Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Independent City or Town
- Metro Area
- Politics c. 1860?
- Don’t Know
- Unions, Organized Labor?
- Don’t Know
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Possible
- Was there an ordinance?
- Don't Know
- Sign?
- Don’t Know
- Year of Greatest Interest
- 1880
- Still Sundown?
- Don’t Know
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | ||||||||
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| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Violent Expulsion
Main Ethnic Group(s)
- Unknown
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
- Asian
Comments
According to David Liestman in “Utah’s Chinatowns,” in Arif Dirlik, ed., Chinese on the American Frontier (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001),
“Bingham, with a population of largely Slavic miners, reportedly ran its Chinese out in 1880 due to a rumored case of leprosy in that city’s Chinatown.” (Liestman 284)
A Bingham resident writes:
“At the time Bingham was bought out by Kennecott Copper or British Petroleum, it was on the news. On one of the reports, it said it was still on the city books that no black person could be in the city limits (the older people said more than 24 hours, some said after dark). There was a siren that went off at 9:00 9:30. The young people said it was curfew, but some of the older people thought it might have to do with this law. Black people could work at the mine, but not live in the city. This really surprised me because Bingham Canyon had almost every nationality as citizens.”
[This canyon is near Copperton, and just SW of SLC.]
Bingham resident writes:
“I also found this interesting item from an important book that I mentioned to you, or that you may already be aware of: _Missing Stories, An Oral History of Ethnic and Minority Groups in Utah_, edited by Leslie G. Kelen and Eileen Hallet Stone: A Greek woman named Ellen Furgis, I think still alive and living in Salt Lake, in recalling her experience growing up in the mining town of Bingham, in the Oqurrh Mountains on the west edge of the Salt Lake Valley, said, “I remember blacks worked in Bingham, but a town ordinance prohibited them from staying overnight. I watched them leave every day at about four thirty.” (p. 389). If true that shows how complex the situation you write about can be. Bingham was a mining town of about 3000 people in the early 20th century. It had a very diverse population of several dozen difference nationalities, many with their own segregated residential area (Greektown, Japanese town, etc.) and yet, while Greeks, Italians, Serbs, Slaves, Mexicans, Japanese, Chinese, … were allowed to live there, Blacks were not.”