While celebrating the centennial of Southern Utah University, President Gordon B. Hinckley and others paid tribute to early pioneers who laid the foundations of communities in southern Utah.
"It is wonderful," said President Hinckley, "to have a great and distinguished inheritance from men and women of the past."President Hinckley's address was part of the university's 100th birthday - celebrated May 2 with parties, speeches and ceremony.
Various VIPs - including former U.S. President George Bush and British Consul General Merrick Baker-Bates - also attended the celebration and spoke during the Centennial Convocation. Music was provided by the Tabernacle Choir, which was in Cedar City as part of its sesquicentennial tour.
A processional march during the celebration featured members or descendants of members of every SUU graduating class from 1900 to 2000.
President Hinckley told the group that they memorialize more than the centennial of SUU. "We also commemorate those who nearly 50 years earlier laid the foundations of this and other communities of southern Utah," said President Hinckley. "They were pioneers in a very real sense."
He said the people who settled the southern valleys were part of a great pioneering effort that resulted in the establishment of more than 350 communities throughout the West.
"They were a people who fought to tame the wilderness. They were people of the frontier in a very real sense. They struggled to bring water to the parched land. They wrestled with the vagaries of the weather," he noted. ". . . But they were also people who carried in their lives a love for the artistic and the beautiful, for education and refinement, for the more subtle things of life which lead to an expansion of the mind and an enlargement of the soul. They recognized that education was the key to achievement and economic opportunity."
It was this belief, President Hinckley continued, that led the Mormon pioneers to establish schools wherever they settled. "Many of those schools were small and somewhat primitive, but they represented a great ideal, a consuming love for learning," he said.
President Hinckley explained that in 1897 the Utah Legislature appropriated $15,000 for the maintenance and furnishing of a branch school in southern Utah - which would later become Southern Utah University.
"The citizens of this community pledged 15 acres of land and a suitable building. There were only 1,500 people living in the area at that time. They went into the mountains and cut lumber. They struggled and gave the project everything they had."
President Hinckley said some of the committee members mortgaged their homes to secure the money needed to complete the campus. Had they not done so the entire project could have failed.
"Illustrious has been its heritage," he said. "The seed from which it grew was planted with faith. Sacrifice marked its infancy. Hope sustained its growth. With a century of life behind it, we wish great good for its future. It has become a vibrant and forceful educational institution and community center in this part of southern Utah. Its future will only get better."
President Hinckley said the presence of a university does something for a community. "It brightens the entire environment. It brings a new dimension of culture. It affects for good the lives of all who are touched by its influence."
British Consul General Baker-Bates spoke of the British heritage of many SUU's founders.
Former President Bush talked on the university founders' sacrifice and applied it to people today - telling the audience that any passion for freedom must include service to others. "All you have to do is get off the sidelines," he said.