The Park City Museum Historic Home Tour (on Upper Main Street and Daly Avenue this year) will take place on Saturday, June 21 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Tickets are now on sale!
One of the homes on the tour this year is 150 Main Street. Originally a hall and parlor style home (a two-room house type where the hall is like a modern living room and the parlor more like a den), it was altered circa 1910 to have the current commercial front and second story.
Nicholas and Carrie Rowe were the original occupants of the more traditional style home. Nicholas arrived in Park City in 1879 and became a pumpman at the nearby Ontario Mine. Nick, as everyone called him, was well-liked by his peers.
He took a trip back to his native England in 1887, returning after a month “with his face so beaming with smiles as to lead his friends to suspect that he had done something good for the cause of humanity….” The newspaper continued, “[T]he suspicions were well founded, and Nick admits… to [marrying] his first love, Miss Carrie Richards, a charming and accomplished lady of Cornwall, England.” They had one son, Arthur, together.
Carrie had a garden at the home, the Park Record reporting in 1894 that she had grown a turnip with a perfect ‘W’ that appeared as if stamped inside the root vegetable, which promptly went on display in town.
There is a long history of sharing funny, interesting, and metaphor or symbol-containing vegetables. Ancient Romans often made use of sexually suggestive vegetables for jokes, puns, and metaphors for discussion and erotica. This trend of course continues today in emojis (most notably the peach and eggplant).
Credit: Park City Historical Society & Museum, Fraser Buck Collection
Other cultures would often share and display produce that appeared to exhibit a symbol of their culture or religion, sometimes taking it as a message or sign from a higher power. This too, has continued to the present.
Less often, produce has created fanfare surrounding an odd shape or similar uniqueness. Not long ago, an older couple went viral across social media for a tomato they grew that looks like a rubber ducky. Carrie’s turnip mostly falls into this category, where the root vegetable did not contain any significance or metaphor, but was just kind of interesting and funny. The newspaper even kept the turnip so they could display it themselves.
Their article not only ran in Park City, but the story was picked up on the local wire, appearing in the Coalville Times, Deseret News, Wasatch Wave, and Tooele Transcript over the course of that 1894 week. The report called the turnip “a freak of nature that knocks silly the letter ‘B’ on oat blades.” Not only that, but people who came to view it at the newspaper office apparently frequently commented on their astonishment.
The turnip did contain a message for some who visited the exhibit, however. The Park Record also reported, “the general remark is that it means waging war or woeful want… though a majority are inclined to the latter.” In other words, it was a waste of a perfectly good turnip to display it and an alliterative sign of further waste (or war) to come.
Unfortunately, the turnip is long gone and won’t be on display for the Home Tour, but 150 Main Street and the other locations still hold plenty of intrigue.