Taggart Family Newsletter
Volume II, # 1, September 1981
By Scott Taggart Sr.

SCOTT TAGGART SR.
My Childhood Memories Of Morgan, Utah

Morgan was my birthplace as well as that of all but two of my nine brothers and six sisters. I rerely mention this unusual and unusually large family without mentioning that on my parents (George Henry and Jessie McNiven Taggart, fiftieth wedding anniversary, fifteen of us with our spouses shared with them the festive wedding dinner, musical program and dance.

Morgan is divided by the railroad into North Morgan and South Morgan. Our home was on the southeast corner of the block on which the LDS Stake House now stands – a masonry building then, built of native stone, with the floor tipping threatre-wise toward the pulpit..

Father and Mother had built their first home in Richville, a short distance south of Morgan, where their first two children, James and George were born. It has always been my understanding that nearly all of us were delivered by a midwife, none other than Grandmother, Janett McNiven Hogg. By the time I came along on January 18, 1893, Jim and George had married and were living in their own homes.

As to the Morgan home, as I remember it, there were three rooms, besides a kitchen and pantry and a ladder reaching to the attic where a number of us children slept. Now I wonder how many of us were accomodated at any one time in that small home. I remember the long strings of yellow squash strips that hung for drying in the attic. I also remember quite clearly the day that sister Maggie and her beloved Walter E. Francis left amid much crying and hand waving to go with team and buggy to be married. She had a large black ostrich plume in her hat. That was in November 1898, and two years later they bought our home when we left to help colonize the Big Horn Basin in Wyoming. And it is interesting to note that after their death the old home passed onto Walter's nephew, who still occupies it. Only two title changes in nearly a hundred years!

I have no memory of our owning a farm, though I presume we did, for we had horses and cows, a stable and large barn with a hay loft. I should mention that there was a well near the south entrance of our home and a cellar under the northeast corner of it. Of course, there was the outside privy, a simple, run-of-the-mill-two-holer. The most modern ones had three holes with different heights and breadths, ample to accommodate all ends, meaning of course hind ends.

Father was a millwright and carpenter, having learned the first of these by assisting his father in operating the first grist mill in the valley, built by grandfather and the two Hinman brothers (see Newsletter, Vol. I, #!, 1 and 2). When Spackman built a mill in Morgan, my father was employed to operate it and they accomodated farmers as far away as Ogden and Coalville. I remember Father coming home one day carrying a seamless bag full of germade, the makings of a delicious cooked cereal. He was an excellent hunter, too. Deer, rabbits and other wild game were plentiful in the area and always provided us with an ample supply of meat.

Father made coffins for the people, charging ten dollars for the material and labor, including "dressing" the coffin by mother and my sisters. A side light – one day a child died and father was quite sure he would be asked to make the coffin and that the chances of being paid for it were just about zero, so he shouldered his 45/60 rifle and made for the hills east of town. He killed five deer, stashed them in a lime kiln until his boys could hitch the team to a wagon and bring them in. When he returned the father of the child was waiting to ask him to make the coffin!

There was a creamery not far from our home. Buttermilk was a by product and was disposed of by piping it through the wall to the outside. We kids sometimes enjoyed drinking it. Another fun was snaring suckers from the only bridge that crossed the river that ran through town. Father outfitted us with a fish pole with a copper loop fastened to the end of it, and we would snare them just behind the grills and haul them in. And we ate them, which I think is not often done these days.

I do not remember ever having gone to school in Morgan, though I was seven years old when we left for the Big Horn in 1900. Neither do I remember anything about Lake Como, which later became a very popular pleasure resort, particularly because of warm water.

The business section of the town was on our side of the railroad tracks, but Doc Wadsworth had a little store just across the street from the present city and county building. I found a dime once and was permitted to walk to Wedsworth store and spend every nickel of it whatever I wanted that could be had for a nickel.

Wandering Indians were a common sight, but we saw more of Indian Jim and Indian Mary than any ot the others. They all would go from house to house begging, and occasionally if we kids didn't behave, Mother would threaten to give us to Indian Mary. I think my older brothers were not impressed.

