Oral History Program Frederick Arthur Florence Interviewed by Jeanine Carter 08 July 1976 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Frederick Arthur Florence Interviewed by Jeanine Carter 08 July 1976 Copyright © 2012 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Florence, Frederick, an oral history by Jeanine Carter, 08 July 1976, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Frederick Arthur Florence. The interview was conducted on July 8, 1976, by Jeanine Carter. Florence discusses the development of Porterville in Morgan County, including public schools, sawmills, mining, the East Canyon Dam, recreation, and the depression. JC: Mr. Florence, would you tell me about yourself, who your parents were, and about your early life here in Morgan County? FF: My parents’ names were Henry and Sarah Jane Taylor Florence. We lived in Portersville all our lives. I was the thirteenth child born to them, out of fourteen. I had one younger brother, Kelly. When we come to school age, we went to school on what they call the bench. The bench was on the east side. The girl I married went to the same school. Annie S. Dickens, Smith then, was our first school teacher. We went to her school for about three years, and then we changed teachers and we had several other teachers. I forgot just who they were. JC: What did your schoolhouse look like? FF: It was a little brick schoolhouse. It was about 30 feet long and about 20 feet wide. When we first started school, they didn’t have desks or benches. They had a platform clear around the building that they let down. That’s what they used for desks in the schoolhouse. In the middle of the floor was a bit potbellied stove. The ones who set close to the stove, they cooked. The ones who were farther back froze. That’s the school where we got most of our education. Later on they built a new schoolhouse. 1 They had three teachers. They had all grades. The one that I went to, she taught the grades from the first grade up to the eighth grade. That was Annie Smith. JC: How did you go to school? FF: I walked to school. I only lived about two blocks from school. The girl I married had about a mile and a half to come. She generally walked. If it got too bad, they rode a horse to school, and then turned the horse loose and it went back home. That’s about the way we got our education. I never did go to any high school or any colleges, or anything like that. I helped my father on the farm until I was married. I married the girl, Sarah Ann Mikesell then. She was a wonderful wife to me. I sure appreciated living so long together. We lived together a little over 68 years. That’s quite a long while for a couple to live together. JC: That’s marvelous... Where did your schoolteacher live? Did she rent an apartment? FF: No, our schoolteacher, Annie Smith, boarded at my father and mother’s home. She was some jolly, nice person. She was always getting something to make a lot of fun around the home and in the school. She was always pleasant and nice. Never had any complaint about the teacher. Later on, she taught in Richville. We walked from Porterville to the Richville schoolhouse to be with her while she taught two terms in Richville. My sister and my brother and myself walked to Richville. JC: You spoke of farming. How did you plant your seeds, and harvest? I’m sure you didn’t have tractors then. FF: No. In the farming equipment, it was all done by horsepower. We had hand plows. We had harrows. We had drills. They was all operated with horsepower. And the same way 2 with the hay. They mowed the hay, they raked it up with a “salkie” rake, they called it. Then they piled the hay, loaded it, hauled it in on wagons that way. That’s the way we handled all the hay. The grain: they planted the grain, irrigated it, and watered it. When it was ready to harvest, they first used a reaper. We had to bind that grain by hand with that reaper. Later on my father got a binder, and that made it a lot easier to farm with a binder. We didn’t have the backbreaking binding by hand. And that’s about the way the farming was carried on in them days. JC: Speaking of industries, what about sawmills? I understand there were quite a few sawmills up Hardscrabble. Will you tell me about them? FF: Yes, at one time there were nine sawmills up Hardscrabble. The first sawmills brought into Hardscrabble was brought over the mountains with pack horses. That was the Porter brothers. They set their sawmills up at the mouth of Beaver Canyon in Hardscrabble. The next one was a man named Farrow. He had a steam sawmill. And that was set up in a canyon called Farrow’s Fork in the head of Hardscrabble. They named it after the man who put his mill in there. Them logs was brought off the side of the mountain with ox team down to the mill. They sawed hundreds of thousands feet of lumber there. About six hundred feet down the canyon, there was another sawmill named Holdman’s that was run by water