UTUtah Famous People

Beaver, Utah, produced Butch Cassidy and the inventor of television

Beaver sits in the southwest of the state, has never held much more than three thousand people, and is responsible for two of the least similar names in American life. Robert LeRoy Parker was born there in 1866 to Mormon pioneer parents, took the alias Butch Cassidy, ran the Wild Bunch out of hideouts in the canyon country, and vanished into South America. Philo Farnsworth was born in the same town forty years later, in 1906, in a log cabin without electricity. At fourteen, ploughing a field in parallel rows, he worked out that an image could be scanned and rebuilt line by line, sketched the idea on a blackboard for his chemistry teacher, and on September 7, 1927, in a San Francisco laboratory, transmitted the first all-electronic television picture. It was a single straight line.

Utah has never produced a president

No president or vice president has come from the state, and the nearest miss is Mitt Romney, who was born in Detroit. He was brought in to rescue the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics after a bribery scandal wrecked the organising committee, governed Massachusetts, lost the 2012 election, then represented Utah in the Senate from 2019 to 2025, where he became the first senator in American history to vote to convict a president of his own party at an impeachment trial. Orrin Hatch was born in Pittsburgh in 1934, moved west as a young lawyer, and held a Utah Senate seat for forty-two years, the longest run any Republican has managed. Jon Huntsman Jr. governed the state from 2005 to 2009 and then served as ambassador to China and to Russia.

The gunsmith, the arcade and the root beer stand

John Moses Browning was born in Ogden in 1855 in his father's gun shop and built his first working rifle at thirteen. He designed the M1911 pistol, the Browning Automatic Rifle and the M2 heavy machine gun, the last of which the American military still fields more than a century later, and he held over a hundred firearms patents when he died in 1926. Nolan Bushnell was born in Clearfield in 1943 and paid his way through the University of Utah running a midway at the Lagoon amusement park, which is where he learned what makes people feed coins into a machine. He founded Atari in 1972, shipped Pong, and later put a teenage Steve Jobs on the payroll. J. Willard Marriott grew up herding sheep near Ogden, opened a nine-stool root beer stand in Washington in 1927, and turned it into a hotel company.

Martha Hughes Cannon ran against her own husband and won

In 1896, the year Utah entered the Union, five at-large state senate seats were on the ballot in Salt Lake County. Martha Hughes Cannon ran as a Democrat. Her husband Angus ran as a Republican for one of the same seats. She won, he lost, and she became the first woman elected to a state senate anywhere in the United States. She was also a practising physician, born in Wales, brought across the plains as a child, and holder of a medical degree from Philadelphia. Utah later chose her statue to represent the state in the US Capitol, replacing the one of Farnsworth.

Stage, court, canyon

Maude Adams was born in Salt Lake City in 1872 and was the first Peter Pan on the American stage in 1905, playing the part more than fifteen hundred times. Loretta Young was born in the same city in 1913 and won the best actress Oscar for The Farmer's Daughter. Donny and Marie Osmond were both born in Ogden, a few years apart, into a singing family of nine children. Roseanne Barr was born in Salt Lake City in 1952 into a Jewish household in an overwhelmingly Latter-day Saint city, which she later mined for most of her early stand-up. Steve Young, born in Salt Lake City in 1961 and a great-great-great-grandson of Brigham Young, quarterbacked BYU and was named most valuable player of Super Bowl XXIX. Ken Jennings, a BYU graduate working as a software engineer near Salt Lake, won seventy-four consecutive games of Jeopardy in 2004 and now hosts it. Wallace Stegner grew up partly in Salt Lake City, took his degree at the University of Utah, and won the 1972 Pulitzer for Angle of Repose. Robert Redford was born in California, bought land in Provo Canyon, named it Sundance and founded the institute there in 1981; the festival that grew out of it runs in Park City every January.

Famous people from neighbouring states

More on Utah