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.

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In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously claimed the year 1890, three years prior, marked the closing of the American Frontier. It seemed in the 1890s that America’s expansionist spirit was shifting from the continental Wild West to locations abroad such as Cuba and the Philippines, pivoting away from consolidating a land empire and toward questing for a sea empire. Pioneers in Fruita, Utah, however, were still preoccupied in the 1890s with frontier processes. Although they had secured their isolated, red rock land, even in 1890 their community lacked important infrastructure such as education, a postal service, and a building for worship. As they settled in and secured the land, the pioneers were able to gather sufficient time and organization to put together more of a society, beginning with an education system. Nettie Behunin, a young girl 12 years of age, became one of the first teachers.  Nettie might not have been a truly qualified teacher by twenty-first-century standards—or perhaps even by her own—but her endeavors marked the beginning of the first community project in the area: the schoolhouse. In a collection of childhood memories of Fruita, Clay M. Robinson reflects on his experience as a young boy in the newly built Fruita schoolhouse as his mother was the teacher at the school during his childhood. He writes, “Most vivid of all in those memories, are Mama and the little one-room sawed-log Fruita school where she taught all eight grades in the years 1925–1927.” He also mentioned that the schoolhouse was used for Sunday church services and Sunday School—most of Fruita were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons—because there was no dedicated chapel in Fruita. Since residents could rearrange the in the schoolhouse, the small building served as a community center that could host different events like dances, box socials, knitting group meetings, and gatherings for men and young boys who enjoyed baseball. The Fruita schoolhouse evidently served as a center of the community, where the small number of settlers could gather to enjoy each other’s company. The Fruita schoolhouse still stands today. Tourists can easily see it as they drive through the park since it is located just to the side of the highway. At times the Park Service offers tours in the old schoolhouse that allow small children to briefly roleplay pioneer school life. This schoolhouse represents the first community building of the Fruita settlement, as well as a reminder of what life was like for the small community of Latter-day Saint settlers.

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John D. Lee, a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, founded Lee’s Ferry in the early 1870s to function as a link between the Latter-day Saint heartland in Utah and new settlements in Arizona. A committed polygamist, Lee built several houses for his multiple families in the following years, naming this group of buildings Lonely Dell Ranch. After the authorities arrested Lee for his role in the Mountain Meadows Massacre of 1857, Church leaders gave the title for the Ferry and Ranch to Warren Johnson and his family in 1879. The Johnson family was still living on the post when Glen and Bessie Hyde arrived on November 5, 1928, though the Ferry had permanently closed that summer. The Hydes had started their journey from Greenriver, Utah, on October 20, well provisioned with food and other supplies. They came equipped with all the necessary tools to document their trek, including a small Kodak camera and a notebook which Bessie used to record daily events. Yet curiously they did not take any life preservers or personal floatation devices with them. The Hydes’ trip to Lee’s Ferry was relatively uneventful, aside from Bessie falling out of the scow on October 27 in Cataract Canyon. Overall, both were in good spirits. The inhabitants of Lee’s Ferry were aware of the hazards of the Colorado River. Glen and Bessie were just one in a series of river expeditions that came through Lee’s Ferry. Other private excursions, Latter-day Saint expeditions, and US Government Survey teams had all passed by the post through the years. Most of these groups had foundered in the rough waters south of the station, just before the entrance to the Grand Canyon. Also, three of the inhabitants had drowned when they tried to recover the outpost’s ferryboat after a summer flood washed it away in June.  With these past events in mind, the Johnson family and the outpost’s government agent, Owen Clark, attempted to convince Glen and Bessie to abandon their trek. They warned them their scow wasn’t suited to the rapids downriver. If they continued, the size of their boat and their lack of life preservers could result in disaster. However, the Hydes did not take the resident's concerns seriously, convinced they were already through the worst the Colorado River had to offer. After exploring the surrounding area for a few days, the Hydes left the station on November 8. They were bound for Grand Canyon Village. In an ironic twist, the last glimpse of the couple caught the station’s residents caught was of Glen nearly falling off the scow. In the years following the Hydes’ disappearance, Lee’s Ferry became a backwater. The completion of the Navajo Bridge several miles downstream in 1929 rendered the ferry obsolete. The post became a ghost town by the early 1940s. Today, it’s a historic site maintained by the National Park Service.

