The Life and Times of the Backman Foundry: Part One

A touchstone to the past.

The Backman Foundry today.

When living in the North Park neighborhood of Provo, I would frequently make evening runs—often passing through the downtown area. Running turned into a ritual of sorts for me. I would meander towards Center Street, admire the unique architectural styles, ruminate on yard care techniques, apartment management ideologies, and used car business models—while somehow always making roughly the same loop. Except one day I stumbled out of my nearly fixed orbit and followed a street paralleling the train tracks that led to an industrial set of buildings directly adjacent to the tracks, formerly home to the Backman Foundry and Machine. 

Immediately I felt some sentimental and vicariously nostalgic attachment to it. To a 26-year-old who grew up in the digital age, among sprawling business parks filled with computers and professional ennui, the very sight of something so unapologetically industrial is startling. Though industrial infrastructure is rarely aesthetically pleasing in any conventional way, I prefer it to the prefab business parks with their tired and unadorned right angles, tinted windows, and seemingly endless appetite for farm-fields and leafy landscapes. By the way, I also prefer it to the ‘highway interchange commercial melee’ philosophy of development so popular these days.

Regardless, this moment last summer sparked a slightly more mature version of what my family called “phases”—childhood periods when I obsessed over a random thing (reptiles, the Olympics, weather, etc.) for months at a time. Though at times my research felt like more of a wild goose chase—as I attempted to piece together history by stitching together obituaries, the occasional reference in local papers, and publicly-available lawsuit depositions—I found the search personally rewarding.

The best basis for this infatuation (and article), that I can articulate, is that the Backman Foundry is one of those places that shakes you from the present and compels you to consider the past. Perhaps it’s because it looms over the train tracks like an industrial dinosaur. Or maybe it’s because it looks every bit the part of a mid-century business? Or is it because it’s so hidden in the bowels of Provo, that just finding it feels like an achievement?

Backman Foundry at the Old Provo Fairgrounds. At this site the old CCC Barracks were used, beginning in 1941, by the Central Utah Vocational School—name since changed to UVU. Digital image courtesy of the George Sutherland Archives, Utah Valley University

Regardless of the reason, here’s some context. The Backman Foundry and Machine building is located in Provo on the corner of 900 West and 600 South. Set just off the train tracks, it finds itself in a ‘gritty’ part of the urban landscape. If you look west you can see the walls of the highway and ramps ascending towards it. But if you look east you can see the two-deep walls of the Wasatch—with Provo Peak towering steeply behind Y, Maple, and Buckley Mountains. 

The Backman Foundry and Machine opened in 1938 and closed in 2012. Two Provo brothers, Angus and Everett Backman, established the foundry on a shoe-string, as they say. Angus started out as a maintenance worker on the railroad—a position colloquially known as a “gandy dancer.” He also worked at a pipe plant and at Provo Foundry before setting up his own operation. Angus and Everett first set up shop in their backyard, in the midst of the Great Depression. Then, when the U.S. declared war they shipped out. Angus served in the Navy and spent time in the Admiralty Islands, while the details of Everett’s service are unclear. Though I wasn’t able to find out if the foundry continued operation during WWII, it is clear that when they made it back the business boomed. 

However, (beyond a source stating that business boomed after the war, and an image that suggests the business was, for a time, located in south Provo) the Backman Foundry’s history from the end of the war to about 1963 is an online black hole. Not that I was expecting to find too much about a small foundry operation, but the absence of information is still mildly troubling. Our lives, when lived day-to-day, are teeming with richness—or at least complexity and nuance. Perhaps there are volumes of books that could have been written on a single year during the Backman Foundry’s post-war boom. Yet, here I am, after months of searching, with almost no concrete facts as to what happened in that period. Few live their lives purely for historical meaning (at least without severe emotional distress), but it is strange how much of a life can be lost to time. We have a written language, audiovisual recording capabilities, and increasingly sophisticated ways of protecting these records from the ravages of time, but a large portion of our personal histories are preserved informally—in memories, family lore, or secrets. And it is usually when these informal processes break down due to death or disintegration that we realize that a hole exists in the historical record, and that our stories are incomplete—perhaps even permanently.

