Oral History Program Glen Thurston Interviewed by Shanna Spendlove 2 May 1971 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Glen Thurston Interviewed by Shanna Spendlove 2 May 1971 Copyright © 2014 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. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed Kelley Evans, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Thurston, Glen, an oral history by Shanna Spendlove, 2 May 1971, 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 Glen Thurston. The interview was conducted on May 2, 1971, by Shanna Spendlove, in South Morgan, Utah. Thurston discusses his family settling in Morgan County, polygamy, land grants, the pea factory, as well as other interesting subjects. SS: Tell us about your ancestor, Thomas Jefferson Thurston, one of the first colonizers of Morgan County, Utah, in 1856. GT: Well, I couldn’t tell you all. The tape wouldn’t even hold it. I’m Glen Thurston. I’m 67 years old, or will be before too long. I’m the third generation of Thurston’s that have been in the valley Morgan here. My father, Burt Thurston, was never named Burt. He was named Harris Thurston. And his sisters, when he came along, he was the last one of 26 kids, and by that time they had got down to “Harris,” “Burt,” “Jonah,” names like that. They didn’t like referring to the name “Harris.” They started calling him “Burt.” It caused him a lot of trouble in his later years because part of his deeds and things like that were made out to Harris Thurston, and his marriage license was made out to Harris Thurston, and then he started signing his name Burt Thurston. We had quite a time getting his deeds and things straightened up, convincing attorneys and other people that it was Burt Harris Thurston rather than Burt and Harris Thurston, you know. Granddad, Thomas Jefferson Thurston, had three wives and came from Ohio. And he heard the Mormon missionaries back there in Ohio and became all enthused, and he decided to come West with the Mormons. He spent the winter at Winter Quarters with them there. After looking over the wagons and equipment and stuff there, he said, “A lot of that stuff will never make it. They’ll fall to pieces. They’ll never make it.” And so he 1 gave his wagons (and he had two or so Borax teams and wagons) and stuff, and had his place sold in Ohio. He gave his wagons and equipment and stuff to Brigham Young to distribute among the people that were ready to leave in the spring after Winter Quarters. And he took a horse and buggy and said, “I’ll go back,” and gave him what money he had. Brigham said, “You can’t do this, Brother Thurston, you’ll never make it out there yourself.” He said, “I’ll be right behind you.” And so, he took his horse and buggy, and within 24 hours he had traded this horse and buggy for a team and wagon with a traveling salesman, who was having a little trouble getting along with just a bag or two in the wagon. It was a good trade for both of them. A lot of people say that the Lord softened the hearts of the people he would trade with; but Grandpa would always say he softened their heads because he made them some tremendous trades. But he went back to Ohio and collected a little more money and gathered up things and stuff. When the main band got here to Utah in July, he arrived in September, right behind them, with a lot of equipment. Granddad was quite an adventurous fellow, and he and another fellow built the first boat that went out to Antelope Island. They never named the boat. They invited Parley P. Pratt to go along with them out to Antelope Island. They were going to name the boat the first animal they seen on Antelope Island. They took Parley P. Pratt and two other dignitaries over there with them, and when they got just about to the land, a mud duck flew up, and Mud Duck became the name of the boat. It started foundering a little bit, and Parley P. Pratt, he jumped out of the boat and got credit for being the first Mormon on Antelope Island. And all he did was rode over with them. Some of my aunts and uncles were really annoyed that my granddad and some of those that built the boat 2 didn’t get credit for discovering Antelope Island. Anyhow, the three of them filed on Antelope Island, which is worth several million dollars at the present time, and the government gave them Antelope Island, and he owned a third interest in Antelope Island. He settled in Centerville. And a little while later, him and some of the guys went to the top of the mountain and looked down into Morgan County when it was all green down in here; when it was dry and all burnt up over there in Centerville , he came down here. And a few days later, him and a few guys (Jedidiah Morgan Grant and George Grant) came over the mountain, walked over the mountain, and came into Morgan and spent a couple of nights here, and decided this would be a pretty good place