1900: When you could walk to Antelope Island; Plus, when a sandbar helped build a causeway

YOU could walk to Antelope Island in the year 1990, thanks to a low level of the Great Salt Lake. Yes, lakeside resorts were struggling in mud to keep patrons happy, but access to the former "Church Island" was easier.
"To Island by land. Trip can be made practically dry shod. Road of Salt and Sand" was a Sept. 24, 1900 headline in the Salt Lake Tribune.
"Great Salt Lake has been known as the 'Dead Sea of America.' If it is not dead, it certainly gives every evidence being in the throes of dissolution," the Tribune stated.
The four-mile stretch from the eastern shore of the Great Salt Lake to Antelope Island was a glistening stretch of sand that year. And, some sand had been used to create a small bar to reach the isle, without a boat.
The Tribune reported that most were using horses and wagons to cross the lakebed to the Island. One man said it required just 35 minutes to cross from the former Jeremy Salt Works to reach Antelope.

                                                 The eastern bay of Antelope Island.

Further north, there were more uneven and muddy conditions and even some small pools of stagnant water.
The receding lake also does not create a pretty scene, the Tribune reported.
"The space left dry by the receding waters is anything but inviting in its appearance. Here and there are decaying hulks of rowboats and sailboats, several of which were once in use at Garfield beach years ago and there is also a vast quantity of other wreckage," the Tribune story stated.
The Tribune also mentioned a special tree, now a landmark, from which hunters surprised and killed a "ferocious buffalo," a few years ago who roamed the Island. 
Little amounts of wheat had been raised on Antelope Island in 1900, because of the dry climate. However, the isle had apparently had some successful farming performed on it in previous years.

                The causeway as viewed from the northeast tip of Antelope Island to the mainland.

-JUMP FORWARD almost seventy years and the newly opened official causeway road  from Syracuse to Antelope Island was in use. And, surprisingly, it was sand from the natural sandbar that runs to Fremont Island that helped construct that original causeway. (It washed out multiple times from the 1970s and into the mid-1980s.)

The sandbar (left side of photograph) from Fremont Island (foreground) to the causeway road. Antelope Island is in the distance on the right side of the picture.

"Gravel for the roadbed was obtained through a trade between the county and state," the Davis County Clipper of April 28, 1967 reported. "The State brought out 200 loads of gravel to the sire in return for an equal amount of salted sand scooped from a sandbar which leads to Fremont Island and connects to the new road."
At the time, in 1967, the road was still a dirt one and was not paved until the early 1970s.

                The sandbar to Fremont Island, as seen from the Antelope Island Causeway.

-THAT SAME SANDBAR to Fremont Island has also been a boating hazard at times. The Clipper of Jan. 22, 1987 reported that four men were stranded for 14 hours in the Great Salt Lake after running aground on the sandbar.
The men were headed to the privately owned Fremont Island to hunt sheep when they became stranded, just west of Howard Slough. They were spotted by helicopter and another boat was launched to rescue them. Whether the men had permission to hunt on the private island was unknown.