“If a flood should come, it would float and if a wind came strong enough to blow it over, it would never crash to pieces." – Ebenezer Bryce
…continued from Ebenezer Bryce: Part 2
Ebenezer and Mary Ann (Park) Bryce
Ebenezer, a burly and skilled single man who would turn twenty on November 17, 1850, had no problems finding work in his new town of Salt Lake City. George A. Smith, a member of the LDS governing body Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, immediately hired him to work on his farm, where he met the maid of George’s wife, Bathsheba. She was a thirteen-year-old Scottish lass by the name of Mary Ann Park, whom Ebenezer would marry three-and-a-half years later.
For the next few years, Ebenezer continued to work as work came, eventually taking a job for Archibald Gardener, the husband of Mary Ann’s sister. The young man built and ran sawmills and gristmills along Mill Creek in Big Cottonwood Canyon in the Wasatch Mountains, 15 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, and in West Jorden along the Jorden River.
In February of 1855, the couple welcomed their firstborn son and my great-grandfather, Ebenezer Park Bryce. Ann Jeanette arrived in 1857, followed by David Andrew in 1858, William Henry in 1860, and Alma Nephi in October of 1861. That same month, Ebenezer and his family got a “calling” to join George A. Smith’s group to settle the area that eventually became St. George. Smith had personally requested Ebenezer so that he could help to build a sawmill and gristmill in Pine Valley, 40 miles north of St. George, to process lumber for building and provide flour for baking in those two towns. Over the next few years, Mary gave birth to three more children: twins Barbara Ellen and George Alvin in 1863, and Jane Louisa in 1867.
In 1867, former ships carpenter Ebenezer was asked to design and supervise the building of Pine Valley Chapel and Tithing Office. His solid reputation as a carpenter, plus his relation to LDS high official Archibald Gardener, might have had something to do with the request. He agreed, as long as he could do it his own way—using shipbuilding techniques, he built what is essentially an overturned ship.
The 32-foot by 52-foot frame stands independently on a granite and limestone foundation. All lumber was ponderosa pine that had been custom milled locally, in the sawmills Ebenezer himself had built. The crew constructed the walls flat on the ground and raised them into place using ropes, pulleys, and a whole lot of manpower. To make sure that they pulled the ropes in unison, Ebenezer sang a Scottish sea shanty—the end of each verse was the signal to pull. Once upright, the walls were “hung” on the basic structure, jointed in place with wooden pegs and strips of green rawhide. As the rawhide dried, it shrank and tightened the joints. The attic was constructed like a ship’s hull, giving the chapel an oval ceiling.
On any given day, a crowd gathered to watch; kids especially got a kick out of the sea shanty, singing it around the valley for months afterward. When the project was finished, Ebenezer was heard to say, “If a flood should come, it would float and if a wind came strong enough to blow it over, it would never crash to pieces.”
The two-story chapel served as a community meeting house, church, and school until 1919 when the school was moved elsewhere. The school occupied the ground floor, while the second, or main, floor was a multi-purpose room with a stage at the east end. On Sunday, the townspeople gathered for worship; during the week, the pews could be moved to make room for potluck dinners, parties, town meetings, and dramas. The main floor was heated by a 6-foot-long by 4-foot-high stove, which was large enough to burn pine logs, giving off a pleasant pine fragrance. Brass kerosene lamps, four on each of the two brass chandeliers and two in each of the eight windows, created a soft glow on dark Utah nights.
When I visited the chapel in 1997, I was amazed by the pews, wood paneling, and pulpit. They were made out of local knot-free yellow ponderosa pine, yet the surfaces had been painted in such a way that you would swear it was oak.
The Tithing Office (now known as the Bishop’s Storehouse) is a well-preserved red-brick 16-foot by 27-foot warehouse east of the Chapel. Like many religious institutions, the LDS Church asked each member to tithe 10 percent of their earnings. Those living on subsistence farms did not have much cash, so they paid in-kind with farmed goods that were then redistributed to those in need, a tradition that lives on. When I was seventeen, in 1951, I worked for my uncle Grant, who owned the biggest bee farm in Arizona. We extracted hundreds of gallons of honey from the combs and stored it in 5-gallon cans, 60 pounds of honey each, until needed for bottling. One of my jobs was to load 10 percent of the 5-gallon cans onto a truck and take them to the Bishop’s Storehouse, where I had the additional privilege of unloading them. Volunteers would bottle the honey for distribution to those in need.
Pine Valley Chapel
The Pine Valley Chapel, reminiscent of New England churches, stands today, at 152 years old, as the oldest LDS meeting house in continuous use. The Chapel along with the adjacent Tithing Office, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.
Back in the late 1860s, the powers-that-be were impressed with Ebenezer’s work and proposed to him an even more important project: The St. George Temple. Because it was to be the first official temple, and therefore the most holy building, in the proposed LDS state of Deseret, the founders of the new temple wanted premium wood for its construction. Such lumber came from Trumbull, Arizona, on the north side of the Grand Canyon. Ebenezer moved there in the fall of 1873—we can assume that he assigned his eldest son, who was by then eighteen years old, to the man-of-the-house role while he was away—and bought a steam engine sawmill to more efficiently process the lumber. When they reached their goal a year later, he returned to Pine Valley.
During that time, Mary became very ill or, as Ebenezer put it, “My wife’s health entirely broken and bedridden.” She was advised to move to a warmer climate, relatively easy advice to follow given that the average annual snowfall in Pine Valley is 90 inches. That, combined with the altitude of nearly 7,000 feet, the fact that she’d given birth to eight kids, and the incredible work required to maintain a homestead, contributed to her waning health.
Usually histories of families in the pre-twentieth century tend to overlook the roles of girls and women. Obviously, female pioneers worked just as hard as their male counterparts, and without them survival would have been impossible. (Mary Ann would go on to have four more children, Mary Isabelle in 1870, Joseph Walter in 1872, Heber Brooks in 1878, and Reuben Adam in 1880. All of her children lived to adulthood, quite a feat and a stroke of luck in those days.) On top of raising twelve kids, the Bryce family matriarch’s responsibilities included but were not limited to: planting, caring for and harvesting the kitchen garden, canning for the winter, churning butter, making cheeses and pasta, rendering lard from pig fat, making candles and soap, sewing clothes, spinning yarn and knitting sweaters, quilting, washing the laundry by hand, and on and on and on…