The next fact I could find is of the tragic kind. On December 9, 1963 the Backman Foundry’s co-founder Everett Backman passed away at the young age of 58 due to a “heart ailment.” Services were held at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church—newly built and dedicated that August (the architectural style of the structure was, let’s just say, intensely modern*). The site of the services are of special interest in a city where the overwhelming majority were, and are, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It appears that the first Backman family immigrants to Provo were from Pedersore, Finland, and as the majority of Finns are Lutheran, the distinct religion of the Backman family makes more sense. However, because the historical record seems intent on creating puzzles for the self-appointed internet sleuth, I found a 1924 photo of Angus and his twin brother Elmer in front of the Provo Second Ward Building (thank you LDS Living). Were the Backmans temporary Mormon converts? Or did they simply attend their local LDS ward until a Lutheran congregation became established in Provo in 1931?

Backman Foundry office building, constructed in 1965.

The historical record picks back up again in 1965—the year that President Lyndon B. Johnson was inaugurated, increased U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, initiated “The Great Society,” and signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law—when a new Backman Foundry office building was erected. The style is a variety of mid-century modern architecture and, 56 years later, it still seems perfectly anchored to its time. 

J.B. Jackson, a noted writer on cultural landscapes, said “landscape is history made visible.” Landscape may be a very expansive thing, but it is made up of small elements—like an otherwise unremarkable foundry office building. Even these small elements are monuments to former times and testaments to larger forces and currents sweeping over small and apparently unremarkable places—and when I come face-to-face with these unintentional memorials I’m forced to stop. A pause that momentarily shakes me out of the stupor of everyday living and roots me in the flow of time—that there has been a past and there will be a future. And that these things are deeply related, no matter what the stark changes of appearance may lead us to believe.

The next piece of information, found in what appears to be the 1965 equivalent of an infomercial in the Daily Herald, notes that at that time the Backman Foundry had over 50 employees. The local industrial operation took in raw materials imported from all over the U.S.—sand from Nevada, coke from Alabama, raw pig iron from Geneva Steel, and alloys from Oregon, Ohio, and New York. Further corroborating that the previously-referenced photo was taken of the same Backmans, the ‘infomercial’ also detailed that the foundry was then owned and operated by the same pair of grown-up twins—Elmer and Angus Backman.

Though the era was anything but placid for the nation, this period (in retrospect) is viewed as the Golden Age of American capitalism. From 1950 to 1970, real per capita income increased at a pace of 2.25 annually, and the ranks of the American middle class swelled. The Backman Foundry’s own golden age seems to have occurred in this time as well. A simple microcosm of an enormous and complex economy, the Backman Foundry’s employees and shareholders surely enjoyed the stable and open economy—one rebuilt on the shambles of the Great Depression, the reorganization of The New Deal, and the mobilization of the Second World War. As it was 1965, I would guess most of the workers were children of the Great Depression, and at their youngest, children of the rationing and suffering of WWII—but did they now believe that things would continue to get better indefinitely? That profits would always rise? That nearly full employment was the new fact of modern life? Or, like a character from Wendell Berry’s Port William novels, did they suspect that “the Depression [was]…not over and done with but merely absent for a while, like Halley’s comet…[and that] the world of the Depression was in fact the real world”?

I ask these questions because the story of the Backman Foundry is one of innocuous rise, steady and slow decline, and nearly anonymous demise—coinciding with the steady and slow decline of American manufacturing. The seemingly mundane rise and fall of the Backman Foundry echoes universal patterns—tides coming in and out, gatherings in and scatterings, order and entropy. This universality seems to suggest that what happens in the world will eventually happen in Utah—or at least influence what happens here. Maybe such a view creates more tragic figures, tethered to patterns over which they have little control—but it also seems to imbue these figures, these events, with a certain quiet nobility. It confirms that we are part of something larger, that perhaps individuality and variation doesn’t require a full extrication from our time and place, and that what happens here carries historic weight. In essence, the Backman Foundry seems to be a touchstone to the past, our relationship to it, and maybe, in a way, to time itself.

Undated photo of Backman Foundry.

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In part two, I will recount the slow decline and closure of the Backman Foundry and share excerpts of an interview with D. Robert Carter (author of several books on the history of Provo) about growing up near the Backman Foundry and the importance of local history.

*Scroll nearly to the bottom of the page for photos of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church in Provo (set of photos is third from the bottom).