A community-minded person, Eccles was elected to the Ogden City Council and served as mayor from 1888 to 1890. On two occasions he came to the rescue of the Mormon Church in a financial way by lending it large sums of money at no interest. Perhaps his most significant transaction was the sale of a majority interest in several beet sugar factories in Utah and Idaho to Henry Havemeyer of the American Sugar Refining Company in New York. At the time of his death, he was president of sixteen industrial corporations and seven banks. He was also a director in twenty-four other banks and industries. He was Utah's first multimillionaire.

David Eccles died of a heart attack in 1912 in Salt Lake City; he was only sixty-two years of age.

See: Leonard J. Arrington, David Eccles: Pioneer Western Industrialist (1975).

Leonard J. Arrington