I was intrigued by the one-powered threshing machines. Mother told us that on one occasion she outfitted me with a clean pair of pants and a beautiful blue waist (shirt )today) with large white dots, and let me go to watch a nearby threshing. I had gone as far as the front gate when she called me to wait until she could bring me a handkerchief. I am supposed to have said, "Oh that's right, I can wipe my mothe on my thleeve".

Some time before we left for Wyoming, they were building a dam across East Canyon. My brother Jack was one of those hired to haul the asphalt to the site. He would park his wagon in the street in front of our home over night and we kids would scrape the asphalt that oozed out of the containers and use it for chewing gum. Many are the wads of that goo have I stuck under the table at meal time.

The Fourth and Twenty-Fourth of July parades were always exciting. The things that impressed me most were the bandwagon and ban; also, one fellow who contrieved to cook pancakes on a buffalo-chip fire and an expert in tossing the cakes in the air, turning them over and deftly catching them in the frypan. After the parade we would make for the bandwagon and gather handsful of nuts and candy that the musicians had spilled on the floor.

There must have been much talk in those days about our people preparing for what I interpreted as the end of the world and threatening famine. I used to play with Sister Vilate Welch's little boy. One day she gave each of us a double sandwich and I buried half of mine where I was sure I could find it when the famine came. I was further reminded of this after we reached Big Horn country and visited my Uncle Jim McNiven, then living on his farm about forty miles from our community. He had stored one year's supply of flour, a year's supply of wheat and sufficient meat, smoked and in brine, to see his family through the first year of the famine.

Let me finish with a clarifying paragraph regarding the call to go to Wyoming. The State of Wyoming had encouraged the Church to establish a colony and to develop approximately 22,000 acres of state land. The Church sent a committee of about fifteen men, of which Father was a member, to examine the land, to deternine the water rights, etc., and to make a report to the brethren. Their report was favorable, so the call went out to families as far north as Monpelier, Idaho, and as far south as towns in southern Utah, to participate in this venture. I believe it was the last successful Church-sponsored colonization effort. The wagon trek and selection of townsites would be under the general direction of a relatively new apostle, Owen Woodruff. He established his headquarters at Hams Fork, Wyoming, to which the wagons from all the communities participating would gather to be organized into companies for the approximately thirty-days drive to the sagebrush flats of northern Wyoming. I mention this because I can remember that by the time Father, with twenty-year-old son Jack, ten-year-old Bruce, and daughters Rebecca, Seventeen, and Nettie, sixteen, was ready to move, there had developed a considerable wagon train at Morgan, preparatory to traveling together up the Weber to Echo and through that canyon into Wyoming. They were given a tremendous sendoff by the townspeople and the local merchants.

It would be early Spring when Mother and the children still living at home in Morgan boarded the train to join the others in Wyoming. She had packed sufficient food for the two-day trip to Butte, thence East to Laurel, and south to the end of the line at Bridger, Montana. There probably were other mothers and children with us. We were met at Bridger by Father with the team and wagon.

I remember how thrilled I was a we came over the rise approahing Butte and could see the lights of the city. We arrived in Bridger too late to undertake the forty-mile trek to the tent settlement. Our oldest sister, Jessie, was ill and father fixed a bed for her and mother in the wagon, while the rest of us slept on the ground.

I still cry when I think of what a heart-breaking experience it must have been for Mother, within hours after leaving a comfortable home in the beautiful Morgan Valley, to make that long, tedious wagon trip through the desolate country to a tent camp on Sage Creek, just south of where Cowley now is. The camp was later moved to the north bank of the creek, where we remained until logs could be brought from the mountains and converted into cabins. It was while here in the tent camp that we were plagued by an epidemic of small pox, seven of our family being stricken. It is also where I and a few other children were baptized. But that is another story, isn't it?

We received this reminiscence of Scott's on June 15, 1981. He described our request for it as a "difficult assignment". We ernestly hope he will continue with Wyoming.