When we start looking into the lives of our ancestors, history comes alive. The more we know about them historically, especially if we find a picture to go along with the information, the dearer they seem to us and they become like long-lost friends.
A newspaper article from the Davis County Clipper caught the eye of my cousin, Mary Ellen Adams Izatt. She sent me a text wondering if I'd heard the home she and I were born in was being relocated.
I was glad to be informed but wondered, was it really a distinction I wanted to advertise — born in the oldest home in Layton?
Our great-grandfather George Pilling Adams built the home in the late 1870s along with the help of his grandfather Elias Adams and father, George Washington Adams. The cabin was originally over the border in Kaysville but was moved a short distance to Layton at some point.
Elias Adams is the man Adams Canyon was named after. These men were also the builders of the earthen dam on Holmes Creek, the first known dam in the western states built for irrigation, and is still in use today.
In my case, as the story goes, my maternal grandparents needed to be on their own farm to finish up the apple season. My mother and father needed to stay with her ailing grandfather whose wife had died a few months before.
I was born at 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning while my dad had gone off to milk the cows. He came home to find me, their first-born, waiting for his approval.
Mother drove me by the home many times, but we never went in because I didn’t relish talking to her ancient relatives who owned it. How foolish we sometimes are in our youth.
Now, after all these years and becoming the ancient relative myself, I am grateful to the Kaysville City Council members who voted to place the original part of the cabin in Heritage Park on 150 N. Fairfield Road.
The more recent additions will be used for patching and restoring it to the original configuration. The granary was torn down to build a heritage structure near Logan.
The authentic log cabin will be used to help young children discover what their ancestors' lives were like and learn to appreciate their heritage. Personally, it will be very meaningful for George Pilling Adams and his wife Eliza’s now very large posterity to view and visit.
The relocation of my great-grandparent's home is a typical example of when history meets progress. The land it sat on will provide housing for 25 families.
It will be an expensive project to move the cabin without further damage or collapse. Because the cabin cannot have water on it, Heritage Park will need to reconfigure their sprinkling system to accommodate it.
In the eastern part of the United States, maintaining tradition has been a way of life for much longer, partly out of necessity, as land became more scarce. For example, our son Jim was one step away from going to Cornell University in New York before deciding to attend Brigham Young University in Provo. We were invited to visit the Cornell campus with our son and were given the “cook's tour” by the recruiting football coach at the time.
My husband, Grit, remembers noticing work being done on one of the buildings in the quad. He was told the reconstructing of the building was many times more costly than tearing it down to build something new and land wasn’t strategically available. It was important for everyone, especially to the donors, that the brick be preserved so dad could say, “See son, that was the building I used to study in.”
Here in Provo, we are seeing this happen with the converted Provo Tabernacle returning as a strategically planned and beautiful temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, all built on the existing footprint. And the many times reinvented and now renovated Brigham Young Academy is still gracing University Avenue as the public library.
Existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard believed, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
An awareness of the hard work our ancestors put into living can help us try harder to be people they would be proud of knowing. We have the capacity to build on their dreams.
Email: sasy273@gmail.com