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While herding cattle during the summer of 1855, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who had been called to settle southern Utah discovered the location of beautiful Pine Valley in southwestern Utah. The following year, St. George residents went to Pine Valley to harvest timber and establish several sawmills. As more people settled in Pine Valley, they constructed a chapel. They called upon Ebenezer Bryce, a shipbuilder from Scotland and the namesake for Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, to design and build the structure. There is some discrepancy regarding the methods used to design the chapel. Some sources claim that because he was a shipbuilder, the roof of the building is constructed to model an upside-down ship, while other sources state that Bryce used materials appropriately common for buildings, not ships. While the roof may look similar to a ship, the description provided by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gives doubt to that claim: the building is made of pine wood, from “the finest trees in the valley, the same stand as those from which the pipe organ in the Salt Lake Tabernacle was constructed.” The foundation is made of local stone, mainly granite and red limestone. The building has three floors: a basement in which auxiliary meetings were held, a ground floor used for community purposes and as a schoolhouse, and an upper floor which contains the building’s chapel, used as the main space of worship. Following the chapel’s original completion, Latter-day Saints in Pine Valley have since added an attic containing pictures of the original settlers and other historical artifacts. Another small building, the Tithing Office, was constructed in the corner of the lot. In 1971, the two buildings, the chapel and Tithing Office, were added to the National Register of Historic Places. Both are still in use today by Pine Valley locals as a church building and community gathering place, making it the longest-operating chapel in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

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In the spring of 1865, Mormon settlers met with Utes of Sanpete Valley, hoping to find a resolution to years of sporadic disagreements and occasional violence between the groups. Instead of alleviating tensions, however, even greater violence erupted with the onset of the Black Hawk War. Brigham Young previously encouraged the Saints to treat Indians well, saying, “We are settled upon their lands, which materially interrupts their success in hunting, fishing, etc… For these reasons, it behooves us to exercise toward them all possible kindness, liberty, patience, and forbearance.” While his policy of kindness toward Native Nations continued, Young simultaneously recognized Mormon settlers were vulnerable to attack after dispossessing tribes of some of their settlement sites and using up the region’s finite resources.

The area around Cove Creek was a particularly dangerous resting place for travelers as 30 miles of uninhabited desert lay in both directions. On April 12, 1867, Circleville resident Ira Hinckley received a letter from Brigham Young extending a calling for him to construct a fort near Cove Creek. Its purpose was to “afford protection from the Indians to the Telegraph & Mail Stations and to travelers who are almost constantly on the road. Also to furnish feed and protection from and weather to this latter class.” Hinckley immediately told the messenger to tell Brigham Young he would accept the calling.

A few days later, Hinckley traveled to Cove Creek with his brother Arza and forty other men, and within seven months they finished building Cove Fort. While most pioneer-era forts were wooden, Cove Fort was instead constructed out of volcanic rock, contributing to its structural longevity.

Although relatively small, measuring 100 feet by 100 feet, Hinckley and his men built an impressive fortress. The walls were 18 feet high, 4 feet thick at the base, and 2 feet at the top. Gun ports lined the walls. The fort had rooms for the Hinckley family, visitors, a kitchen and dining area, and a room for a telegraph station, which was installed in February 1867. There was also a ranch on site to provide food and a blacksmith shop to service the horses and wagons of travelers.

While the fort was initially designed for protection, it was never attacked, and the inhabitants maintained good relations with the local tribes. It did, however, serve as a refuge for all those that visited. Families, telegraph operators, mail carriers, trail workers, and even occasional Utes called upon the Fort for a place to sit or stay the night. Hinckley’s son Ira Parnell Hinckley said, “Within its then impregnable walls were safely sheltered thousands, both good and bad, the venturesome and the timid, the desperado and the saint, as they moved westward in quest of gold, or eastward in disappointment, or back and forth in their routine duty. Without it, what might have been, no one knows.”

The fort was used as a waystation from 1867 to 1882, but as the railroad became increasingly popular, fewer travelers visited the fort. The Hinckley family occupied Cove Fort until 1890, and then in 1919 the Church signed it over to William Henry Kesler. In 1989, descendants of Ira and Arza Hinckley purchased the land back from the Kesler family and subsequently donated it to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Church restored Cove Fort to its original condition and Gordon B. Hinckley, then a member of the Church’s First Presidency and a descendant of Ira Hinckley, dedicated it as a historic monument on May 21, 1994.

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When the Mormon pioneers migrated to the Great Basin to construct new settlements in July 1847, they initially settled in the Salt Lake Valley. As the population grew, the need for new settlements beyond the valley arose. This led to the establishment of Lake City, now known as American Fork. Settlers faced a reality of few supplies, harsh weather, and uncertainty amid an exposed position in Ute territory.  General Daniel H. Wells and the Deseret Militia took the offensive about the Timpanogos Utes on March 5, 1849, killing several dozen Utes in the Battle Creek Massacre near present-day Pleasant Grove. Afterward, Wells ordered the American Fork villagers to construct a twelve-foot-tall wall surrounding the town for protection. He and other leaders feared reprisal for their hasty and violent actions against their native neighbors. Leaders like Wells were far more concerned with the need for a wall than were American Fork settlers, evidenced by the reality that they never truly finished building the wall according to its planned specifications. To divide the labor, each family was required to build the portion of the wall connected to their plot of land. This resulted in the construction taking a longer than planned, and each section differed in dimension and construction. The city code references a tax levied on any citizen that did not nor could not complete their portion of the wall, but no record has been found documenting this bylaw’s implementation. Eventually, in 1855, a significant enough portion of the wall was completed that it could be described as encompassing the town; however, it never reached the height of twelve feet as originally ordered. At that time 85 Latter-day Saint families lived within the fort walls. The Utes exercised tremendous restraint towards their new neighbors and never attacked the settlement before, during, nor after the wall’s construction. Whether the wall served as a reasonable deterrent to such threats or was an unnecessary product of exaggerated concerns cannot be confirmed. Today all physical remnants of the wall have been lost to time with the exception of a number of stones found in William S. Robinson park in downtown American Fork. A small plaque affixed to the base of a statue in the same park offers information about the wall.

