UT -- Fillmore -- Utah Territorial Statehouse:
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- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- UTS_190711_005.JPG: From Capital to Museum
As the focal point of the community, the Statehouse has served many functions over the years. First as Utah's capital building, then as: dance hall, theater, jail, school and even a hiding place for the Deseret News. It currently serves as a State Museum.
- UTS_190711_021.JPG: Built With Pride
The stoneworkers who constructed the Statehouse initialed the building with pride. Though they expected their initials to be covered by stucco they took the time and effort to leave their marks on the building. A quick search will show many initials.
- UTS_190711_028.JPG: Daughters of Utah Pioneers
No. 7
Erected August 3, 1935
Utah's First Capitol
Creating Fillmore City and Millard County the Territorial Legislature of Utah selected Pahvant Valley, as Capitol site October 29, 1851. This spot was selected by Governor Brigham Young. Construction work began in 1852. Truman O. Angell, architect and Anson Call, supervisor. This south wing was used by the fifth Territorial Legislature October 10, 1855. In 1856 the seat of Government was moved to Salt Lake City. Later used as Court House and County Headquarters. Restored in 1928 and dedicated as State Museum July 24, 1930.
Custodians; Daughters of Utah Pioneers
Millard County Company
- UTS_190711_032.JPG: Utah's First Capital
Why Fillmore?
On September 8, 1851 Governor Brigham Young placed his cane on the North East corner of this block and designated this geographically centered location as Utah's capital. The large open space, water and building materials were favorable for settlement. In a political move the Governor named the town Fillmore and the county Millard after President Millard Fillmore.
- UTS_190711_045.JPG: Vision vs. Reality
- UTS_190711_053.JPG: This proposed Utah Territorial Capitol Building, designed by Truman Angell, was never completed. United States President Millard Fillmore helped secure $20,000 for construction of the first wing, but could help no more after losing the 1852 election. Territorial Governor Brigham Young petitioned for more funds, but was denied because of political power struggles with federal officials. In December of 1855 the Territorial Legislature met in the newly constructed south wing. After a single full legislative assembly and two partial sessions in 1857 and 1858, the Utah Legislature abandoned the building in favor of a more populous Salt Lake City location. In 1930, the Territorial Statehouse became Utah's first state park.
- UTS_190711_082.JPG: Events on President Buchanan's Mind When he Ordered Troops to March on Utah
- UTS_190711_089.JPG: The Deseret News Moves to Fillmore
- UTS_190711_099.JPG: The Utah War Begins
- UTS_190711_106.JPG: Military Guns
- UTS_190711_109.JPG: Flintlock vs. Percussion
- UTS_190711_121.JPG: Fillmore Abandoned as Utah's Capital
Brigham Young moved the capital to Salt Lake City for two reasons
- UTS_190711_129.JPG: State of Deseret or Territory of Utah
- UTS_190711_142.JPG: Why Fillmore?
- UTS_190711_152.JPG: Mormon Migration West
- UTS_190711_172.JPG: Shingles part of the original roof of the Territorial Statehouse.
- UTS_190711_204.JPG: Utah Territory -- A Place of Conflict
- UTS_190711_225.JPG: Cooper
- UTS_190711_229.JPG: Barbed Wire for Fences
Collected through the years by William Ivie. His grandfather was James Russell Ivie, who was killed by Indians on June 10, 1866, while checking on a milk cow and new-born calf.
- UTS_190711_243.JPG: Mary Johnston Huntsman
May 6, 1800 - Aug. 15, 1895
It is said that Mary threw a cup of coffee in Brigham Young's face and said, "This is my answer." When asked if she would consider her husband taking a second wife.
- UTS_190711_259.JPG: Story of Painting
- UTS_190711_285.JPG: It is said this is a communications radio taken from a damaged German Panzer Tank at the Battle of the Bulge.
- UTS_190711_314.JPG: Brigham Young's Vision of the City of God included small material details, like dishes
- UTS_190711_317.JPG: Investing in the City of God
- UTS_190711_333.JPG: Teachers Room
- UTS_190711_337.JPG: In the early 1880s the Statehouse served as a Presbyterian Mission School. Missionaries flocked to Utah after the Civil War. Once the slavery issue was resolved they focused their attention on polygamy. As missionaries, their primary tool in the fight against polygamy was the mission school.
- UTS_190711_344.JPG: Original Wall
- UTS_190711_354.JPG: Language Created Barriers
- UTS_190711_363.JPG: Cultural Clashes
- UTS_190711_371.JPG: Governor's Office
- UTS_190711_379.JPG: Federal Government vs. Utah
- UTS_190711_382.JPG: The Federal Government struggled to keep the South and Utah from leaving the United States as polygamy and slavery became key issues in the national battle over state's rights. Brigham Young's use of authority as Governor of Utah and Prophet of the Mormon Church at the same time added concern about the Territory's status.
