Tarlton Lewis was the fourth of twelve children born to Neriah Lewis and Mary Moss on May 18, 1805 in South Carolina. Tarlton married Malinda Gimlin on March 27, 1828; over the course of their marriage, they had eight children together. While living in Illinois, Tarlton and Malinda joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (sometimes nicknamed “Mormons”) and were baptized July 25, 1836 by Tarlton’s older brother Benjamin Lewis. The brothers joined moved to Missouri to live among other Latter-day Saints, and on October 30, 1838, while living near Hawn's Mill, they were attacked by a violent mob agitating for the expulsion of all Mormons from Missouri. The mob murdered Tarlton’s older brother Benjamin, and Tarlton suffered an injury to his shoulder; their younger brother David, however, was uninjured. After surviving this tragedy, the brothers moved with other Latter-day Saints to Nauvoo, Illinois. There, Joseph Smith, president of the Church, and his brother Hyrum set apart Tarlton as bishop of the Nauvoo Fourth Ward. Also in Tarlton and Malinda received the endowment and sealing ordinances—the Church’s highest sacraments—before joining the mass exodus of Latter-day Saints from Nauvoo, leaving behind the temple they had spent years helping build. The Lewis family left as part of the second wave of Saints, fleeing westward across the Mississippi Rive, but Tarlton himself stayed behind to continue his service as a bishop and help the Church members under his care prepare to go West. After many weeks crossing Iowa, they settled temporarily at Council Bluffs in Pottawattamie, Iowa, 1846. After the Latter-day Saints regrouped in Iowa, Tarlton joined the first company of pioneers departing in 1847. As part of the Vanguard Company led by Brigham Young—Smith’s successor to the Church presidency—Tarlton was captain of 50 wagons and entered the Salt Lake Valley on July 21, 1847. There, Young called Tarlton as the first bishop in Salt Lake Valley, and Tarlton remained in the valley to build cabins and plant crops for the Saints who would arrive next. After an almost two-year separation, Tarlton reunited with his family when they arrived at the Salt Lake Valley on September 21, 1848. Two years later, in December 1850, the Church called Tarlton to travel with apostle George A. Smith and one hundred others to explore southern Utah. Tarlton again captained 50 wagons, and on January 17, 1851, the explorers officially organized Iron County. In their first election, the young county elected Tarlton Lewis as a magistrate. George Smith organized the settlement into four wards, and Tarlton became bishop of the Second Ward in Parowan. The Lewis family helped build roads, log cabins, and furniture. After Tarlton’s brother David died in September 1855, Tarlton married two of his brother’s widows as polygamous wives. Tarlton explored the mountains of Beaver Valley for lead ore, finding a mine and becoming a director of it. They also helped found Minersville, and Tarlton was active in the community and donated a portion of his lot to finance a Relief Society building. Life in Minersville was a struggle as farming was difficult with little water from Beaver Creek. The family managed a humble living for fourteen years until the Church assigned Tarlton to establish a United Order in Joseph, Sevier County. The most pressing issue that settlers faced was the difficulty of irrigating water for farmlands; their hard work was paid off with “diverse crops as apples, apricots, peaches, pears, grapes, and black walnuts,” but there was not enough to make Joseph prosper. The Lewises lived there a few years before moving northeast to the larger town of Richfield, and the United Order in Sevier County dissolved in November 1877. Apostle Erastus Snow then set Tarlton apart as bishop of the Richfield Second Ward on July 16, 1877. As an active citizen of Richfield, Tarlton and a hundred other citizens petitioned the Utah Territorial House to incorporate the town, and the provision passed. Tarlton’s time as a bishop in Richfield was brief, as health complications warranted his resignation a year later, but he recovered his strength enough to serve as a stake patriarch, as listed in the Sevier Stake Conference for August 27, 1887. Tarlton Lewis died on November 22, 1890 at Teasdale, Utah Territory, at the home of his son, Beason Lewis. He was buried in the Teasdale Cemetery. In 1987, Mount View Camp, the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, and the Lewis Family sponsored and built a marker and plaque at his burial site in 1987.

