Woodcarver | County Durham, England and Salt Lake City, Utah

Ralph Ramsay was born on January 22, 1824, in Leiddlesfell, near Byton in County Durham, England. His father and grandfathers before him had worked in stone and wood, and in keeping with that tradition Ramsay was apprenticed as a youth to William Hobbs, a craftsman who taught him the trades of wood carving and turning. After completing his apprenticeship he opened his own shop. The work he mastered in those English years — decorative carving, furniture making, ornamental turning — would prove essential to the community he would eventually join on the other side of the world.

Ramsay was baptized into The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on July 8, 1849, in the River Tyne. He was married to Elizabeth Burns in 1852, and on March 18, 1856, the couple left England on the ship Enoch Train. The Atlantic crossing was marked by loss: their infant daughter Jane died at the Missouri River camp on June 7, and a son, Joseph Smith Ramsay, died and was buried on June 28. The grieving family completed the overland journey with a handcart company and arrived in Salt Lake City on September 26, 1856.

Almost immediately after arriving, Ramsay was put to work. He was employed in making furniture for Brigham Young and others, and he undertook carving work on the construction of the Beehive House and the Lion House — the residences of Young that remain among the most visited historic structures in Utah. He worked as a carpenter and woodworker on the Salt Lake Theatre and the Tabernacle. His most enduring and publicly visible creation was the great eagle of the Eagle Gate.

The Eagle Gate commission arose around 1858. Truman O. Angell, the Church’s chief architect, had shot a large eagle in City Creek Canyon and provided the bird as a model. Working with the scarce timber available in early Salt Lake City, Ramsay carved the eagle from five separate blocks of wood — one for the body, another for the neck and head, one for each outstretched wing, and one for the small beehive on which the whole figure rested. The blocks were held together with iron, and the finished eagle measured eleven feet from wingtip to wingtip. A note in the Church’s Journal History for February 17, 1859, records its mounting: ‘A large spread eagle was placed over the gate east of President Young’s house… It was made by Ralph Ramsay.’ In 1891 the weathered wooden original was sent east to be electroplated and returned as a copper structure, the form in which it is known today.

Beyond the Eagle Gate, Ramsay’s work appears throughout the material culture of early Salt Lake City. He carved the façade for the Salt Lake Tabernacle organ — a major undertaking given the instrument’s scale and prominence. He carved the oxen that served as the pattern for the baptismal font bases in LDS temples. He produced furniture, cabinets, hall trees, day desks, and decorative objects for prominent families including the Jennings and Devereaux households. A hall tree he made for Brigham Young is preserved in the collection of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, as is his personal bedstead, which he assembled over decades of travel from pieces of wood gathered along the way.

The Utah History Encyclopedia notes that ‘virtually everything in the city of Salt Lake that could be in any way called sculpture’ in the pioneer era was produced by either Ramsay or the stonecarver William Ward — a remarkable summary of how completely two craftsmen defined a community’s entire visual and material artistic life. Ramsay moved from Salt Lake City to Richfield, Utah, in 1872, and later to Snowflake, Arizona, where he died on January 25, 1905, at the age of eighty-one. The Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum in Salt Lake City holds the most significant collection of his surviving work.

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