Douglas D. Alder sees in St. George a tale of two cities.
"Brigham Young's St. George," said Alder, a historian and former president of Dixie College, "is the old town" - a grid-pattern village of pioneer homes and public buildings roughly bordered by the gleaming LDS Temple and the Virgin River on the south and east and by sandstone and lava-encrusted hills on the north and west."And then there's the `California' St. George, which is very much not the old Utah style," he said. Suburban malls and mission-style houses in nouveau neighborhoods with West Coast names and winding streets fill in what were once the community's farm fields and outer reaches.
But unlike cities in which the 20th century has tended to obliterate the physical and architectural memories of the 19th, St. George appears to have grown belatedly and with enough grace so that today many reminders of the pioneer past remain engagingly in place.
"We're just delighted the old town is still alive," Alder said, for tucked in among the electric signs, fast-food restaurants and commercial enterprises, he notes, "are about 20 really important original historical buildings and homes."
Not long after entering the Salt Lake Valley, pioneer leader Brigham Young dispatched settlers to the Virgin and Santa Clara river basin. Jacob Hamblin and other missionaries to the Indians put roots down in Santa Clara in UTAH
1855. Such villages as Washington, Gunlock, Heberville and Toquerville were in place by 1860. In May 1861, a party led by Young visited the area, apparently with an eye particularly trained upon the potential for growing cotton in a climate drier and much warmer than northern Utah's.
James G. Bleak, as noted in the Utah Historical Society publication "Utah's Dixie: The Cotton Mission," described the Mormon leader's reaction to the landscape this way:
He caused his carriage to be stopped and (when) a number of the brethren gathered around, he looked north up the little valley between the two volcanic ridges where St. George has now been built . . . and said with a sweep of his arm, "There will yet be built, between these volcanic ridges, a city with spires, towers, and steeples, with homes containing many inhabitants."
Three hundred heads of families were called to the LDS Cotton Mission in October 1861. Before the first wagon headed that way, the name "St. George" had been selected for the planned city (in honor, it is said, of George A. Smith, a leader known as "the potato saint") and a postmaster had been named.
During a leisurely walk today through the old center of town, antique buildings seem to pop up on every other corner. Civic and church buildings, from the old Washington County Courthouse to the white-spired St. George LDS Tabernacle, and dozens of pioneer residences, including Brother Brigham's own winter home, stand like emissaries of another time.
The Washington County Travel & Convention Bureau, in cooperation with St. George Magazine, publishes a color brochure, "A Stroll Through History," that guides visitors - on foot or in cars - through the downtown area. Along with a map, it lists 27 sites, from specific homes to old commercial strips, and presents brief histories of them. Small sidewalk signs have been placed outside most of these locations as well, offering similar information. Another collection of markers relating the area's history decorates a small corner park beside the Zions Bank at Main Street and St. George Boulevard.
During the peak summer tourist season and by arrangement at other times of year, the city and local historical society present "Historic St. George LIVE." This is a bus tour and first-person re-enactment during which six actors, "who represent the pioneers and speak in the terms of the day," outline the desert community's history and explain what pioneer life was like, noted Alder, who wrote the original script and is the project's chairman.
Beside a tiny adobe house at the St. George Art Museum, a volunteer portraying Indian missionary and pioneer Jacob Hamblin, for instance, tells visitors about the settlement of southwestern Utah, Alder said. At his home, " `Orson Pratt' - who is an intellectual and a mathematician - talks from more the scientific point of view," telling about crossing the Plains and helping devise an odometer. "Erastus Snow," a Mormon apostle and leader of the St. George "Cotton Mission," talks more about the challenging settlement of Utah's Dixie.
"These are all volunteers," Alder said. "We have 10 or 12 Jacobs and 10 or 12 Brighams and so forth - a different one every day. This is lots of fun, and a lot of good people in this community are willing to do it."
The less supervised history walk begins at the old Washington County Courthouse at 100 East and St. George Boulevard. Today it's the home of the Chamber of Commerce, where visitors can pick up all kinds of information - including the site-by-site tour guide. Historic markers outside note that Brigham Young sent settlers south to grow cotton in 1861 because he knew the Civil War would deplete supplies from the American South.
The courthouse, begun in 1866 and completed in 1876, includes an upstairs old-style courtroom; in the basement are three jail cells, including one called "the black hole."