power. They made shingles and ties for railroads. Then further down, there was a man named Bill Dickson who had a sawmill. That was run by water power, too. And then further down the canyon, there was a sawmill that belonged to Sam Brough. He sawed shingles and ties for the railroad. There was a sawmill, water-powered, operated by Joseph Taylor. That was further down the canyon in Hardscrabble. Then down at the mouth of Arthur Canyon, there was 3 another sawmill. The man’s name was Jake Arthur. He had a water-powered mill. Later on, they all moved out of there. The last mill that was in Hardscrabble was Bert Turner and George Turner that lived here in Morgan. They operated a sawmill there for two years – I think it was two years. I worked for Bert Turner for one season, pulling in logs for him. Then they sold that sawmill to Joe Carpenter. He moved it up the canyon to what they call the Black Grove. He sawed lumber there. It was taken out of Hardscrabble and moved into the lower valley somewhere. I don’t know just where it was located down there. The mining part of it – one of the mines was operated by Gren Porter and Joe Carpenter. They had what they called the Iron Hill Mine. They hauled quite a lot of ore out of Hardscrabble by team and wagon and sleighs, and loaded it on cars here in Morgan. Some of it was shipped to the cement plant. Some was shipped down to the smelters down below Salt Lake. It didn’t seem to pay off, so they didn’t do that anymore. There was a man named Daniel Norchy. He operated a mine. He had his family living there. He packed all the groceries that he had to supply his family with from Morgan on his back up to Hardscrabble. He mined there for several years, but he never had any paying ore out of it. Finally he quit and left. This was about 1895 or 1896. Then later on, there were seven Fowler brothers come in Hardscrabble. They set up a mine. They built a mill in there. They were going to smelter ore, but it fell through. They sold a lot of stock, but it never paid off very well. Then up Arthur Canyon, Oren Porter and Joe Carpenter had another mine. They drove a shaft down into the canyon. They drove down in there – they were about two hundred feet down. They had a good paying ore, but the water came in so bad they had to abolish it. That’s about the end of the mining business in Hardscrabble. 4 JC: You spoke of pulling logs. Will you tell me what that means? FF: Well, you go into the timber. You chop down the trees with an ax. Then you would log them at certain legs, whatever you wanted the lumber to be sawed out of – 60 and 20 and 18 feet logs. Then you would have to pull them into the sawmill by horses. Then they sawed them that way in the mill. JC: How long would it take to get a load? FF: Well, I never did load them on a wagon. I always pulled them into the mill yard on the ground with the horses. I would get about a little over a thousand feet a day. They paid me $6 dollars a thousand feet for pulling in the logs. It was hard work, too, I’ll tell you. JC: Were there any bears up Hardscrabble? FF: Yes, I saw a few bears up Hardscrabble. JC: Do you know any bear stories? FF: Yes, I saw a bear one time. Joe Carpenter shot it and wounded it. He was going along the trail, and the bear was sitting up back of a tree, and he just reached out and tore the jumper right off of him with one of his front paws. Then one time I was going up the canyon, and there was a mother bear and two cubs. They stopped right in the road and wouldn’t let me by, so I turned around, gave them the road, and came back. JC: I understand that another industry in Porterville was bricks. Can you tell me about how they made bricks? FF: Yes, there was a brickyard in Porterville. It set right below where Porter Carter had his home. I don’t know who lives there now. Right down in the bottom was where the brickyard was. There was a lot of homes in Porterville built out of those bricks – the old 5 church house in Porterville, all the inside brick was made there. A man named Bill Brough operated the brickyard. He had what is called a pug mill. He had a horse that went around pushing the mud out and putting it in crates to dry. Then after it got so dry, they put it in a kiln. When they got the kiln big enough, it would be about as big as this room. They had fire boxes underneath it. They would build fire in all those fire boxes. They had to burn it so many days. At night when they got it bright, red hot, all the kids in Porterville would go down there to see it. It was pretty, red hot, you know. Then we would play around there in the brickyard. That’s the story of the brickyard in Porterville. JC: What about the construction of homes? How were the first homes built? FF: Well, the first home was built out of what they call concrete. It was rock and lime, it wasn’t cement. It was lime. They would have to render that lime out and put water on it. It would boil up just like you would have a