• • • Charles Boyden Charles Boyden was born 2 December 1817 in Milford, Staffordshire, England, to John Boyden and Mary Lindop. He married Sarah Corns on 4 March 1841. He learned the trade of wheelwright and carpenter. They came in contact with missionaries of the Latter Day Saint church and were baptized-Sarah on 16 April 1850 and Charles five days later on 21 April 1850. By this time, they had five children-John, Fanny, twin girls, Mary Ann and Louisa, and William Henry. When William Henry was one year old, he died and the teachings of the church they were learning about gave them new hope about a purpose in life. They made friends with other members of the church. One of these families was John and Elizabeth Lees. Also a young woman named Mary Horsefield. They soon developed the desire to "gather to Zion". They began saving for this move and on 30 March 1860, the family boarded the ship~- This ship had been chartered by the church so that the emigrants could travel under church supervision. They arrived in the harbor at New York City on 1 May 1860. They traveled by train to St. Joseph, Missouri. There, they boarded a steam boat and traveled up the Missouri River to Council Bluffs, Iowa. They had !mown that they would be traveling from Iowa to Utah in a handcart company. The~ Company was too large to travel as one handcart company so the group was divided and ·the Boyden family traveled in the company led by James D. Ross. They were ferried across the Missouri to Florence, Nebraska. The Ross company left Florence on 17 June 1860. There were 140 saints going by handcart and 106 by ox teams and wagons. The company arrived in Great Salt Lake City on Monday, 3 September 1860. They were greeted by their friends from England, John and Elizabeth Lees. 'Flie Lees had emigrated seven years earlier and had a home on the corner of 5th West and 4th North. The Lees took the Boyden family and Mary Horsefield to their home to rest and help them find work. Mary had also traveled with the Ross handcart company. Brigham Young had encouraged the new emigrants to settle in one of the other valleys near Salt Lake. Charles and Sarah decided to take President Young's advice and go to Weber Valley to start their new home. At that time, Morgan Valley was referred to as Weber Valley. He rode horseback through Davis County and up through Weber Canyon. There was really no road into the valley. Much of it had been washed out by high water. Two families that the Boydens had traveled with across the plains had already moved to Morgan. These were the Richard Fry and George Simons families. When they had traveled through the canyon earlier in September, it had taken them over a week, just to get through the canyon. They had had to take their wagons apart and haul the pieces by oxen over parts of the canyon wall. Charles decided it would be best to wait-until spring the following year before moving to the valley . 15 • • • The Boyden children, John, age 19, Fanny, age 16, and the twin girls, Mary Ann and Louisa, age 14, all found work. John began to teach school. The girls all found work helping as domestic servants in homes. Mary Horsefield, who was 39 years old, went to live with the family of Bishop William Thorn to help with his family. Charles found work as a carpenter. By the next spring, Charles and his wife Sarah decided to become involved with plural marriage and on 30 March 1861, Charles, who was 41, took Mary Horsefield as a plural wife. That same spring, Charles left for the Weber Valley to build a cabin for his wives and family. He had previously staked out his squatter's rights, taking up four acres ofland in the north end of the valley in an area called Weber City. This land was located in what later became known as Peterson. He felled and hauled nearby trees to the cabin site, and he built a large, one room dirt-floor cabin, with no windows. He built on a hillside away from the occasionally high water from the Weber River and·Peterson Creek. When the cabin was finished, he returned to Salt Lake for Sarah and Mary. His children stayed in Salt Lake City to work. He began to clear his land from oak brush and willows. He planted a garden and learned new skills in farming including planting oats, wheat and raising livestock. In July of that year, 1861, his daughter Fanny was married to James Whitehead Jr. and they moved to Peterson and homesteaded the property adjacent to Charles' property. Sarah was helping Charles clear his land for agriculture when she was bitten by a scorpion. Because there was no medical help available in the Morgan Valley, Sarah was taken to Salt Lake to the home