- UTS_190711_399.JPG: Battle to Control Territorial Funds
- UTS_190711_406.JPG: The Humorous Side of Conflict
- UTS_190711_410.JPG: Conflict for Power
- UTS_190711_427.JPG: This baby bird was outside of the courthouse. They had put a cup of water in front of it but it was clearly waiting for its mother.
- UTS_190711_464.JPG: The Ute Domain
First described by Spanish explorers as the YUTA Indians (pronounced Ute-ah), the ancestors of the Ute people are thought to have migrated from the deserts of southeastern California over 700 years ago. The Utes moved into predominately two areas and became somewhat distinct because of that geographical division. The eastern Utes (Colorado) migrated to the east of the Colorado River and settled on the Colorado Plateau. On the other hand, the western Utes (Utah) established their camps in the valleys between the rugged mountain ranges on the eastern margin of the Great Basin.
In south-central Utah, one of the earliest camps has been dated to around A.D. 1380 and consists of stone circle 10 to 15 feet in diameter that would have anchored skin or brush shelters called wickiups. Unlike the Fremont and Anasazi Indians who preceded them, the ancestors of the Utes were not farmers but rather relied on hunting and gathering for their sustenance.
When encountered by the Dominguez-Escalante Expedition in 1776, the Utes were found living in "houses of grass and earth" near the shores of Utah Lake. Father Escalante, the chronicler of the expedition, describes the Indians as having good features with most of the men wearing long beards. The Indians called themselves the Timpanogotzis or the "fish eaters" but their diet also consisted of plants, herbs and wild game. Escalante wrote that the Utes were a docile and peace-loving people.
Over a half century later, an adventurer by the name of Dan Storm spent the winter of 1839-40 with the Utes in an encampment near Utah Lake. The village consisted of two dozen buffalo-hide tipis occupied by 100 men, women and children. The people kept about 300 horses which they had obtained from the Spanish beginning in the early 1800s. The Utah Lake Utes, according to Storm, were one of the strongest of the six independant bands that made up the western Utes. Storm found the Utes considerably more aggressive than had the Spanish, and he writes of participating in a raid on the Gosiute Indians of western Utah. Many prisoners were taken in this raid with women and children ultimately sold as slaves to the Navajos and the Mexicans.
With the arrival of the Mormon pioneers in 1847, relations between the Utes and the newcomers were at first peaceable and friendly. George A. Smith, of the Utah Indian Service wrote that, "They are virtuous, honest and free from licentiousness; they are humane and kind to one another." Smith described the Utes as typical mountain Indians. They were wanderers and had seasonal camps all over central and southern Utah including those near Spanish Fork, Payson, Nephi, Manti, Fish Lake, Meadow, Kanosh and Parowan. On occasion, the Utes ventured as far as the plains of Colorado in search of buffalo meat and hides. Marriage was polygamous, and a man might take as many wives as he could afford. Women were expected to raise their children, butcher and process wild game and plants, provide meals, and to move camp. The role of the men, in contrast, was that of hunter and warrior.
The greatest warrior and chief during the early pioneer period was a tall, handsome man named Walkara, the "Hawk of the Mountains." Born somewhere between 1808 and 1815 on the Spanish Fork River near what is now Provo, Walkara rose to power when he assumed the role of war chief in his father's band, the Tim-pan-ah-gos Utes. The Hawk quickly increased his prominance as a leader by his skill and prowess as a "procurer" of horse flesh. Raiding as far away as the coast of California near San Luis Obispo, Walkara terrorized western ranches for over a quarter of a century until his death in 1855. According to fragmentary accounts, his raids were conducted between 1825 and 1854. The largest number of horses stolen on any one raid was 3,000 with several raids netting at least 1,000 head. Horses could be sold at a mountain rendezvous for as much as $50 per animal or traded to other tribes for Indian children who were then exchanged for ammunition, blankets, pots and pans, and trinkets at the Santa Fe slave market.
Inevitably, the differences in culture, customs and economics brought the Utes and Mormon Pioneers into armed conflict. The Utes found their hunting and camping grounds increasing crowded with settlements while the Christian values of the pioneers prevented them from ignoring the issue of slavery. In 1853-54 and again in 1865-67, smoldering hostilities were fanned into open warfare. In 1872, with their ranks desimated by both war and disease, 1,500 Utes were removed by treaty to the Uintah Indian Reservation in northeastern Utah. Today, headquarters for the Ute Tribe of Utah or the "Northern Ute Tribe" as it is now called is located near the center of the reservation at Ft. Duchesne.
