestead provides architectural descriptions of ninety-four extant adobe houses. They are as basic as the people who built them—small tradesmen and farmers, laborers and domestics. Author Laurie Bryant discusses the neighbourhoods in Salt Lake City where adobe houses have survived, often much renovated and disguised, and she showcases the houses not just as they appear today but as they were originally built. Almost all the houses now have additions and improvements, and without some dissection they are not always recognisable, often being both more comfortable and pleasant than might have been the case in the nineteenth century. What emerges through Bryant’s research is an enlarged picture of the roughhewn life of many early Utahns. Includes 120 historic and contemporary photographs.