of John and Elizabeth Lees. There she died on 27 September 1861. Sarah was one of the first to be buried in the Salt Lake City Cemetery. Following Sarah's death, Charles and Mary continued to live in Peterson. Although work was done on the road through Weber Canyon, travel to Ogden and Salt Lake continued to be difficult. Food was sometimes scarce because of flooding of fields and difficulty of travel to the other valley, but the completion of a gristmill in Richville helped with that situation. On 29 September 1862, Mary gave birth to a daughter, their only child. They named her Sarah Alice and called her Alice. John came to live in Peterson for a short time. He taught school there and also helped Charles Peterson in his job as postmaster. John later moved to Coalville, in Summit County. Some of his accomplishments were: he taught school, was elected to the Legislature, was a tax collector and assessor, was appointed Postmaster for Coalville, was Superintendent of the Coalville ZCMI for 14 years, served a mission to Great Britain, established Coalville's first drug store. Charles' twin daughter, Mary Ann and Louisa had stayed in Salt Lake City to work as domestic servants for different families. When they became homesick to see their father and their sister Fanny, who had married and was also living in Peterson, they walked the trail up City Creek Canyon. This wasn't an easy walk, but once they reached the summit the rest of the way was downhill. There was a saw mill at Shingle Mill on the north side of the summit where trees were cut and lumber brought down through City Creek to Salt Lake City. From the summit, Mary Ann and Louisa followed Hardscrabble Creek to the meadow where the trail divided. The trail east went to Porterville and they took the trail lb t • • • west along the base of Mahogany Ridge and followed the Deep Creek into Littleton, just seven miles from Peterson. In the General Conference of the Church in April of 1865, Charles was called as one of twelve elders to serve on a work mission in the Sandwich Islands, or the Hawaiian Islands as they are now called. In 1865, the church had over 4,000 members who had been baptized since the mission had opened in 1850. At first, the church had purchased property on the island of Lanai, and encouraged the Hawaiian saints to gather there rather than to go to the Salt Lake Valley. All went well for a few years, then a wayward missionary, Walter Gibson, began to use his authority wrongly, and because communications were slow, it was not until 1864, that apostles Ezra T. Benson, Lorenzo Snow, and Joseph F. Smith, along with Elders Alma Smith and William Cluff, arrived in Hawaii. Their investigation showed that Gibson had defrauded the church and natives of the property in Lanai. Gibson was excommunicated and the Hawaiian Saints were encouraged to move to a new location on the island of Oahu. The church purchased a 6,500 acre plantation at Laie on the windward side of that island. Missionaries were needed to build the new community there. Charles and his wife, Mary, were set apart for their missions one day apart-Charles on 15 May 1865 and Mary on 16 May 1865. They traveled by wagon train to San Francisco. There were ten wagons and forty-three saints in that company. From San Francisco, they sailed to Hawaii. On 6 July 1865 the missionaries arrived in Honolulu. It was their job in Laie to build schools, homes and meeting houses and help erect a sugar factory, teach trades to the Hawaiians and teach the gospel. In Laie, Charles moved his family into a grass hut. The sugar factory took a couple of years to complete, but it helped give employment to the saints. The sugar cane grown on the church plantation was taken to the factory and made into brown sugar and shipped to the United States. In the summer of 1867, Charles and Mary along with James Lawson and his wife, Harriet, moved their families to Honolulu so they could work to earn money for boat passage in the spring. After a successful three year mission, Charles and Mary were released and sailed home. They arrived in San Francisco on 11 June 1868, traveled to Sacramento and waited for about four weeks until a party was organized that would travel to Utah. Charles bought a wagon and two pairs of mules. Alice became ill with mountain fever and was ill all the way back to Salt Lake. All her hair came out and when she arrived in Salt Lake, she was too weak to walk. Alice was 2 Y2 when her parents were called as missionaries to Hawaii. In later years she said she didn't remember much of the ocean voyage to Hawaii, but she remembered her home in Laie as a grass hut. She