tea kettle on the stove. You would have to put so much water in it, and then you would mix that with rock and gravel. They would have to have forms. That’s how the first homes were built. My father’s home was built that way, and several others up there. JC: After that, how did they build their homes? FF: A lot of homes – I had three brothers that built brick homes out of the brick from the brickyard there in Porterville. There was a lot of homes in Porterville built with that brick. JC: What did you do for drinking water? FF: My folks had a well. A lot of them drunk the ditch water... that didn’t have wells. Later on, they put the pipeline in and got some water. JC: Where did you get your water to irrigate with? 6 FF: On our farm, it came from Hardscrabble. When they built that irrigation ditch, my father, I’ve heard him tell that he worked on that irrigation ditch, and all they had to eat was baked potatoes. That’s the way they had to live them days. JC: Did you help on the construction of the East Canyon Dam? FF: Yes ma’am. JC: Would you tell me something about that? FF: I was on what they called the chain gang. What the chain gang was, there was a string of men, and they would just hand the material from one to the other clear up, until the material got to the dam. That was rock and cement and whatever they had to have. JC: Was this the first dam? I understand there’s three dams. FF: Yes. I hauled cement for the second dam. From Morgan, they hauled cement up to the East Canyon Dam with teams of wagons. JC: About how long did it take to build the first dam? FF: Well, I would say about 18 months. JC: About how many men did they have working on it? FF: Well, I would just have to guess at that. I would say about 50. JC: What was the purpose of the East Canyon Dam? FF: To hold irrigation water, mostly for the lower valley. They were the ones that had all the interest in building it. I don’t think Morgan did because they have to buy the water from them. JC: How did Porterville get its name? 7 FF: From the Porter brothers, that’s how it got its name. They were the first ones to move into Porterville... Same as Richville – it was the Riches though. It was a man named Tom Rich that moved in there first... JC: What did you do for plumbing in your homes? FF: There wasn’t any plumbing. We had a dishpan to wash dishes in. We had a reservoir on the back of the stove to heat water in. We washed on a washboard. My wife washed on a washboard quite a few years after we were married. That’s about the way they done the plumbing. JC: Where would you bathe? FF: In a washtub. You know one of those old time washtubs they used to have? Well, I’ve got one out there now. They’d get some hot water, just the right temperature, and get in there. You couldn’t stretch out in it. You’d just have to sit there. We would bathe once a week. JC: What did you use for transportation? FF: Some of them went with wagon and teams, some had buggies. There was no automobiles in them times. That’s about the transportation they had. I know my folks have drove. In fact I drove to Salt Lake City when I was married with my wife and we were alone. And we drove back alone. It would take one day. We left home early, and we was in Salt Lake a little before dark at night. JC: What did you do in the wintertime when it was cold, with horse and buggy? FF: We’d have a sleigh. I had a nice team. I had four strands of sleigh bells. You could hear them miles away on a cold night. When I would go to get my girl for a dance, I would 8 always have a lot of people waiting so they could ride to the party with me. I enjoyed that, though, very much. JC: What did you think when the first automobiles came in? FF: I thought they was crazy! JC: Can you tell me about the first automobiles? FF: The first automobiles that I can remember was Levi Waldron’s and Jim Anderson. They had the first automobiles. I believe that was in Morgan. My two brothers got an automobile, and that started the rest of them to getting them. I got my first automobile in 1925. That was the first one I had. JC: What did it feel like to get behind that wheel? FF: I was scared at first, but it was nice to be able to go faster and get there quicker. JC: What were the roads like? FF: In the springtime, there was mud. There was just dirt roads. In the spring, the mud would get so deep that sometimes I’ve seen buggy wheels get so full of mud they wouldn’t turn. They would have to stop and dig them out to be able to go. JC: What did you used to do for recreation? FF: Oh, we had a lot of recreation; we had ball games. Generally a bunch would get together, and we would play softball. Then they had a lot of dances. They had some of the best times in Porterville on the 24th of July and New Year’s. They always had a big celebration there. JC: What would they do on the 4th of July? 9 FF: First thing in the morning, they’d do a lot of blasting with joint powder. The day would almost tear