SALT LAKE CITY — At Mount Cavalry Catholic Cemetery one grave marker stands out above the rest. The monument, standing at 27-feet-tall can’t be missed as you drive into the eternal resting grounds.
And no, this memorial doesn’t belong to a prominent business owner or church leader, but rather to an Irish Immigrant bar named James McTernay.
“A couple of possible theories,” said Michael O’Brien, a local Salt Lake attorney who has done significant research on the McTernay. “He was a bartender. He emigrated from Ireland, had no money, was a child of the great famine, and sort of made his own way in the world.
"He owned bars in Salt Lake and either he made enough money that he could buy himself a big monument like this, or he made so many friends that they erected it for him after he passed. And so it's one of those two stories don't know exactly which one though.”
And being in the hospitality business it probably wasn’t hard to make friends.
“He was known as a genial mixologist and a bit of a philosopher, and he made a lot of friends as he was tending bar,” O’Brien said.
As one of the oldest catholic places in Utah, this cemetery at 127 years old, didn’t see many monuments like this, back then and until this day. Currently, McTernay’s grave marker is still the tallest in the cemetery.
“It's made of Vermont granite,” O’Brien said. “I imagine it weighs a couple of tons.”
According to O’brien, who found interest in the monument while frequenting the cemetery visiting a friend buried right next to McTernay- the Irish immigrant set aside $2,000 for a monument in his will. In today’s money that would have been equivalent to around $60,000 dollars.
But while he was mostly known to be a beloved man, just like all people, McTernay wasn’t perfect.
“He was actually sued for breach of promise to marry the year before he died, a woman said that he had promised to marry her and had not followed through and he denied it,” O’Brien said. “But before the case got to court, he passed away.”
O’Brien also added that McTernay was involved in backroom betting on elections in Salt Lake, which he says could have contributed to the making of inordinate monument.
The beloved bartender died in 1910 of pneumonia. But he made sure to leave more than just a physical reminder of himself in his beloved home of Salt Lake.
“So he was a colorful character, but he also at the end, devoted most of his estate to charity. In his will it said that his money should go to Holy Cross Hospital, to the orphan orphanage that was being set up here in Salt Lake and so he tried to give something back to his community as well.”
