Sanpete Memories

By Gary Topping–

When you are driving down Highway 89 and you cross the border into Sanpete County, Utah, you can feel the clocks moving more slowly.  The past is always present, but you can feel it more clearly there than almost anywhere else.  There the fast-talking, fast-driving modern urban world you have left behind exists no more. It is not hard to ignore the intrusive features of modern civilization and to imagine the nineteenth century world, to focus on the old Presbyterian church on Main Street in Mount Pleasant and the 1904 ward house in Spring City, to place yourself back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The graves of Orson Hyde, the resident apostle of the LDS Church during the pioneer years, and James Allred, the founder of Spring City, are there, as well as the home of Knut Peterson, the founder of Ephraim. The history is all around you.

Every year at Decoration Day (the name we knew it by in our childhoods), it is my privilege to visit the cemeteries in Mount Pleasant and Spring City with my wife, Marianna Allred, a descendant of the founder of Spring City—the Allred Settlement, as it was originally known—and place flowers on the graves of the Allreds and the Aldriches (her mother’s family) which one can find all over the place.  One of the best parts of the trip is the tour she gives me of the homes of her family and the places she grew up.  It always includes her grandfather’s mercantile establishment on Mount Pleasant’s Main Street where she and her cousin Helen Rae used to step on the foot X-ray machine hundreds of times to see their foot bones, and which caused Marianna a case of thyroid cancer at the time I met her in 1991.

Those trips are special to both of us because we understand that our past is our present, and it helps us to know each other better.  I do the same thing when we visit my ancestral home on the southern Oregon coast, to the same purpose.

But I have my own Sanpete history as well.

In the fall of 1977, with a crisp new Ph.D. in  hand, I was hired by the Utah State Historical Society on a one-year contract to assist in writing a history of Sanpete County.  My responsibility was to research the records repositories in Salt Lake City and at BYU, and the county and city records in Sanpete, then to write several of the chapters.  For the next year, I found my wide-eyed self living in the exotic world of nineteenth century Mormon colonization.  It was not at all the placid world of modern Sanpete, but rather a deadly struggle with the dispossessed Indians who forced the colonists to cower behind the walls of forts from which they risked venturing out daily to tend their farm plots.  It was a desperate struggle, too, with the immense clouds of grasshoppers who made a tasty repas of the settlers’ wheat crops.  And finally, it was a constant ethnic conflict between the English and Scandinavian colonists and among the Scandinavian groups themselves.

Some of the records told stories I could scarcely read with a dry eye.  Albert and Azariah Smith, father and son, were early converts to Mormonism who journeyed west with Brigham Young.  They went to California with the Mormon Battalion, and Azariah was one of the three Mormons who discovered gold in Johann Sutter’s millrace.  They returned to Utah in time to be sent to Sanpete with the initial 1849 colonizing party.  Somewhere in there Azariah was thrown from his horse and suffered brain damage that caused ever more frequent epileptic seizures and rendered him dangerously violent.  His wife divorced him and he moved in with Albert, who then had not only to work his own farmland but also to keep Azariah restrained from hurting others.

Albert and Azariah kept parallel diaries, and for long periods Azariah’s is blank, but we know what was happening from Albert’s account.  Happily, he eventually got better and his diary entries begin again.  He remarried and built himself a new house, a drawing of which proudly appears on a page of his diary.  Azariah lived well into the twentieth century, and we can see his smiling face among the surviving members of the 1847 emigration, photographed in Salt Lake City during the church’s semi-annual conferences.

On my periodic trips to Sanpete, I would visit the Manti cemetery, where I found the decaying grave markers of both Albert and Azariah Smith.  From a plat map in the County Recorder’s office, I located the lot on which Azariah had built his new home.  The house is long since gone, but you can feel that Azariah is still there.

In the LDS Church Archives, I found the diary of Eliza Euphrasia Cox Day, a young polygamous wife living in Fairview.  She wrote her diary in a very hard lead pencil, which was all but illegible on microfilm (one of my professors used to say that “Microfilm is God’s revenge on historians.”).  I was on the verge of giving up when I suddenly discovered what a deeply personal document it was, so I persisted.  She had married Eli Day, a locally prominent citizen, during the 1880s when federal marshals prowled through those Sanpete communities looking for polygamists.  Even being seen with her husband could lead to a penitentiary sentence.  It breaks even a hardboiled historian’s heart to read her diary entries where she would go to a dance and have to stay on the other side of the room from her husband, all the while longing for his touch or even a fond glance.

So on our annual Sanpete visits, Marianna and I each have our own ghosts dancing about us.  There are worse ways to spend a holiday afternoon.

*Gary Topping is a writer and historian living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is the retired archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City and has written many books and articles. Signature Books recently published his latest work titled D. Michael Quinn: Mormon Historian.