No one lives here now. It's been more than 100 years since Charles Rich built the three-room adobe house for two of his wives, 100 years since they worked and slept and raised their children within these walls.
Nothing in the tidy house gives a hint, however, that the people who built it died decades ago.When you walk into a home at Pioneer Trail State Park, you are supposed to feel like you are back in the 1850s. So it is with the Rich home.
On the white mantle shelf, two candles stand half burned. A Bible lies nearby as though someone might have been up late last night, reading and praying.
On the window sill a geranium blooms. The soil around it smells damp, freshly watered. The lumpy bed in the corner looks hastily made. There is spinning left on the wheel.
You can almost believe Sarah Rich started that spinning and that she'll soon be back to this little room - lugging a pail of milk, or a basket of vegetables, or a sleepy baby to deposit in the cradle before she sits at the wheel again.
A long dusty road runs past the house. When the front door is open to the morning sun, you can hear meadow larks and the livestock in the barnyard - a high-pitched piglet and a snorting horse. In the evening, the insects whir in the tall grass outside.
From the doorway you can lift your eyes to the eastern mountains and see nothing but scrub oak. No telephone lines, no highways, no high-rises, just oak.
Pioneer Trail Park, at the mouth of Emigration Canyon, is one of the best places in the state to see the world the way the pioneers saw it. But not all that many Utahnscome to look, says Mike Barker, the park supervisor.
Last year, 430,000 people came to This Is The Place monument. But only 40,000 of those ventured away from the imposing statue into what Barker considers the most engaging part of the park: the living history village called Old Deseret.
And of the 40,000 visitors, 40 percent came from out of state. "On bus tours," says Barker. If he had two wishes for Pioneer Trail State Park it would be for more visitors, especially local visitors, to Old Deseret and more money for its development.
The park's master plan, prepared in the 1970s when legislators and planners felt flush, calls for 100 buildings. "A Western version of Williamsburg, on a smaller scale," explains one park ranger.
So far there are 13 replicas or reconstructed originals in the village, 13 buildings exactly like those pioneers used during 1847 to 1869, when the transcontinental railroad came.
Volunteers staff the homes. Dressed in period costumes, they chat with visitors about the history of the home and demonstrate crafts of the time - everything from broom-making to lace-making, from shoeing horses to dipping candles.
July 24, 1997, will be the 150th anniversary of the arrival of the pioneers. Barker and other officials from the Utah Division of Parks and Recreation asked that Pioneer Trails be designated the official park for the sesquicentennial celebration. The Legislature granted the request two years ago, but hasn't provided funds for more development.
"We'll ask again next year," says Barker. Meanwhile, history-conscious families and cities around the state keep offering historic homes to the park. If the state doesn't have enough money to move the home, Barker says, they just have blueprints made of the building so they can build a replica of it later.
The state parks division did find the money to move the Wild Bill Hickman home to Old Deseret, says Barker. That reconstruction will begin soon, with park rangers, dressed in pioneer clothes and using pioneer tools, rebuilding the old log cabin that stood in Fairfield.
Hickman was colorful character, a bodyguard to Brigham Young. "With the interpretation of that history, his home will be an exciting one for us," says Barker.
But each home has a history, an atmosphere all its own, says Maureen Cook, and for her money Mary Fielding Smith's home is the most moving. Cook volunteers every Monday at the park. The paid staff knows she loves the little adobe home that sits by itself at the far end of the village. They try to make sure Cook is assigned to Mary's home.
"I tell the visitors the story of Mary," says Cook. Of how, when her husband Hyrum was killed, she could have stayed in Nauvoo, but she chose to bring her children across the plains. "I think she was a very determined woman. But people loved her," says Cook. "I've read a lot about her."
If there is one lesson to be learned at Old Deseret, Cook says, it is that the pioneers had very little, but that they had all they needed. They had orchards and gardens, and a loft for the children to sleep in, and room for a spinning wheel next to the fireplace.
Pioneer Day is always a busy day at the park. The 24th of July is the day most people set aside to remember the pioneers. It's a good day to visit because there are extra activities, special programs. But Barker and Cook and the others who work at the park urge Utahns to visit on another day as well.
Come twice, they say. Come again later in the summer, when their are fewer people, and you can appreciate the park in a different way.
For the all the activities, Old Deseret is on most days a peaceful place, a sanctuary very like the one the pioneers were seeking when they came to this valley so long ago.