A 1900 commercial block in downtown Provo

Jesse Knight built his headquarters on this corner

You're standing outside the Knight Block, a three-story brick building in downtown Provo that still holds offices today. Look up and you'll see its clock tower rising over the roofline on the southwest corner. Gray limestone caps the windows against the red brick walls.

Jesse Knight built it in 1900 as his headquarters. Historians credit him as the richest man in Provo at the time. Knight made his money in mining, striking it rich around Eureka, Utah, after what he described as a spiritual impression led him there. Knight used that fortune to buy banks, real estate, and the Provo Woolen Mills. He also ran cattle and farming operations as far away as Canada.

Knight never let his wealth separate him from his faith. His mines were known as some of the cleanest mining camps in the American West. He stayed an active supporter of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints his whole life. When he died in 1921, he left much of his fortune to Brigham Young University.

The building he put up anchors the corner where Center Street meets University Avenue, in the heart of a city founded barely fifty years earlier. Fort Utah, as Provo was first called, began in 1849 when thirty-three Mormon families arrived from Salt Lake City. By the time Knight built his block, Provo had grown from a frontier fort into a railroad town with its own woolen mill. The city's name was changed to honor Étienne Provost, a French-Canadian fur trapper who had passed through decades before any settlers arrived.

A trapper's name and a massacre preceded the city

The name on the city itself goes back further than Knight or his building. The following year, it was renamed Provo to honor Étienne Provost, a French-Canadian trapper who had passed through the region in 1825.

Provost had come looking for furs, not a city. He led a company into Utah Valley and ran into Shoshone bands near Utah Lake. Provost's trappers were attacked at the mouth of the Jordan River, and eight of his men were killed. Provost survived and went on to build trading posts on the shores of Utah Lake and the Great Salt Lake.

Some accounts credit Provost as the first European to lay eyes on the Great Salt Lake. Other historians say that claim was never proven. Either way, his name stuck to the ground under the Knight Block long before Jesse Knight ever built on it.

Decades earlier still, in 1776, two Spanish Franciscan priests, Silvestre Vélez de Escalante and Francisco Atanasio Domínguez, passed through Utah Valley. Escalante and Domínguez wrote home about its beauty and its fertile ground, the same valley that would later hold Fort Utah, then Provo, then the corner where you're standing now.

Fort Utah was established on April 3, 1849, near present-day Provo, along the Provo River close to where Brigham Young University now stands. The arrival of the Mormon settlers exposed local Timpanogos Ute peoples to measles and led to escalating violence between the two groups. The killing of a Timpanogos Ute man in January 1850, over a shirt, led directly to the Provo River Massacre the following month.

In 1849, William Dayton was killed at Fort Utah, on the south side of the Provo River, when a spark ignited powder while the fort's cannon was being reloaded during a demonstration. George W. Bean, who was with him, lost his left arm in the same accident.

In August 1850, a Timpanogos Ute man known as Old Bishop was murdered near Provo by settlers Rufus Stoddard, Richard Ivie, and Gerome Zabrisky, according to settler accounts. Old Bishop was shot over a shirt they wanted, or, in another account, over his stopping them from hunting deer. His body was weighted with rocks and thrown into the Provo River.

On February 9, 1850, Joseph Higbee was shot through the neck while sheltering behind a log during a battle between Fort Utah settlers and Timpanogos Ute people, on the south side of the Provo River. Joseph Higbee was the only living son of Isaac Higbee, a Bishop in Nauvoo and Salt Lake. His death came during the fighting that led into the Provo River Massacre.

From February 8 to 17, 1850, ninety Mormon militiamen under orders from Brigham Young surrounded a Timpanogos Ute encampment near the Provo River, Rock Canyon, and Utah Lake, laying siege for two days. The militiamen killed 40 to 100 Ute men and one woman using guns and a cannon. One militiaman was killed and eighteen were wounded in what is known as the Provo River Massacre.

In 1870, Army troops were stationed in Provo. Their presence in the city sparked what is known locally as the Provo Riot.

In 1884, Provo's first brick academy building, erected at the corner of Center Street and Freedom Boulevard, was destroyed by fire. The building had housed the Brigham Young Academy, later Brigham Young University, since 1878. Classes continued in temporary quarters and a ZCMI warehouse until a new education building was dedicated in 1892.

The Knight Block earned a place on the historic register

After Knight's death in 1921, the building kept working as offices and storefronts through Provo's growth into a railroad and manufacturing town. It stood through the decades when the city built the Ironton Steel Mill and later the much larger Geneva Steel Plant nearby. The clock tower kept watching over Center Street while Provo grew up around it.

In 1977, the Knight Block earned a place on the National Register of Historic Places. The listing recognized the building's red brick walls, its limestone lintels, and its tie to one of Provo's wealthiest early citizens. It remains one of downtown Provo's oldest commercial survivors from that era.

The building passed through three owners in a decade

Provo City's Redevelopment Agency owned the building by the 1990s and sold it in 1996 to a group called Knight Block Partnership. That name borrowed directly from the building's history, a nod to the man who built it nearly a century before.

The new owners held it only a few years. In 1999, Knight Block Partnership sold the property to a private buyer. The owners kept it until 2005, when he sold it to Terminus Properties LLC, which still holds the deed today. Through all these sales, the building kept its original footprint: a three-story rectangle with ground-floor retail, a basement, and two floors of offices above.

Offices still fill the Knight Block on University Avenue

The Knight Block still holds offices on University Avenue, its clock tower rising over the same roofline Jesse Knight built in 1900. Down the block, the Festival Latinoamericano has drawn crowds to the courthouse grounds each Labor Day weekend since 2001, filling the same streets Knight once walked to his bank.

Freya Larsen, 27, was shot once in the head on May 7, 2019, at E. Center Street in Provo. Michael Taylor Robinson, also 27, shot her during an altercation in her apartment at that address. Robinson called 911 and later claimed the shooting was accidental.