For more (including 3 images) view the original article

In the mid-twentieth century, Brigham Young University’s student population continued to grow as more students from further afield sought enrollment at the flagship university of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In its ongoing efforts to grow the campus, BYU purchased the building which eventually became Knight Mangum Hall in 1943 from the National Youth Administration (NYA), a New Deal program designed to maintain education and employment among young adult men and women. NYA built the edifice in the mid-1930s as a shop building to teach auto maintenance skills, and BYU initially planned to use the facility for similar purposes in its Industrial Arts program. However, university administrators changed their plans and decided to use the building as a women’s dormitory, renaming it Campus Dormitory. The decision to use the building as housing was so abrupt that few renovations were made to make it suitable for living. The university filled the hall with bunk-beds, and coeds hung sheets from the ceiling to cordon off sleeping spaces and create a semblance of privacy. BYU began renovating the hall to make it more suitable as a dormitory in 1946 and added a kitchen, dining room, and laundry over eight years. When renovations were completed in 1954, administrators renamed the building Knight Mangum Hall, after Jennie Pearl Knight Mangum and Lucy Jane “Jennie” Brimhall Knight, respectively a daughter and daughter-in-law of Jesse Knight and Amanda McEwan Knight, a philanthropist couple who supported BYU in the early-twentieth century. Jennie Pearl was active in her religious and civic communities and established a scholarship at Provo High School. Lucy Jennie was the daughter of George H. Brimhall, a former BYU president, and in 1898 she had been one of the first two single women to serve as missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, serving alongside Inez Knight, another daughter of the Knights. Both were considered lifelong friends of the university. By the 1950s, Knight Mangum Hall housed between 280 340 coeds at a time. In the early 1960s, however, huge dormitory complexes like Heritage Halls and Helaman Halls took over the heavy lifting in housing BYU students, perhaps diminishing Knight Mangum’s necessity. In June 1963, the Church took over Knight Mangum to use as a headquarters for its Language Training Mission, which taught missionaries foreign languages for ecclesiastical missions abroad. In 1976, the Language Training Mission moved into a new headquarters, leaving Knight Mangum Hall back in BYU’s hands. Rather than restore it to housing use, BYU maintained it as an office space for faculty. Since it was no longer used as a dormitory, at some point the campus began calling it the Knight Mangum Building. Eventually, every department of the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences spent some time in Knight Mangum, as did the Joseph Fielding Smith Institute for Latter-day Saint History. With the building aging and falling behind modern standards for safety, university administration decided to demolish the building. BYU tore down Knight Mangum in the summer of 2008.

