Archives West Finding Aid

A partial biography of Enos A. Wall follows, written by Doris F. Salmon for the Utah History Encyclopedia:

Enos Andrew Wall was born in 1839 in North Carolina and reared in Indiana. He began his mining career at Pike's Peak, Colorado, in 1860. He soon moved on to Montana, where he and a fellow miner began freighting goods between Salt Lake City and the Montana gold fields. Later, he became involved in mining in Silver Reef in southwestern Utah. In 1879 he met with financial difficulties in Silver Reef and he fled the area, taking with him his Silver Reef sweetheart Mary Frances Mays. They stopped in Salt Lake City to be married and went north to Wood River, Idaho, where he continued his mining career. He invented several pieces of ore crushing machinery and was elected to the Idaho Territorial Legislature. Six daughters were born to the Walls.

The family returned to Utah in 1885 and Enos engaged in mining at Mercur and elsewhere. Wall first visited the Bingham Mining District in 1887 and immediately detected signs of copper. At once he stalked three claims, and by 1900 owned all or part of nineteen claims, covering an area of two hundred acres.

In his attempts to gain financial backing for development of these low-grade properties, he approached Joseph R. DeLamar. Sometime later DeLamar obtained an option on a portion of Wall's holdings and had tests made by Daniel C. Jackling, then a young metallurgical engineer. Many negotiations ensured during the next three years until the Utah Copper Company was incorporated in 1903.

It was Wall's copper properties that netted him his vast fortune, although that venture was probably the most unpleasant and frustrating in his fifty-year mining career. He eventually sold his holdings, receiving $2,700,000 on the New York market. In 1904, Wall purchased a two-story adobe home at 411 East South Temple, which had been built in 1880 by Bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints James Sharp. He hired architect Richard Kletting to transform the home into a palatial dwelling resembling a Renaissance villa. He lived the remainder of his life there, and on 29 June 1920 died of cancer at the age of eighty-one. Following the death of Mary Frances Mays Wall three years later, the home was bought by the Jewish community to be used as a social center. The building was next occupied by Ensign College (formerly LDS Business College) until 2006.