Historic homes and buildings radiate from the courthouse in all directions. The Daughters of Utah Pioneers Museum, filled with relics and portraits, is next door. The art museum and nicely refurbished Opera House are only a short block away. The beautiful St. George LDS Temple, completed in 1877 - the first in Utah - is several blocks south, out of the range of the published walking tour, but is a big draw with a popular visitor center.
Old St. George is still dotted with pioneer residences - several of which have become bed-and-breakfast inns (historian Juanita Brooks' 1870s-era home is the Quicksand and Cactus B the lava-foundation Erastus Whitehead home of the 1880s is the Old Penny Farthing Inn; the large Woolley-Foster home is the Seven Wives Inn).
By 1866, bothered by the maladies of old age, Brigham Young himself began to spend winters in warm St. George. The telegraph arrived in 1867, making such a long-term stay more practical, and in 1871 he bought a small adobe house at 200 North and 100 West, which he immediately set about expanding into a fine home.
"Essentially this became the headquarters of the church when he was down here," said LDS Elder Reid Robison, a guide at the home.
Robison and others lead visitors into the pioneer prophet's office, a separate small building next door, into a parlor that includes a handsome black Chickering piano Brigham Young owned as well as a portrait-sized photograph of him; through a 19th century kitchen and upstairs through bedrooms used by the servants as well as Brigham himself.
"Brigham Young lived here from 1873 to 1877," Robison said. "That isn't very long, is it? He died in Salt Lake in 1877."
Several old stores and theaters - many of them restored and looking pretty spiffy - line St. George's Main and Tabernacle streets. A few now house coffee, keepsake and consignment shops.
One, Thomas Judd's white-front store, just across from the turn-of-the-century Woodward School and just east of the Orson Pratt home and the restored buildings of Greene Gate Village, is operating much as it always has.
Then as now, children pack the place "so much that they don't have any elbow room," said employee Merlin Nielson. "Kids come in morning and afternoon, except at lunch, when we're trying to build up the clientele" for made-to-order sandwiches, he said.
In the old days, "kids would buy breadsticks and cheese and candy - we still sell a lot of them," he said.
The store retains the accoutrements of a century ago: a soda fountain, shelves stocked with all sorts of candies (though today they're M&M's and pop rocks as well as taffy) and an antique brass and nickel-plated cash register.
"The maker put his boss' face on it as a devil," Nielson said, pointing to the silvery mini-gargoyle on the drawer. "They recalled them, of course - there's only 12 or 13 of them around."
Woodward is scheduled to close at the end of the school year, Nielson said, and that worries him. "The school is what has kept this store alive." With the end of the primary tourism season, business has already begun to drop.
"This is my last day," he announced.
The centerpiece of old St. George is just down the street - the Mormon Tabernacle.
"I'm biased," Alder said, "but I think that's the most beautiful building in the state. It's pure New England style, just a marvelous building, and has a lot to do with this colony."
The red-sandstone tabernacle with its elegant white steeple, he said, "ended up being a work project to give the people some support when their agriculture was not yet working. About 100 men were taught building trades - and also used those trades on the temple."
Brigham Young believed southern Utah needed a civic center, he said, and so supported big building projects for almost 20 years, directing both funds (including tithing money and goods) and manpower to St. George. The major structures - including the LDS Temple, the tabernacle and the courthouse - were built concurrently, even as the settlers were constructing their own homes.
The tabernacle was a focus of this civic-mindedness, noted Elder Dick Werner, who leads tours of the building. He pointed out the cast-iron chandeliers, made in Cedar City; the ponderosa pine - often painted to look like mahogony or even marble - logged in the Pine Valley Mountains; and, along the ceiling, plaster-cast bunches of grapes and ventilation holes decorated as if they were cotton, representing two of the region's primary products.
Brigham Young visited the building as it was being constructed and insisted that the sight-lines from the balcony be improved. Workers subsequently lowered the entire balcony, Elder Werner said. When it was discovered that not enough money had been raised to pay for the 2,200 glass window panes that had been shipped around Cape Horn to San Diego, a settler willingly surrendered the exact amount needed to pay the bill.
The modern world has made inroads into St. George, and some older buildings have fallen to the wrecker's ball, Alder acknowledged. But, he said, a pro-active city government and redevelopment agency, as well as interested citizens and property owners, have kept the pioneer heritage alive.
On the verge of a new millenium, St. George remains a city where anyone can step back into the 19th century.