85 years ago today - Feb 23, 1933

[During the Great Depression]
Increasingly, evictions proceeded only over citizen protest. On the afternoon of 23 February 1933 Salt Lake County Sheriff Grant Young and several of his deputies were scheduled to conduct a tax sale from the west steps of the City and County Building. Six houses and a farm were to be sold for back taxes following mortgage foreclosures. A crowd of several hundred people gathered to try to prevent the sale. Sheriff Young appealed to them to disperse; instead, they stormed the building. Deputies turned a fire hose on them, slowing them only momentarily, and they quickly wrestled the hose from the deputies and turned it into the building, flooding the ground floor. Police finally succeeded in dispersing the crowd with tear gas and arrested seven men and a woman for "direct rioting". Eventually, fifteen people were arrested, found guilty, fined and sentenced to brief jail terms.

[Source: Utah History Encyclopedia: The Great Depression, http://www.uen.org/utah_history_encyclopedia/]

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