For more (including 11 images) view the original article

In 1938, after Brigham Young University’s new Allen Hall dormitory for men successfully addressed student housing needs, BYU administrators resolved to build a companion hall for women. BYU rehired Allen Hall’s architect, Joseph Nelson, to design the second building. Nelson innovated upon the Jacobethan Revival style he used for Allen Hall by seamlessly blending it with the English Tudor Revival, such as in the steep main gable, making the building simultaneously regal yet domestic. BYU Administrators named the building after Amanda Knight. Known as a philanthropist to BYU alongside her husband Jesse Knight, Amanda Knight also exemplified positive attributes worth emulating. Knight was thrifty, unselfish, devout, and feisty. A nephew’s journal noted her home industry, as she made and sold butter and cheese while raising her children. A friend, Mary Hammond, called Knight “absolute[ly] devot[ed]… to all that is better and purer and truer.” Construction crews finished building Amanda Knight Hall in 1939, and nine women lived there as early as April 1940. Only two were from Utah, while one was from Canada, two from Hawai’i, and three from Mexico. Over the years, many students, from around the world, followed these initial nine. Amanda Knight Hall was BYU’s first all-women dormitory, and before World War II it was BYU’s only institutional housing for female students. In 1954, the hall housed 130 students. Amanda Knight Hall was designed for student use. For “those interested in the books,” as a 1954 dedicatory program described, the hall had a study room with nighttime quiet hours. There was also had a sewing room so students could practice applied home economics. Student government was another feature, and residents elected a hall president and council to serve, represent, and manage the hall. Students lived in Amanda Knight Hall until 1964, when BYU stopped using the building as a dormitory. The university occasionally used Knight Hall as extra office space, and the Church’s Language Training Mission also used the building as overflow housing for missionaries until 1976, when the Church completed new housing and headquarters for the Training Mission. Thereafter, BYU also used the building for language training, and its English Language Center held classes in Amanda Knight Hall through the 1980s. The offices of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies even had a stint in Amanda Knight Hall into the 1990s. By the twenty-first century, however, BYU began seriously considering demolishing the building, deeming it unsafe. Amanda Knight Hall lacked modern earthquake-proofing, and its lead paint was a health hazard. However, Preservation Utah—a historic preservation nonprofit—urged BYU to instead conserve the building, especially after BYU demolished Allen Hall in 2018, making Amanda Knight Hall the last “visual tie between the original (lower) campus and the current (upper) campus of Brigham Young University,” in Korral Broschinsky’s words. Administrators had reservations about Amanda Knight Hall’s usefulness, but under university president Kevin Worthen’s leadership, BYU forestalled demolition and placed the building on sale. In 2019, Mountain Classic Real Estate—a firm with historic renovation experience—purchased Amanda Knight Hall and announced it would restore the building for its original purpose: student housing. During the process, the firm’s managers, brothers Chris and Davis Phipps, serendipitously learned they had a personal connection to the building: their grandmother, Patricia Leone Taylor, lived in Amanda Knight Hall in its early years. After two years of renovation, Mountain Classic held an open house for the restored building in August 2021, and it opened its doors for up to fifty-seven women as BYU contracted women’s housing. More than eighty years old, Amanda Knight Hall could once again be home to pioneering women scholars in honor of its pioneer woman namesake.

For more (including 13 images) view the original article

To accommodate the growing student body, in 1937 BYU began constructing its first building meant specifically for use as a student dormitory. Utahn architect Joseph Nelson designed the building in the style of Jacobethan Revival, including gabled parapets and striated brick, and BYU students donated time and labor as construction workers to help building contractor Louis De Young turn Nelson’s vision into reality. Completed in 1938, the dormitory accommodated up to seventy residents, which BYU set aside for specifically male students. BYU named the building Allen Hall, after Inez Knight Allen and R. Eugene “Gene” Allen. The Allens were the daughter and son-in-law of Jesse Knight, a Latter-day Saint philanthropist who had financially supported BYU (a loan from the Knight Endowment Fund financed Allen Hall itself), and they were accomplished Latter-day Saints in their own right. Inez had been a student at BYU’s predecessor, Brigham Young Academy’s Normal Training School, from 1892 to 1896, where she studied pedagogy and philosophy. Two years after that, Knight became one of the first single sister missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, serving for twenty-six months in Great Britain from 1898 to 1900. Gene was also a Brigham Young Academy alumnus; he also studied at Rochester Business College. As an officer of Knight Trust and Savings Bank, Gene managed the Knight Fund. Gene and Inez married in 1902, and they became philanthropists in their communities, following Jesse Knight’s example. BYU considered Allen Hall such a success as a housing unit that it immediately drew up plans to build another dormitory building, this time for women, which it named Amanda Knight Hall and completed in 1939. BYU Students lived in Allen Hall for the next twenty-four years. Though originally intended only for men, when an influx of female students strained available housing during the mid-1940s, BYU temporarily used Allen Hall to house both men and women, renting first-floor rooms to men and second- and third-floor rooms to women. Eventually, the first floor was converted to women’s housing as well, and men did not fully occupy Allen Hall again until 1953.  In the 1950s, BYU built new dorms to house its increasingly numerous students, perhaps making Allen Hall less significant to BYU’s overall housing needs. Students stopped living in Allen Hall in 1962, and the Church’s Language Training Mission took over the building to house missionaries-in-training. In 1980, BYU took over the building again and used it to host its Museum of Peoples and Cultures for over thirty years. After the museum moved to its present location on Canyon Road in 2014, BYU occasionally used Allen Hall to accommodate university employees when construction created a shortage of office space. Four years later, in June 2018, BYU announced plans to demolish Allen Hall on the grounds that its age made it unusable for university purposes. Preservation Utah, a historical preservation nonprofit, objected to the planned demolition, arguing that losing Allen Hall would “erase a key part of the university’s story of historical growth and expansion.” Despite Preservation Utah’s passion, however, its intervention came too late. BYU demolished Allen Hall in August 2018. As of January 2022, BYU maintains the empty lot as a grass field.

