Park City’s history is fertile ground for stories about farms and ranches.  The Wallin Barn near Kimball Junction and the iconic McPolin Barn, which many feel serves at the gateway to town on S.R. 224, are remnants of the area’s rustic history. Then there’s the 900-acre Flinders Family Ranch, a dairy farm once located in the Snyderville/Kimball Junction area that spanned east of the Swaner Preserve and south of Interstate 80.  “They offered square dancing,” said Historian David Nicholas, a member of the Park City Museum board. “They opened a restaurant. They opened a motel. They opened a ‘catchery,’ where you would pay to catch fish and they would clean it and cook it for you. They would board cattle in the summer for other ranchers in the region. They would offer hayrides. They had sleigh rides, and they sold hay.” Nicholas, along with fellow historian, Stuart Stanek, will tell the ranch’s story during a free presentation titled “The Flinders Family Ranch — Park City’s First Multi-Season Business” from 5-6 p.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 11, at the Park City Museum Education and Collections Center, 2079 Sidewinder Drive. The lecture will cover the life and times of the family’s patriarch, George Truman “Judd” Finders, his wife, Beth, and their children, who established this unique Summit County attraction in 1949. “Judd and his wife, Beth, were married in 1930, during the depths of the Great Depression, and Judd drove a delivery truck for the local Coca-Cola bottling company,” Nicholas said. “His route was from Salt Lake City up to Logan, and during the course of travels, he saw what l worked for businesses and what didn’t work. He saw advertising. He saw promotion.” Flinders opened his first restaurant called The Boat in 1933 in Salt Lake City. “By 1936, he had two more restaurants — Judd’s Park ’N Dine and Judd’s Drive-In,” Nicholas said. “Then he went to work for the Strong Automotive Group at their Hudson dealership and established himself as one of his top sales people. He was brilliant with numbers, marketing and promotion.” Soon afterward, Flinders bought a small, 3-acre farm in Millcreek, and they experimented — dairy cows, beef cows, according to Nicholas. “That encouraged them to take the next step, and in 1949, they purchased their 900-acre farm in Snyderville from Archie and Annie Carter,” he said. The burden of running the farm fell upon the Flinders’ oldest son, Leland, who was 17 at the time. “I can’t even imagine that,” Nicholas said. “Dairy farming is a 24-hour day job, 365 days a year. You have to start the milking at 4 a.m. and another at 4 p.m. every day.” But Leland Flinders, who is now 93, ran it with his four other siblings. “Then Judd, being a numbers guy, found they could make more money raising beef cattle,” Nicholas said. “So, they switched, but Judd kept thinking about how to leverage this 900-acre asset.” That’s when the square dancing and other endeavors began, Stanek said. “David and I had done a lecture a little while ago about what was happening in Park City mining during World War II, and immediately after the war was over, everything went into the pooper,” he said. “(The Flinders) started operating this business with mines being closed and miners being unemployed, and the square dancing was like a lightbulb. They would hold this event and advertise, mostly in Salt Lake, and all of sudden people started showing up. And that’s when they wondered what else would people show up for.” Dog owners prepare their pack for a dog sled race that took place on the Flinders Family Ranch in the 1960s. The 900-acre ranch, which was located east of where the Swaner Preserve is now located, also hosted snowmobile races, Boy Scout jamborees and other events. Credit: Photo courtesy of the Flinders family So Judd Flinders began hosting dog-sled races and snowmobile races, according to Stanek. “Then they thought, ‘Maybe we should sell snowmobiles,’” he said. “That allowed them to expand the restaurant.” The family eventually invited the Boy Scouts to host annual jamborees, Stanek said. “These jamborees weren’t winter things, and they were international,” he said. “I read an article that said someone from the U.K. was so proud to send their boys and that it was so nice in Utah and the mountains were so beautiful. How did people find out about that? I mean, back then you just couldn’t look it up online.” Leland Flinders told Stanek and Nicholas that the scouts and their leaders showed a lot of respect to the land. “There were 3,000 participants in the international Boy Scout Jamborees they hosted for multiple years, and when everyone left, there wasn’t even a gum wrapper left on the property,” Nicholas said. The snowmobile and dogsled races, which started up in the early 1960s, attracted multitudes, including participants from Truckee, California, and Idaho, according to Stanek. “The prize money in both dog racing and snowmobile racing was extraordinary — between $1,500 and $1,800 — which wouldn’t be bad today, let alone back then,” he said. “And one of the things that struck me was they had a celebrity snowmobile race that featured a bunch of prominent Salt Lake media types, including Dick Nourse, who was the anchor at Channel 5 for ever and ever.” In addition, the family coordinated the dog racing and snowmobile racing with ski-jumping events at the Ecker Hill facility, Stanek said. “So they worked with others to bring people up here,” he said. The family also owned a herd of prize clydesdales that would participate in parades in Park City and Salt Lake City, Nicholas said. “They would pull wagons filled with family members and ranch workers to promote the Flinders’ enterprising,” he said. The Flinders’ knack for advertising impressed Stanek, a former general manager and a regional president for iHeart Radio, the nation’s largest broadcaster.  “What struck me about this story is they were marketing geniuses but didn’t know how good they were,” he said. “There were 16 dairy farms, loosely speaking, in the late 1940s in the Park City area, and the Flinders’ were the only people who were able to develop all of these other businesses on their ranch,” Nicholas concurred. “They had an economic dynamo going to diversify their risks from just ranching.” The family sold the ranch in pieces in the early 1990s, Nicholas said. “Judd had other visions for developing the ranch, but the Summit County planning commission, on multiple occasions, denied the requests,” he said. “So he decided to move on.” The family sold the buildings as a separate entity, but the people they sold them to couldn’t keep things going, Nicholas said. “So the Flinders bought it all back in bankruptcy court and sold it in its entirety after that,” he said. Nicholas was the first to connect with the Flinders’ surviving children — Leland and Melvin Flinders, and their sister Elizabeth Hanney, who lives in Henefer. “On Oct. 2, 2023, I happened to meet a gentleman named Patrick Curtin, and we had a wonderful conversation regarding Park City history and Sugarhouse history,” Nicholas said. “At the end of the conversation, he said, ‘I have a friend who used to own a dairy ranch in Park City/Snyderville, and his name is Leland Flinders.’” Two weeks later, Leland accepted a visit from Nicholas, who introduced Stanek a few weeks later. “We had three sit-down visits with the family, and David had multiple meetings before that,” Stanek said.  Each session revealed more information and anecdotes, according to Stanek. “We kept uncovering stuff and kept plowing forward,” he said. “What’s cool is you can do a lot of research about Park City and uncover some photographs, and that can sometimes be hard. But with this, you sit down at their counter, and they have a stack of three-ring binders loaded with photos, stories and newspaper clippings. It was like a snowball rolling down the hill.” “As we rolled along on his project, the family members were super generous with their time and their photographs and memories of life on the ranch,” Nicholas said. Many members of Flinders family plan to attend Wednesday’s lecture. “For both Stu and I, this will be the first time we’re doing a lecture on a family, and the family will be there,” Nicholas said. “So there’s an added pressure that we don’t say anything boneheaded.” “The good news is there will be a crowd, even if nobody else shows up,” Stanek said. ‘The Flinders Family Ranch — Park City’s First Multi-Season Business’ Presentation When: 5 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 11 Where: Park City Museum Education and Collections Center, 2079 Sidewinder Drive Cost: Free Web: parkcityhistory.org/events The post Historians harvest stories about the Flinders Family Ranch appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less