When people hit a milestone birthday, they like to have a big celebration. The same goes for the country.

This July 4 marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and Utah is organizing a raft of events to mark “America250” — including parades, town fairs and fireworks shows.

It’s not the first time Utah has thrown a big party for the country’s birthday. I looked through The Salt Lake Tribune’s archives to find out how Utahns marked the country’s centennial (in 1876), sesquicentennial (in 1926) and bicentennial (in 1976).

200th birthday (1976): A day at Lagoon

Celebrations for America’s bicentennial started six months earlier, on Monday, Jan. 5, 1976, with an event at the Salt Lake Tabernacle to mark 80 years since Utah’s statehood.

The country was less than two years removed from the Watergate scandal and President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

Months of planning went into the state’s formal four-day commemoration, which involved a fair at Salt Lake City’s City Hall, a parade and a concert on Sunday, July 4, with a 500-person choir and an address from Norman Vincent Peale, the clergyman who wrote “The Power of Positive Thinking.”

The final day included an expanded version of the annual “Old Fashioned Fourth of July” at the Lagoon amusement park in Farmington, which drew 55,000 attendees to a classic car show, bicycle races, a watermelon-eating contest and more. The high hit 97 degrees, and about 10,000 kids there were given free sun visors.

The Lagoon event was free, except for parking and the gravity-defying rides, including the Jet Star 2, which was new to the park that year and lasted until 2025.

150th birthday (1926): Cars in the canyons

Most of America’s 150th birthday celebrations in Utah fell on Monday, July 5.

“Perhaps Liberty Park was the scene of the most concentrated activities,” The Tribune reported in its July 6, 1926, edition. “The great green lawns were dotted with picnicking groups and the playgrounds were thronged with boys and girls bent on having a strenuous good time.”

Many Salt Lakers also took advantage of a fairly recent invention — the automobile — and headed up into the canyons.

“Perhaps never in the history of the city have the canyons been as invaded,” The Tribune wrote, apparently not imagining the “the red snake” present-day Utahns have come to expect each ski season.

During the three-day weekend, the reporter added, “thousands of automobiles carrying thousands of passengers have propelled their way up mountainous slopes to icy streams, where trout lingered under shady shrub-edged streams and pines filled the air with a faint, fresh aroma.”

Meanwhile, in the city, The Tribune reported, those fleeing Salt Lakers were replaced temporarily by more rural residents.

“From the country, seeking the newness of other pleasures, came hundreds and even thousands of holiday visitors to the parks and resorts of Salt Lake City,” The Tribune reported.

100th birthday (1876): Oratory and baseball

Many Salt Lakers marked the nation’s centennial the same way: by getting out of town.

“The Fourth in the city was observed by an almost total suspension of business, and the cars on the Utah Central and Utah Western carried away thousands of our citizens,” according to an article in The Salt Lake Daily Tribune on July 6, 1876.

One holiday venue, the article said, was Fuller’s Hill Pleasure Gardens, said to be the state’s first amusement park, on a hillside just west of the University of Utah. (The area today is filled with houses and apartment buildings between 900 East and the edge of the university.)

Under the “blazing hot sun,” Judge Joseph C. Hemingray — a leader in the “anti-Mormon” Liberal Party — gave a 30-minute speech on “the heroic sacrifices made by our forefathers in the achievement of their liberties, and then touched on the principal political topics of the present time,” though the article doesn’t detail what those topics were.

Other festivities at Fuller’s Hill included a “well attended” theater performance and a dance that “was kept up till past midnight,” the piece noted, adding that “the display of pyrotechnics at private houses was quite liberal.”

Ogden residents enjoyed similar festivities, with speeches and patriotic music. The city was also the site of a “hotly contested” baseball game between the Longstroke club of Willard City and Salt Lake City’s Deserets, The Tribune reported. The Deserets won, 31-13.

East of Salt Lake City, “small parties went up the several canyons and celebrated on their own hook,” The Tribune reported. “They were generally well provisioned, and enjoyed themselves hugely. … These parties, we believe, had the best time of any of the celebrations in Zion.”