For more (including 13 images & 1 video) view the original article

Porter, as he was called, has been credited with killing more outlaws than Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Doc Holliday, and Tom Horn combined - a reputation which earned him the rather menacing nickname, “Destroying Angel.” Having been one of the very first converts to, and members of the burgeoning Mormon Church in New York State in 1830, he became a bodyguard to the church founder and Prophet Joseph Smith. In this role he faced continued anti-Mormon persecution and violence, leading him to hone his skills of marksmanship and fighting. At one point, his family’s home was attacked and burned to the ground, as they watched. Thereafter, he vowed to never be helpless again. While Rockwell was in his service, Joseph Smith promised him that as long as he stayed faithful ito the Church, and did not cut his hair, he too, like the Biblical figure Samson, could not be killed by any man. Smith said that “no bullet or blade can harm thee.” This promise would make Rockwell known as a miraculous modern-day Samson type of figure, and created a great deal of fame, and mythology surrounding him. After Smith’s martyrdom, Porter Rockwell made the trek out west with the rest of the Mormon Church to what would become Utah Territory.

In Utah, Rockwell quickly resumed his duties as a bodyguard to the new head of the Mormon Church, Brigham Young. He became a Deputy US Marshal and local territorial lawman, working all throughout the territories of the American West. He was known as an expert marksman who carried multiple weapons with him - most notably, two large black-powder revolvers which he could shoot simultaneously. He gained enormous notoriety, through his many successes in law enforcement. Despite his numerous violent confrontation, he was never struck by a bullet. This prompted gunslingers to come to Utah to see if they could shoot down the “Destroying Angel,” gain some notoriety of their own, and put to rest the legend of Rockwell’s Samson-like invincibility.

At this featured location, on the Main Street of Lehi, Utah, one such outlaw tried his hand at defeating Rockwell and his myth. Lehi City court documents recorded the events of June 25, 1873 as an "affray," or the “the fighting of two or more persons in a public place, and to the terror of others.” This affray began as a young outlaw named Loren Dibble approached Porter Rockwell in broad daylight, drew two guns, and emptied them at him. According to onlookers, Rockwell simply stood still, staring directly back at Dibble, without even having his composure ruffled. When Dibble had fired all of twelve shots, Rockwell drew his own two revolvers and shot at Dibble’s feet, making the young outlaw "dance" to avoid being hit by each bullet. When Rockwell had emptied both of his own guns, he walked directly up to Dibble, grabbed him by his collar, and shook him like a rag doll. Rockwell yelled into Loren Dibble’s face “If it wasn’t for the fact that I know who your father really was, I’d have killed you!” Rockwell threw him to the ground, and walked away. This comment about Dibble’s father was not understood at the time, by those present, but has more recently come to be understood through genealogy and DNA tracing that Dibble was the son of Joseph Smith, through one of Smith’s polygamous wives. Few other outlaws were given the benefit of having their lives spared by Porter Rockwell. Rockwell was known to kill too soon, sometimes without sufficient justification for taking a life.

For more (including 7 images) view the original article