the place to pieces. Then they would have a program in the morning. They would have a children’s dance in the afternoon. Then they would give the children a treat. They would have a big bar built at the side of the church. They would have a grandstand in there. They would have refreshments sold. Then at night they would have a big dance for the grownups. That’s about the recreation they had. JC: What did you do on New Year’s? FF: Well, it’s about the same thing. They had the program in the morning, children’s dance in the afternoon. They would have refreshments for everybody – a bag of candy and peanuts. JC: Can you remember going to the show? Was there a show house in Morgan? FF: Not in the first part of my life. Later there was a show house. They had picture shows up in the schoolhouse in Porterville for several winters. They would come in there and show pictures. They had some pretty good shows then. JC: How did the Depression affect you and your family? FF: The Depression came on just when we bought the farm up in Porterville. I guess your father’s told you. He cut my grain for me a lot. It was pretty hard going. We paid a pretty good price for the farm. We had to buy a lot of material and machinery. It was pretty hard going, but we finally made it, paid it off. We lived a pretty happy life together. We had a family of five. Of course, two of them have gone now. We had a nice life together. JC: Can you remember going to Como Springs? 10 FF Yes, but it wasn’t called Como Springs. You’d go up there to bathe. You didn’t have to have a suit then, when the boys would go. If the girls would go, we would have to have a suit. It was just a swimming hole then. JC: What were some of the ways you earned money? FF: We didn’t have very much money. If they had a celebration, and if they got 50 cents they thought they were rich. But they always had a barrel of lemonade made up for the public to help themselves to at them celebrations. That is on the 24th of July; at New Years’ time, they didn’t have that. They sold homemade ice cream. There was a lady named Phillips. She sold that homemade ice cream every Sunday night. That is where all the kids and young people would gather to have a dish of ice cream. She had a big yard, and we would play in it. We had some good times there. JC: Did the LDS Church have a big part to play in your lives? FF: Yes, quite a bit. I always went to church. I went to church in the old schoolhouse. Then when they built the new one, I went to church there. My father and mother always took us to church. JC: Can you remember seeing any of the general authorities? FF: Yes, I can remember seeing Joseph F. Smith, when he came up there to dedicate the old church house. And then when they dedicated the schoolhouse, where the church is now up there, Matthew Cowley came up and dedicated it then, the new church. JC: Where they had an east and west school and church, were you rivals with one another? Did you try to outdo one another? 11 FF: Yes, they didn’t agree at all. The wards didn’t agree. One was trying to outdo the other. But when they joined the wards together, they put a bishop in and they got along fine. JC: How did you store food? FF: They put up bottled fruit just about like they do now, but they didn’t have no pressure cooker. Of course they would have to cook it on the stove, and then they would put it into the bottles. The way they used to make preserve, they never did bottle it. They would put it in a big jar and cover it over. They would open up one of them jars, and take out a dish, and cover it up again. JC: What would you do with your meat? FF: We made a brine and salted our own meat, then smoked it in the spring. My father had a little smokehouse built. They have a certain kind of wood to smoke it with. They used mostly apple limbs, dried them and smoked them with that. That made a good-flavored meat. They would hang it up and dry it. My folks always put it in the wheat bin, covered it with wheat, and it would keep there good all summer long until we used it up. We didn’t have very much beef. We couldn’t keep it unless they salted it and made it into salted beef. JC: What about communication, the mail and the telephone? FF: In my time, they had a post office in Porterville. The mail was carried from Morgan on horse to Porterville. That’s the way we got our mail until Reinhardt Olsen started delivering it around the county. People had to have mail boxes. It made it much better though. You didn’t have to chase to the post office. It was delivered right to our door. JC: Did they have dirt roads when the mail was first delivered? 