to stay. So he came up here and built him a log house and brought his second wife, Elizabeth Ann Smith Thurston, up here with him. (See Mountains Conquered, 1959) His first wife Rozetta Bull Thurston had 13 children, and the second wife had 13 children. But one of the children of the first wife was a well-educated person, and they owned eight to 10 acres of ground somewhere around where the Newhouse Hotel is, at that particular time. And they and a couple of fellows started building a road up through the Weber Canyon. The way they built the road, you had to fiord the river back and forth, and back and forth; whenever they had to go close to the bank, they rolled those big rocks down in there and drove over the rocks with their wagons. In one place, they had to take the wagons apart and put it up over a cliff and down. Anyhow, they called it a road B and they got through. And they thought if they could get a toll road in there, they could get some financial help. People would back them on a toll road. So they built a toll road, and they had a toll bridge there, and you could walk across the toll bridge for 3 10 cents, and it would cost so much per wagon. They tell a story about this old Dutchman and his wife coming into Morgan. (I once knew their names at one time, but I don’t remember now.) When he found out that they could get across for 10 cents, why he had two bags and she was carrying two bags, and that’s all he had, you know. And he climbed up to a bank there, and she climbed on his shoulders, and he staggered across the bridge, when you could take all you could carry for 10 cents. He packed his wife and four bags across. He fell down just near enough to the other side that the toll bridge guy said, “You were near enough that I’ll let you in for 10 cents.” Otherwise it would have cost them 20 cents if they had walked across. Anyhow, this big, fat woman used to laugh about it and say how her husband thought a lot of her, and how her husband got her into Morgan free-he packed her in. Then the state decided that they’d buy the toll bridge off of Grandpa, and there was a deed in the family here for a while with the bill of sale where they had paid him and his partners for the work that they did on the road. And the state bought the road and made it into a pretty highway. And the legislature appropriated the tremendous sum of $500 to improve the road into Morgan County. SS: From where? GT: Up through the Weber Canyon. And a fellow by the name of Frank Hopkins took the contract for $500. And he got up on some of those little narrow passes with some dynamite and black powder, and he blasted more rock off than he anticipated. He got so much rock down in the road, there that he couldn’t move. And he run out of money before he could get all the rocks out and of course the road was worse than it was before. 4 An Englishman came up the road one day and broke his wagon tongue. He hit one of those big boulders and broke his wagon tongue out. He met Frank Hopkins’s son. They were still working there with hammers and crowbars and stuff, trying to get the road passable. When he said, “I broke my wagon tongue on that barley bit of road your father dug. If the government had given him another $500, you couldn’t have gotten through there a foot.” But anyhow, Grandpa got into here and moved up Deep Creek where Willy Spendlove lives, and Colonel Little moved down at Milton there. There was more open ground by Royal Clark’s place, and Roy Giles and Ronald Giles. And Grandpa had the choicest ground in the county, he thought. Well, he did, there’s no doubt about it. The Colonel started grumbling one day about how Grandpa got all the clear ground. And Grandpa, he didn’t have anything built except a couple of corrals and a little shed. He just loaded up everything he had, and drove down to Milton. He said, “Now, you old grumbling soand-so, get up there and stay, and don’t let me see anything of you again.” And so he traded from there to Milton. As time went on, they organized the LDS Church, and Grandpa was appointed stake president or presiding elder of the different branches in the stake. He was living down that little hill there-by where Dale lives. And he had a little log dugout in the hill with that nice spring there, you know. One of the general authorities came up-I daren’t quote his name, I’m quite sure I shouldn’t. Anyhow in this talk he gave, he said, “I want you people in Morgan County to build better homes and plant vines around your houses, and plant trees and improve this place. Here’s old Father Thurston living in a hut that I 5 wouldn’t keep my old white sow in.” That kind of got under Grandpa’s skin, and he, the presiding authority, went back to Salt Lake. He took him back beaver skins and rat skins and everything he had, and he came back with 100 pounds of nails, and a new beaver cloth hat, and a new