remembered the tropical climate of gentle rain and breadfruit, coconut and palm trees. She had fond memories of sitting on the ground with her parents and dipping baked fish into a pot of poi. Her first school was in Hawaii, where she was taught by one of the sister missionaries, Mildred Randall. She learned the native language by playing with the children . /7 • • • When the Boydens returned to Utah, they arrived in Salt Lake City on 16 August 1868. They didn't go directly to their home in Peterson, but traveled up Parleys Canyon to Coalville to visit with John and his wife, Jessie, for a few weeks. They then returned to their home in Peterson. Charles now built a small frame home for his family. This home was much more comfortable than their log cabin. Charles continued to farm and develop their homestead. Mary's brother, Edward Horsefield, who still lived in England had two sons. In 1875, Charles and Mary sent money to pay for emigration expenses and these two sons, nephews of Mary, came to live with the Boydens and help with the farming. Their names were Samuel and William Henry Horsefield. Charles' daughter, Fanny, and her husband, James Whitehead Jr. had moved to Peterson after their marriage and they took care of the Boyden farm while Charles and his family were in Hawaii. James was a weaver and he used wool that had been carded in Ogden. Weaving and farming provided for his family. Later they moved back to Salt Lake. After the birth of Fanny's fourth child, a daughter who lived only three weeks, Fanny never regained her health. The family moved back to Peterson where Fanny could be cared for by Charles and Mary. James was working, first at Deseret Woolen Mills located at the mouth of Parleys Canyon. Later he worked for Abraham Smoot , who was building the Wasatch Woolen Mills one mile west of the Deseret Woolen Mills. James traveled the trail from Peterson to the south end of Morgan Valley, up Hardscrabble Canyon and down City Creek Canyon to Salt Lake to work at the mill and stayed in Salt Lake City while he worked during the week. He would walk back home to his family in Peterson on Saturday to be with them until Sunday, when he would walk back to his work in the city. Fanny was an invalid for the next three years and died at age 27, in 1871. Charles and Mary helped care for the three children until James, their father, remarried a few months later. Charles was 71 in 1888 when he became ill. He succumbed to pneumonia on 20 November 1888 and was buried in the Salt Lake City Cemetery. Mary, age 66, and Alice, age 23, continued to live in Peterson. After the Salt Lake Temple was completed, Mary spent time in Salt Lake City doing temple work. She died on 11 November 1904, at age 80, and was buried in the Salt Lake City Cemetery. When Alice was in her teens, she left home to live in Ogden and to learn to be a seamstress. When she finished her training, she returned to Peterson and sewed for the residents of Morgan County. On 28 June 1893, Alice married Eli Frank Whitear, a farmer and widower whose wife had died in childbirth fourteen years earlier. Alice was 31 and Eli Frank was 36. After their marriage, they made their home with Mary, to look after her and take over the farming responsibilities. They had three sons, Charle~ / Brooks, Frank Leslie, and Robert Earl. They started to build a larger house, bmbefore it was completed, Eli Frank contracted typhoid fever and died 28 &tober 1900. He was 43 years old. Alice was expecting her fourth child when Eli died. Mary Josephine was born five months after Eli's death. Alice was left to care for her mother who was 78, and her children, ages 6, 3, 2 and the new baby. She supported her family by working as as t • • • seamstress and leased the farm land until her sons were old enough to do the farm work. She always helped them milk the cows. In 1914, she and her sons moved to Logan where the sons attended the Agricultural College. While they were attending school there, one of the professors questioned the spelling of the last name. It was spelled "Whitear". The professor said it looks like it should be pronounced "White ear". Alice changed the spelling for her fami ly to "Whittier". Poor health made it necessary for Alice to return to Peterson. She kept busy raising her family, serving as a counselor in the Primary, and as President of the Relief Society for ten years. She was known for her kindness and the fun family gatherings for the Boyden clan at her home in Peterson to celebrate the Fourth of July. She died in Peterson at age 70 on 9 September 1932. Both she and her husband are buried in the Peterson Cemetery .