OCR

Introduction 1860 - 1904 It is both interesting and significant that Utah Construction and Mining Company's history and growth has often been compared and paralleled with the growth and development of the western United States. It is interesting also from the standpoint of today's advanced society; how difficult it is for today's citizen to grasp the concept of society that pre- vailed only one hundred years ago. In the early 1860's, only a little more than a decade after gold had been discovered in California; the west was well on its way to the concerted growth that is still continuing to this day. These were the years when the dream of a railroad linking the Atlantic and the Pacific was fast be- coming a reality. As the long-awaited railroad linking the two oceans reached Utah, six farm boys who lacked the opportunity for formal education but who possessed vision and energy, were hired as laborers, teamsters, and in similar jobs. G. L. Corey, father of Utah's former president Lester S. Corey, was the oldest of the group. The others were his brothers Warren W., Charles J., and Amos B. Corey, and their nephews, Edmund O. Wattis and William H. Wattis. The Corey boys traveled West with their mother, who was a young widow when she decided to accompany relatives and friends in their search for a new life in the far west. The Wattis boys, sons of the Corey brothers' sister, were born in Utah on one of the homesteads these pioneers plowed in the uninhabited lands which surround present- day Ogden. By the time a silver sledge hammered the gold spike linking the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads at Promontory Point, Utah, in May, 1869, the Corey and Wattis boys were no longer content with simple farm life. They had their savings from their railroad work, a sum estimated as no more than a few hundred dollars, and they had teams and wagons. They pooled their cash, horses, and wagons, and they were in business as a freighting company. At first they hauled freight coming on the new railroad, carrying it to the interior towns of Utah, Idaho, and Nevada. Then, as they became known, as their business confidence grew, they won little contracts for grading branch railroad lines. Along about the 1880's, when they started railroad construction, they organized a partnership known as Corey Brothers and Company.