Morgan Pioneer History Binds Us Together when she was extremely ill, and had apparently passed away, her mother insisted that the elders exercise their priesthood and ask the Lord to bring her back so she could raise her children. Eliza was revived, and she later testified that her husband, Octave, had met her on the other side and said, "The priesthood are exercising their power and you must return and raise our family. I will come for you later." After this experience, her health was never good, and she eventually went quite deaf, which prevented her from being very active in church work. She lived until Sarah Jane was married and Octave Fredrick was twenty years of age. She passed away January 8, 1890, and was laid to rest in the Morgan Cemetery. ©19 Joseph Durrant In the year 1851 in a little village called Deanshanger, Northampshire, England, lived my great grandfather and great grandmother, William Durrant and Phoebe Hoar Durrant. On June 29,1851, the eighth child was born, a son, Joseph Durrant. He had odd eyes, one blue and one brown; this was my grandfather. He was k.V ^AMl five and one hall years ^^H ^BW old when school. He was taught ^ by Mrs. Baily in her home. When he was I ■"^fc ^»l six years old, he went %* ^^ *-"• 0 to the district school; he learned to read and write quite well. -g^^ 1 He got him a job ^KmH| scaring crows from William Reins' garden. He used a pair of wooden clackers to Joseph Durrant scare the crows with. He had to go to work early because the crows got out very early. He worked seven days a week for five pence. For two or three years, he herded and fed sheep. From the time he was fourteen until he came to Utah, he worked on the London North Western Railways as a plumber's helper. He and his brother, Thomas, nineteen, had saved up enough money to come to Utah and it was decided to let his older sisters Jane and Eliza come ahead. They would start saving again. On June 29, 1868, on his seventeenth birthday, he and his brother, Thomas, left their family and started in the early morning to the train and rode 110 miles to Liverpool. They got on board the ship that night and in the early morning left on the steamship Minnesota. This was the first steamship that came to carry the Mormon immigrants. It was under the direction of John Parry. There were 534 Saints that came on that vessel. Grandpa was sick all the way. They were thirteen days on the water. They reached New York on July 12,1868. They reached Laramie, Wyoming, July 22 the same year. When the train of immigrants reached Morgan County, the crops had been planted, but it looked more like a desert for the grasshoppers had eaten everything that was all green. The boys got a job on the Union Pacific Railroad at the tunnels just above Round Valley. In the spring of 1869 they bought some wheat seed and planted on the bench in Porterville. They paid $4.00 a bushel. The wheat came up pretty; just as it came in head, the grasshoppers ate it. They were so thick they nearly darkened the sun. After their crops failed, they got a job on the Central Railway. While working on the railroad and farm, he and his brother saved enough money to send for the rest of the family. In 1872 he and his brother rented a farm in Round Valley and raised a little wheat, but had to stack it until March before they could get it thrashed, then they had to beat it out with sticks. In November, 1872, in the town of Round Valley, Morgan County, the trustees came around and got each one to sign a paper that they wanted to go to school. Grandpa was twenty-one, but he signed for three months of school. The teacher was a boy of eighteen; he had a widowed mother with five children to look after. So Grandfather paid him one hundred pounds of flour, ten pounds of pork, and a load of wood for teaching him. The school started December 1. He was in the fourth reader. He and a girl were the only two to study the fourth reader. The teacher agreed to give a prize for the record and neither of them missed a day of school until about a week before school was out. Grandpa had a colt in the hills