Morgan Pioneer History Binds Us Together Thomas Palmer, Sr. and Thomas Palmer, Jr. and Rutha Elizabeth Stewart Palmer \ Pain: On June 3, 1859, a son was born to Thomas Palmer and Fannie Stark Palmer in Salt Lake City, in the vicinity of the Sixth Ward. This son was named Thomas Palmer, Jr. The family lived there until he was three years old. At this time, Brigham Young advised the people to spread out and settle other sections of the country. They settled in Enterprise. The name was chosen by Jessie Haven for an enterprising place to live. The roads were almost impassable. The wagons had to be taken to pieces and carried up over the mountain at Devil's Gate. Brigham Young advised the people to take up twenty-five acres of ground and not more, so there would be plenty for settlers who would come later, and to take the land best suited for irrigation. They built a one-roomed cabin west of where the main highway runs, in a grove of cottonwoods. They used one corner for a granary. They had four children, three boys and one girl. They brought a yoke of oxen, one cow and an old stove from Salt Lake. They came early in the spring of 1862, and in the fall of that same year, the mother, Fannie, died. She is buried at Peterson in the field south of where the old Peterson school stood. Mrs. Haven helped care for the children, but the little girl died a year later at the age of eleven. After the mother's death, the family had twenty-five bushels of wheat that had been harvested that first year. It was cut by hand with a scythe, and pounded out with a flail. On this, the family lived for six months having nothing to eat except the boiled wheat. Two years later Thomas Palmer, Sr. married Mrs. Mills, an English woman who had four children. Later he married one of her daughters, "Louie." The family went six months at a time without tasting bread. At that time, the closest grist mill was at Farmington. To get flour the men would carry the grain on their backs over the mountains and have it ground. Some of the women also helped to carry the grain. Their clothes were made from cloth spun from flax grown by Thomas. There was a Swedish man that lived down by the river who would throw the flax into the slew until it cured. Then he spun the flax and weaved it into cloth with a wooden loom. It resembled burlap. Thomas laughed, saying, "The pants and shirts scratched so bad, we would get running so fast to get away from it, that we could not stop." Thomas Sr. bought two buffalo robes from the Indians, or traded a pony for them. Thomas Jr. said they laid one robe down with the hair up, and put the other over them with the hair down. This was his and his brother Will's bed for years, until the hair was almost completely worn off the robes. The only dishes they had were wooden bowls. They used green blocks of wood, and a man that lived in Milton made these bowls. Some held about a pint and others a quart. He also made wooden spoons. Thomas Sr. made a table from slabs. The children stood around the table to eat, because there were no chairs. In the summer it was so hot and crowded in the cabin that Father Palmer moved the stove outside of the house in a kind of a bowery he had built. One day the team of oxen were frightened by some approaching Indians and ran right through the bowery smashing the priceless stove all to pieces. After that, the family's cooking had to be done in a fireplace, built in one end of the cabin. The pony express was the only means of getting mail at that time. Soon after this the stagecoaches came. The station was about one half mile from their home. The station tender lived right at the station. When the stage would be near the station, the driver would shout until he roused the keeper, who would bring out fresh horses and change teams while the driver was warming himself. Then away they would go on the run again. They always used two teams on each coach. During the wet season it was often necessary for the settlers to use their ox teams to pull the stagecoach across the muddy Enterprise bench. Thomas Jr. remembers coming to Morgan with his family in the wagon to watch the first train arrive. He said when the train whistled, it frightened the children and also the horses. The horses came nearly running away. This same year the grasshoppers came in hordes and destroyed all the crops, even eating the leaves 119