12 FF: Yes ma’am. He always had a cart with one horse. When he would come around and the school kids were out, he would load that cart right down with school kids and take them along with him to where they lived. He was a jolly old fellow. JC: What about telephone? FF: When our first two babies were born, I had to ride a horse to Morgan from Porterville to get a doctor. Then later they put a telephone line in from Morgan to Porterville. That’s the way we got our first telephone. JC: Will you describe the first telephone? FF: There isn’t much difference... only they were always hung on the walls, they wasn’t sitting around on the tables. It seemed good when you wanted to get a doctor in a hurry you could call him and get him. It would save riding to Morgan on a horse. JC: Has there always been a doctor in Morgan? FF: No, there hasn’t. They had a Dr. Wadsworth, and he wasn’t a very good doctor. Then Dr. – I can’t think of his name. JC: What did you do before the doctors came to Morgan? FF: They had midwives to wait on the women when they were confined with the children. And they done a lot of traveling around with the sick. We used to have quite a bit of typhoid fever around the county. They claimed it was through the water they was drinking. The midwives would go around and help the parents and take care of them. JC: What diseases can you remember having when you were younger? 13 FF: Oh, I had whooping cough, typhoid fever, measles, chickenpox. There was no immunization then. I had them all. JC: Can you tell me about the flour mills? FF: There was one in Richville. They had two big wheels that went around. The grain went between those wheels and it crushed it. It didn’t take the flour all out, it made whole wheat flour. Then over here to the Pingree mill, they owned it then, they made good flour, high grade flour. It made good bread. JC: Do you remember the first creamery that used to be in Morgan? FF: Yes, they made cheese mostly over here in this creamery here. They would haul the milk from all around the county by team and wagon. They would put it in the vats over there and get it heated up, and it would go to curds. They would drain all the whey off – they called it whey– then they would put these curds into molds and made cheese out of it. A lot of people liked the curds. I didn’t want any of it. JC: What about the pea factory that came into Morgan? FF: They raised peas all around the county. I raised a lot of peas for several years. Sometimes they would pay good. About three years I worked up in the pea vinery up in Porterville where they thrashed threshed the peas, boxed them, and sent them to the canning factory in Morgan. JC: How did they used to thresh them? FF: They would feed them into an elevator. Beaters were going around inside the cylinders to pound the peas out, and they would roll down on to an elevator and it would take 14 them up the scales where they weighed them. They would go out on an elevator, and they would box them up and fetch them Morgan on trucks. JC: I understand you were employed at Kearn’s Ranch. FF: Yes, I was employed there for one summer. It was right there by East Canyon Dam, where they’ve got that part there. It took in that part of the land. It was all done by horsepower. When I was plowing, I had three bottom plows. I had four mules and one horse. Sometimes you would bounce up off that seat when you would hit a rock, and come down and go and hit another one the same way. It wasn’t a pleasant life to live, I’ll tell you. JC: Did you clear any land? FF: Yes ma’am. JC: How would you go about that? FF: Well, we had a rail. They’d put four horses on one span on each end, and then you would stand on a platform on this rail, and it would tear the sagebrush out and surface berries. Then you would have to pile them up and burn them. You would clear the land that way. JC: What did you enjoy doing the most? FF: Just playing ball, I think I enjoyed doing the most. I’d like to go there and play the best I could. That’s all anyone could do. We sure had some good games. Sometimes we would sure get into some terrible arguments. We played a lot of games with Richville, Milton, Peterson, sometimes with Morgan. The ball ground is right where Bub Kilbourn’s house is now. There was a big knoll there. The ward got out with team and scrapers 15 and leveled it all off. They made a ball diamond out of it. It wasn’t a very good ball ground. We sure had some wonderful, good times there. JC: What position did you used to play? FF: I played second base mostly. JC: The ball teams were associated with the school, or with the church? FF: They were just ward teams. They wouldn’t let us play on Sunday. Sometimes we did, but they didn’t want us too. I can remember once all the kids locked the teacher in the coal house... We played ball all the afternoon until four o’clock, and then we let her out and we all went home. The next day we were sure in a lot of trouble. When we went back to school, she had the trustees there and they were going to expel us all. But if they had, they would have had to shut down the school. JC: Is there anything else you would like to tell me about your earlier days? FF: Well, I lived with my parents until I was about 20 years old. Then I got married. I was married before