broadcloth suit, and one of those beaver stovepipe hats. He got home in the middle of the night, and he told the boys-he woke them up and told them to get a good night’s sleep, which was a fine thing to do, because in the morning we’re going up the hills to get timbers cut and start to build a new house. That’s when they built that three-story building that’s down there. You’ve seen pictures of it, I imagine. See Mountains Conquered, page 15. This was built on a hill and the bottom door went out to the spring. The second floor went out to the highway, and there was an upstairs with a balcony around it. All the big parties, banquets, and weddings were held there for years. But the next morning he put on this new beaver hat and broadcloth suit and went up-he wore that every day till. They lived there for quite some time, when he married this here third wife, Helen Davis. He had by both of his other wives 13 children each; and he decided it was time he had another wife, and he brought home this last wife. And Grandma, she had been scrubbing the floor there all day. SS: Now which one was your grandmother? GT: She was the second one. Yes, the third wife, she didn’t have any children. The old man, he had just overestimated his ability. Anyway, Grandma, she had been scrubbing them wooden floors all day and had a great big dishpan full of scrub water. And she come by Grandpa, who had a nice beard and hair, and his bride was sitting there on his knee, 6 combing his whiskers out and they were sitting there, getting ready to go to bed. And Grandma came by with this great big dishpan full of scrub water and just as she walked by, she dumped it right on top of both of them. She almost gave them a water bath. SS: Did they get along good together? GT: She was just mad at him for coming in there with this here new bride, you know. I never knew what happened to this here third wife, Helen. I don’t know where she’s buried or what else. I suppose I should look that up sometime and find out. The records are available around here. She died before Elizabeth did. And then in later years, Granddad, they asked him to go down to St. George and finish the temple. The temple had been under construction for quite some time. He said that he’d been moved around long enough. He had been kicked out of Salt Lake and Centerville, and then he moved here on his own. Then they asked him to go down to St. George. At first he said no, but after thinking it over for a while, he gathered up the three youngest kids, my dad and another brother, Roy, from out to Nevada, and Mirte Whitear. The three of them and his second wife, Elizabeth Smith Thurston, he took those three to St. George. And he bought him a house there in St. George and worked on the temple there. He died and was buried there. Both him and Grandma died and were buried in St. George. But with all of the property that he had, he had traded off Antelope Island for a bunch of horses, and this, that, and the other. But with all the property he had, had here. When he died, he left this widow with three kids, and all the income she had was a half an acre of ground in back of the house, which had peaches, nut trees, you know, and $7 a month income. And that’s all the income they had-$7 a month, and she raised them kids on that. But part of the property that he had, and I bought back most of the rest of it, this 7 place of Saxton’s located in South Morgan about 1/4 of a mile up the road from Glen Thurston’s present home up here is part of the original that Grandpa had. He gave away all of the land over in Milton there. SS: How come he gave it away? GT: Well, a new family came in, and he’d give them 10 acres to build on and get started. SS: You mean immigrants would come in and he’d just give them some land? GT: Yeah, he’d give them 10 acres, enough place to build their house and that. Of course, he got the land for practically nothing. You know, he bought part of this here place and the other, he got as a grant from Ulysses S. Grant, who was the president of the United States at the time. And the other part was bought from the railroad, and it was just cheap ground. He didn’t like to farm that ground over there where Marion’s got that farm. He didn’t like to farm it because it was too hard to plow, and he farmed this here sandier ground in this area here, and he just used that for pasture, most of it. SS: Now, his first wife lived over in Centerville all her life? GT: I don’t know. I don’t think she ever moved up here. He brought this Camilla Smith up here, and she taught school for a while. And she married Willard G. Smith, who was the stake patriarch here. She bossed him around. She was quite a bossy schoolteacher. She taught the kids here, but she always figured if she had, Grandpa would have stayed in Salt Lake. That Salt Lake property, you know, Antelope Island there, if they hadn’t talked