- UTS_190711_465.JPG: Death of a Chief
The winter of 1854-55 found Walkara and his band camped along Meadow Creek just four miles south of this spot. In January, the chief began to feel ill, and by the later part of the month, he was suffering from pneumonia. On January 29, the Hawk of the Mountains died. Carrying out the wishes of his dead brother, Arapene slashed the throats of Walkara's two wives so that their spirits might walk with that of the Hawk. On the day of their deaths, the bodies of the chief and his wives were securely strapped to horses and carried to the mountain above what is now the town of Meadow. There, in the talus slopes which overlook the western deserts of the Great Basin, Walkara was interred in a tomb of stone.
The Chief was placed on his favorite blue blanket, and the still-bloody bodies of his two wives were laid on either side. A young Paiute girl was also killed and put into the grave while another Paiute child, a small boy, was staked alive in the pit to ward off wild animals. Before the tomb was sealed, an ornate saddle with brocaded cherubim, a Book of Mormon, rifles, bows, steel-tipped arrows, Spanish ornaments and food were placed with the dead chief. To seal the ten foot diameter tomb, logs were placed across the top of the grave. Rocks were then stacked on top of the logs to conceal the posts and the burial vault. With the sealing of the tomb, 14 of Walkara's favorite horses were led to the grave and killed. A Forest Service survey of the burial site in 1983 revealed the scattered skeletal remains of these horses 128 years after they had been killed. This survey also confirmed what had been unofficially suspected for years: Walkara's grave had been robbed by relic hunters sometime around 1909.
Two hundred yards north of Walkara's gravesite are a number of Ute burials from the same general time period; that is, the 1850's and 1860's. These burials are not as grand as Walkara's. Generally, they consist of a small vault in the talus just big enough for a single individual accompanied by a small number of grave goods. Of the 20 burials, 13 have been disturbed by grave robbers. Human bones have been scattered indisciminately across talus slopes while graves have been looted of the goods that accompanied the dead at burial.
- UTS_190711_480.JPG: Walkara's War
When the Utes welcomed Brigham Young and his party of 143 pioneers in 1847, they offered the Mormons the use of the land but had not given them their streams with their fish and beaver. They had also not reckoned with the fact that the white men would fence the land into little squares and tell them to keep out. And, they had not known that the ever increasing streams of newcomers would build forts as strongholds against them.
In 1853, relations between the pioneers and the Utes were strained to the limits. In July of that year, three Indians from Chief Walkara's camp on Hobble Creek appeared at the cabin door of James Ivie near Springville to trade fish for flour. An argument followed, and Ivie killed one of the Indians in a hand-to-hand fight with a broken rifle stock. Walkara, upset with this incident and the Mormons' recent policy opposing his lucrative slave trade, grasped the situation and unleashed a hit-and-run reign of terror that plagued the settlements in Utah, Juab, Sanpete, Millard and Iron Counties for the better part of the next year.
Ironically, the largest "engagement" of the war was not fought by Walkara but by Pahvant Utes camped at Meadow Creek south of Fillmore. In the fall of 1853, a wagon train of Missourians enroute to California camped near the Indian village. When a group of Pahvants approached with bundles of buckskin and offered to trade for tobacco and other goods, the settlers surrounded the party and attempted to disarm them. A fight ensued and the father of the Pahvant War Chief Mosnoquap was mortally wounded by a gun shot to his side. In retaliation, Mosnoquap ambushed a United States Army survey team in bivouac near Sevier Lake some 35 miles northwest of Fillmore. Captain John W. Gunnison and 8 of his men died as the Pahvants attacked with a barrage of arrows and bullets as the morning sun rose on the army camp.
When word of the battle reached Fillmore several days later, White officials traveled to the site with Kanosh, Chief of the Pahvant Utes. Kanosh, long considered a friend of the pioneers, was sickened at the sight of the mutilated remains of Gunnison's men. After ordering the appearance of Mosnoquap, Kanosh admonished the war chief for his actions. Although reproved for his role in the battle, the war chief was never surrendered by Kanosh to either Brigham Young or a U.S. Army detachment which had been sent to the Utah Territory to keep the peace.
