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Show 8. Statement of Significance Certifying official has considered the significance of this property in relation to other properties: O nationally I I statewide fX] locally Applicable National Register Criteria P^A I IB f^lc I ID Criteria Considerations (Exceptions) I I IB I I ID |A Areas of Significance (enter categories from instructions) Ic I IE I IF I |G Period of Significance Significant Dates Architecture__________________ 1900-1941__________ Site Acg.-1921 Politics/GovernmentConst.Cultural Affiliation N/A______ Significant Person Architect/Builder . . James A. Wetmore, Acting Supervising Architect/Federal Government State significance of property, and justify criteria, criteria considerations, and areas and periods of significance noted above. The Eureka Post Office is an unaltered and well-preserved small-town, single-purpose post office. It is significant, both stylistically and programmatically, as one of the few post offices constructed in the West and nation during the early-1920s. Utah received four post offices during this period (of nine still under USPS-ownership in the entire West)? however, only Eureka is unaltered. Stylistically, the design motif of this period is a departure from the Beaux-Arts of the 1900 to 1920 period and its brief resurgence of the early 1930s. As a symbol of the federal presence and federal recognition of the city's permanence, the Post Office marks the zenith of Eureka's growth after which it faded to little more than another mining ghost town. The building is also designated as a landmark in the Eureka National Historic District. Utah received four of the fifty-six post offices constructed by the federal government from 1920 to 1926; Park City (1921), Eureka (1923), Spanish Fork (1923), and Vernal (1925). Although Eureka is the only unaltered example, all of these buildings had common characteristics that marked a departure, and essentially an interlude, from the Beaux-Arts tradition that had ruled federal architecture. Utah's previously constructed post offices, up to the 1919 Richfield Federal Building and then those subsequently constructed from the 1931 Price Post Office to the 1934 Cedar City Federal Building, were clearly Beaux-Arts in influence. The buildings of the early-1920s, however, were markedly simplified. Indeed, they seem to belong to the modern, 'Starved Classical 1 , building designs of the mid- to late-1930s. Though Classically symmetrical and proportioned, the buildings of n%3 See continuation sheet |