him into moving over to Centerville to help colonize that, he would have been among the Bamburgers and the aristocrats, you know, rather than some old colonizer. But be that as it may, I’ve always been satisfied with what I’ve had. I never wanted to be any high-faulting dude. 8 SS: What year were you elected to the county commission? GT: 1956. I served there for four years. Then I got defeated for another term as county commissioner. And then I served eight years in the legislature. And then this time, I retired without any ballots, out of my own free will. SS: You’ve had quite an active life. GT: I’ve been on everything that you can think of in this county. I don’t think that you can think of anything I haven’t been on. I haven’t been on the Democrat Central Committee. I’ve always been a strong Republican, but I can’t think of anything-fair board, poultry plant, farm bureau. SS: The poultry plant in Morgan, how come that went out of business? GT: Well, the price of eggs just got down to where people couldn’t make any money producing eggs. You know that eggs right now are the same price that they were forty years ago? SS: Is that right? What are we paying, about 52 cents? GT: Yeah. But the farmer makes about 40 cents. And we were receiving that much forty years ago, in the winter time. When we first got married, we used to produce some winter eggs, and they’d get up to about 60 cents. Then they started taking the cheap eggs in the summertime and putting them in cold storage. But that only kept the price of the winter eggs down because instead of there being a shortage of winter eggs, the summer eggs were available, and that kept the price of eggs down. It worked in reverse of what some of us thought it would. SS: That poultry plan, how long was that there? GT: It was there for 20 years. There were three to five employees there for several years. 9 SS: What did it do and how did it start? GT: Well, a group around here just got together and the Utah Poultry Producers borrowed enough money and bought the plant. They kept back part of your egg check to support that thing. We’ve got stocks in there now. They paid them off. They used the money for 10 years, then you got your money back, you know interest free. They furnished all the feed for all the poultry here in the valley, and shipped out all the eggs and candled the eggs there, and run them through that lime water that sealed in the little cracks and defections, and sealed the air out, so they would be fresh. There were lots of times when an empty box car would come from Ogden, and we would finish loading it here in Morgan. Then it would leave for New York, you know. It was a tremendous thing for Morgan County. There was two men working the warehouse, and a secretary, and then in the evening, there would be three to four to five people down there candling eggs for blood spots, and running them through this oil. I think they ran them through lime water first, and then they run them through an oil that kept the air out. I don’t remember. It was a good thing for the community at the time. Then they built that potato cellar up there. Of course, I guess you’ve been up there. They built that potato cellar, and they used to ship potatoes out. But now Paul Turner, last year, was the only one that had any potatoes in there at all. SS: Was the pea factory still in operation when you were a county commissioner? Was it owned by Del Monte at that time? GT: Yeah, Del Monte was the last one to operate it. That was built by a local man, you know. SS: Who built that? 10 GT: Jim Anderson and his brother, Joe. First, they built the warehouse where Clark’s is, and the machine shop was around in back and that was where the viners were. And the pea vines run up into that tall silo there. They didn’t know you could stack pea vines out in the open there. They thought you’d pollute the environment. They run the pea vines up into that silo there, and they added the warehouse upstairs, and then finally they got a good name and finally got enough money outside to build that sandstone warehouse and the big factory behind it. And then they had viners, you know, and all the areas here and clear down from Hoytsville, they hauled peas down. From Hoytsville to Morgan and canned them, and from Uintah up here and canned them. Then they Del Monte branched out and went up to Smithfield, and built a factory up there, and Del Monte still runs that. Then Jim Anderson died, and no one else was manager and diplomat enough to keep the thing operating. It was sold to Cal Pak and they put in a sauerkraut factory. One time there, the sauerkraut, the cabbage, the growers received about $150,000 a year for cabbage, and the payroll was about the same, from $150,000 to $300,000 a year. And we just lost that when they moved the kraut factory up to Cache Valley, Smithfield, where they used the same equipment