I was 20. I don’t regret that. My wife was three months older than I was. I don’t regret that. We had a good happy life together. My parents were good to us. When they all got together, we had a nice organ in the home. We had two sisters that could play and one brother. We had a pretty good time together when we all got together. Pretty good singers, some of them. JC: Mr. Florence, I sure appreciate talking to you and learning these many interesting things. Thank you very much. 16 NOTES: i. 1896 East and West Porterville Districts were consolidated. Porterville trustees were: William Brough, C.G. Porter, and Thomas Speckman. See Mountain Conquered, page 85. ii. Mr. and Mrs. Fred Florence celebrated their sixty-eighth wedding anniversary Thursday, November 15. The couple spent a quiet day at home, reflecting on the happiness and contentment they enjoy, strengthened by the bonds of love established over the 68 years of their married life together. They were married November 15, 1905, in the Salt Lake LDS Temple. See the Morgan County News, Friday, November 16, 1973 iii. The election of 1908 gave the position of county school superintendent to Mrs. Annie S. Dickson (maiden name Miss Annie Smith). Her many years of experience as a successful schoolteacher, as well as her education, made her well-qualified to be the first superintendent of schools in the new district. She became a familiar figure to the county residents as she traveled from school to school in her horse and buggy. See Mountains Conquered, page 88. iv. The community of Porterville received its name from Warriner and Sanford Porter, Jr., who came over the mountains from Centerville, in Davis County, into Hardscrabble Canyon in 1854 and built a sawmill on Beaver Creek. They carried the necessary machinery and provisions on pack mules. Lumber was taken back over the mountain to Centerville on a cart with four yoke of oxen. The main stream was first called Mill Creek, but lager changed Hardscrabble. See Mountains Conquered, page 135. 17 v. From Iron Hill, hundreds of tons of iron ore were shipped to the Murray and Midvale smelters. This ore was used as flux for smelting other ores. See Mountains Conquered, page 135. vi. About 1894, the seven Fowler brothers came to Hardscrabble Canyon. They organized a camp and began driving a tunnel, which they named “Seven Brothers” they went into the mountain 120 feet. About a year later, they began the construction of a mill. Mining stopped, and the mill and tunnel were never completed. Several thousand dollars were spent on the project. See Mountains Conquered, page 135. vii. In East Canyon, about seven miles south of Porterville, an ideal location was found for a dam to store irrigation water. The canyon gorge was narrow with rocky canyon walls on each side. In 1898, this dam was constructed of rock with a plate steel core, 95 feet above bedrock, giving the water depth of 53 feet, which amounted to 5,000 acre feet. The height of the dam was raised 25 feet in 1900, and two years later, another 17 feet was added, making a storage capacity of 13,800 acre feet. See Mountain Conquered, pages 28-29. viii. Construction began in 1915 on an arched reinforced concrete dam below the site of the first dam. Work was completed in 1916 on the structure, which was raised 140 feet above the outlet of the old dam and stored 28,000 acre feet of water. See Mountains Conquered, page 29. ix. In 1898 construction was completed on the first dam by the Weber and Davis Company to store flood waters for irrigation purpose in those counties. See Mountains Conquered, page 23. 18 x. A history of the restoration of the old Porterville Church may be found at the Weber State University Library. See Oral History Interviews, “Porterville Church in Porterville,” by Thomas V. Bergman. xi. On August 23, 1897, the two wards were combined, with Joseph Durrant as bishop and Thomas Spencer and John Riley Porter as counselors. Bishop Durrant is credited with bringing the two wards together, and soon a brick meetinghouse was started to serve their religious and social needs. During the rest of the summer, meetings were held in the groves because there was no building large enough to accommodate the members. See Mountains Conquered, page 25. xii. Rural Free Delivery service was established in Morgan County, April 15, 1905, with one carrier, at a salary of $720 per year, including horse hire. The route was known as Route No. 1. Reinhardt Olsen was appointed carrier. See Mountains Conquered, page 153. xiii. Dr. Charles Frederick Osgood followed Dr. Wadsworth, coming to Morgan in 1898. See Mountains Conquered, page 126. xiv. In 1904, James A. Anderson organized a canning company in Morgan, thereby giving birth to the Morgan Canning Company. Anderson erected a small building to house one Viner and a line of pea processing machinery. The combined equipment and factory cost approximately $12,000. See Those Good Peas, page 169. 19