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Fort Utah was first established a mile and a half east of Utah Lake by a company of one hundred and fifty Latter-day Saints. Led by John Higbee, the Saints arrived on April 1, 1849. They chose the location with the intention to farm on the fertile river soil, but when President Brigham Young visited the fort, he suggested they move to higher ground. The secondary location became the nucleus for the city of Provo. The Saints settled next to the indigenous village of the Timpanogos Utes. Initially, the Utes treated their new neighbors with kindness and generosity, and they fished and gambled together. That winter, however, misunderstandings broke out between the Utes and Saints. It began in August with a dispute between Richard Ivie and a native known to the Latter-day Saints as Old Bishop, whom Ivie accused of stealing his shirt. When Bishop refused to give the shirt up, Ivie and his friends killed him and threw his body into the Provo River. Furious, the Timpanogos demanded the settlers hand over the murderers. When their requests were denied, they insisted the Saints provide compensation for Bishop’s death, which the Saints also refused. Considering how generous the tribe had been in sharing their prized fishing and hunting resources during the summer, the Utes felt justified in collecting rent through involuntary cattle and corn payments from their neighbors during the fall and winter. As the amicable relations began to sour, Higbee asked Brigham Young permission to declare war against the Timpanogos, whom he misrepresented to Young as hostile. Young granted the request. Parley P. Pratt and Willard Richards agreed with him, not wanting to find themselves cut off from their southern colonies. They sent the Nauvoo Legion to assist the local Latter-day Saints in attacking the Timpanogos. After just one day, the soldiers cornered their enemies into an abandoned cabin. The next day they placed shields on sledges and attacked. Desperate, the natives fled during the second night only to be hunted down. When the fighting ended, there were more than one hundred Timpanogos casualties and one dead Latter-day Saint. This dark episode serves as a reminder that while Latter-day Saints generally had positive interactions with the Native Americans, there were certainly episodes of unwarranted and reprehensible violence.

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Dixie State University’s history is intertwined with the history of the Latter-day Saints in the St. George area. In October of 1861, some 300 families were called to the cotton mission and were to join the 28 families that had already established the settlement of St. George to grow cotton. This is when St. George started its growth and the need arose for schools in the area. One of the first orders of business at a camp meeting among the recently arrived settlers in December of 1861 was to establish a school for the children. The Saints had run into several difficulties, including a flood, but were able to maintain small schools until 1864, when the first large schoolhouse was built for the First Ward. Even with these newly erected schools, some children were taught privately in homes and still others took classes in the basement of the Tabernacle and in the social hall for many years.

Dixie State University can trace its beginnings to the 1880s. It was first opened as St. George Stake Academy, which housed elementary and immediate grade levels. Classes were held in the basement of the St. George Tabernacle. The academy was opened along with about 20 other academies by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints which experienced varying rates of success. The St. George Stake Academy opened its doors in 1888 and closed its doors just a few years later as public schools grew in popularity and didn’t require tuition.

Two decades later, in 1911, the St. George Stake Academy reopened as a secondary school, the first of its kind in the St. George area. Enrollment grew steadily for the first years and the school added different classes. In 1916, the academy was approved to add a teacher preparation program and the school had its name officially changed to Dixie Normal College in 1918. The name was changed again in 1922, this time to Dixie Junior College, when the church decided to drop the high school and keep only the college courses. The phasing out of the high school progressed slowly, but the school donned Junior College status.

Around 10 years later, the Church decided to relinquish control of their Junior Colleges as the Great Depression took its toll. Dixie Junior College was in crisis as the legislature did not assure that it would get funds. Nevertheless, the community of St. George helped keep Dixie from going under until it was able to get funding again. Dixie has since grown and gained the title of State College in 2000, followed by that of Dixie State University in 2013.

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The Willard area was first surveyed by Henry G. Sherwood in 1851. As a member of the 5th Company of Ten in the Brigham Young pioneer company, Henry Sherwood was one of the first Mormon settlers in Utah. The town was originally named Willow Creek due to the numerous flowers located around the creek. In 1857, it was renamed “Willard,” in honor of the Mormon apostle, Willard Richards.  Willard was originally a fort used to fend off the local Native American groups like the dominant Shoshone. In fact, Willard might have had the biggest fort in any Utah town during this time period. The fort was later proved unnecessary and was torn down. The leftover stones of the fort were spread throughout the town in building homes.  

The construction of these rock homes are credited to Shadrach Jones. Jones was a stonemason from Wales who converted to Mormonism in 1849. Later he moved to Willard, Utah. He participated in the building of the Logan temple and was later sent on a mission back to Wales where he died. His home still stands today, along with several other homes constructed by Jones. 

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