that they canned sauerkraut in the fall. They could use that for canning beans and other stuff. At least that was their excuse to close things down if you’re not making money. SS: So they just slowly went out of business? GT: They just took the machinery and stuff and moved it up there. SS: What about the mink business here in Morgan? A lot of the mink farmers are selling out. That used to be big business. GT: About three years ago, mink brought a lot more money to Morgan County than dairy or 11 anything else. It was one of the biggest incomes the farmers had. They were running two trucks into Morgan with feed every day. I can’t tell you just offhand, it costs about $1 a month to feed a mink, and with several hundred thousand mink here. SS: It costs a dollar a month to feed mink? GT: To feed each mink, yeah. Or to feed, it costs around $2,000 to $3,000 a month when the kits are growing. They were bringing in 30 tons of mink feed at 6 cents to 8 cents a pound every day. But in the market, it’s just gone down. A lot of the mink men are in real financial difficulties at the present time, all over the state. A man here from Wisconsin the other day, said an outfit back at Racine doesn’t make any difference what the town was, he said that was the town built around the mink set up. They had their own fish boats form the lake there, you know. And they produced their own feed and everything. And he was here the first of the year, around January, and said, “I was down there the other day working for a contractor, looking at a road, getting ready to bid on a road,” and he said, “that place is just closed up. There were a few people living in the house, but the mink sheds are all empty and the plant, the windows are all boarded up on the plant.” He said the warehouse was empty and it was completely folded up. It costs about, if you hire labor and pay interest on your feed money, it costs almost $10 to raise a mink, and that would be about what they brought this year. So a lot of the fellows, some of them didn’t break even. Some of them are just hanging on and the bank is going to carry them through this season to see if they can’t pick up a little bit. SS: Well, I guess I’ve come to the last question. How about your Clydesdales? How did you get them? GT: Well, this has always been a horse place. Granddad Thurston, he had 100 head of 12 horses when he was here 100 years ago. And Dad liked horses. And I liked horse. And we were working, Dad was always quite a horse trader, and he would always trade a good horse for a poor horse, you know, and get a few dollars to boot. And I got so tired and sick of working the poorest horses in the valley, the horses which were balky, you know, and horse people couldn’t get along with, runaway horses, and balky horses and stuff like that, and end up with spring work with a short hand all the time. And so an army captain was here one day, and we were trying to raise horses for the US Calvary, and we had one of the government free-mount stallions. And he was leaving for California the next morning to buy some horses down there. And I said, “Major Karr, if I give you a blank check, will you buy me a couple of good registered Clydesdale mares in California?” He said, “I’ve never saw any in California.” I said, “They’re down there. I don’t know who’s got them. I haven’t a name or address or nothing else. But you inquire around and see if you can find them.” He said, “Well, I won’t need any money.” And about a month or so later, he sent me a night letter, a telegram, and said to send him about $800 in cash the next morning to a certain place. He said that he’d located a couple of horses there. So I sent him the check, and it went on and on and we never heard from him or nothing else. The check came back in the bank statement, and Dad was pretty upset about it. We were in partnership at the time. And he said, “Them damn army guys got to playing poker or drinking parties, or something. And you’ve probably lost that money.” But on the 4th of July, he brought me two mares, and one of them was in colt at the time he bought her. She’d had a colt. And he said that he had both the mares bred again. He brought me up the two mares and the colt, and both the mares were safely in foal again. They got here on the 4th of July. That was quite a day for me. 13 That was in 1936. And we’ve been in the Clydesdales ever since. We’ve bought horses in West Virginia, we’ve bought horses that came from Scotland. We bought some in Canada. This horse here, he’s rated one of the best horses in North America. He’s in Chicago at the present time. SS: You sold him? GT: Yeah, we sold him. SS: How many Clydesdales do you have now? GT: We’ve got eight, nine. We’ve got one out here that is one year old and weighs 1,200 pounds. Yeah, he’s as tall as you are, and he will be a year old on the ninth of May, another week. 14