With the approach of the spring of 1854, the Utes had grown tired of the fighting, and Walkara found his ranks of supporters growing ever thinner. Governor Young, recognizing the opportunity of the moment, arrived at Walkara's camp on Chicken Creek near Nephi on May 22 with a contingent of 50 mounted militiamen and 100 wagons filled with gentlemen, their wives and families. The Chief was presented with 16 head of oxen, blankets, clothing, tobacco, whiskey, trinkets, arms and ammunition. During negotiations that lasted into the night, the Utes agreed to cease all hostilities against the pioneers and to give up their slave trade. The Mormons, in return would establish an Indian farm near Utah Lake. The calmut of peace was smoked on the 23rd of May, and thus ended 10 months of violence that had claimed 20 pioneer lives, an undetermined number of Ute deaths, and about $200,000 worth of property damage.
- UTS_190711_501.JPG: 1872 Rules for Teachers
- UTS_190711_507.JPG: Daughters of Utah Pioneers
No. 190
Erected 1953
Little Rock School House
Fillmore was settled in 1851. Before the close of the first year the Pioneers had erected a log school room inside the fort. It had split logs for seats, a dirt roof and floor. In 1854 an adobe church was built which also served as school. In 1867 three small school buildings were erected. This is one of them. It was the first building financed by the taxpayers. Contractors, Dellie Webb & Ova Peterson, Builders: Horace & James Owens, Nat Baldwin, Lewis Tarbuck, John Ashman, James & Ralph Rowley, Hans & Christian Hanson, & John Powell.
Millard County
- UTS_190711_511.JPG: Emphasis on Education
Three different education facilities existed on the [sic] this block at the same time.
- UTS_190711_521.JPG: Punishments
- Wikipedia Description: Utah Territorial Statehouse
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Utah Territorial Statehouse, officially Territorial Statehouse State Park Museum, is a state park in Fillmore, Utah, preserving the original seat of government for the Utah Territory. Built from 1852 to 1855, the statehouse was initially intended as a larger structure, but only the south wing was completed before the project was abandoned due to lack of federal funding, and the Utah Territorial Legislature only met in the building once before the capital was moved to Salt Lake City in 1856.
History
In 1851, Mormon leader Brigham Young and a group of lawmakers determined that Fillmore should become the capital of the provisional State of Deseret because of its central location. When the Congress of the United States turned down their petition for statehood and created the Utah Territory instead, Fillmore was designated as its territorial capital.
A model of the Utah Territorial Statehouse as originally conceived by architect Truman O. Angell. The red area represents the portion of the building that was actually completed.
The original statehouse building plans called for four wings connected by a Moorish dome at the center, but only the south wing was completed. U.S. President Millard Fillmore had helped secure the first $20,000 for construction, but could not help the territory secure additional funding after he lost the next election. (Both Fillmore and the county in which it sits, Millard County, were named in honor of President Fillmore.) In 1856, after housing its first and only full session, the Territorial Statehouse was abandoned by the Utah Legislature in favor of a new location in Utah's largest city, Salt Lake City.
By the early 20th century, the building was vacant, decaying and threatened with demolition. During the 1920s, the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers (DUP) proposed restoring the statehouse to serve as a history museum. Under the direction of the Utah State Park and Recreation Commission, the museum opened in 1930 and was placed in the custodial care of the DUP. The statehouse and grounds became a state park in 1957. Today, the Territorial Statehouse serves as a museum which contains many artifacts from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Two restored cabins and a pioneer stone schoolhouse are also located on the grounds.
Utah's governor, Jon Huntsman, Jr. delivered his State of the State address from the Territorial Statehouse in 2005 while the State Capitol was undergoing renovations. The State of the State address in 2005 was the first official use of the Territorial Statehouse for a Utah Governmental Function since 1856.
The exterior
Because they expected the red stone exterior to be covered with stucco, the stoneworkers who constructed the statehouse carved their initials into several of the stones on the outside of the building. Those initials are still visible today. The south exterior wall bears a plaque from the National Register of Historic Places. According to the plaque, the building was used by the 5th, 6th and 8th Legislatures who served in 1855, 1856, and 1858 respectively. There is also a plaque from the Daughters of Utah Pioneers dated August 3, 1935 that reads:
Creating Fillmore City and Millard County the territorial legislature of Utah selected Pahvant Valley as capitol site Oct. 29, 1851. This spot was selected by Governor Brigham Young. Construction work began in 1852. Truman O. Angell, architect and Anson Call, supervisor. This south wing was used by the Fifth Territorial Legislature Oct. 10, 1855. In 1856 the seat of government was moved to Salt Lake City. Later used as court house and county headquarters. Restored in 1928 and dedicated as state museum July 24, 1930. Custodians; Daughters of Utah Pioneers.
The interior
The basement
The basement currently contains several exhibits, including:
The Deseret News printing press: In July 1857, rumors of Johnston's Army approaching spread throughout Utah. Mormon leaders decided that the Deseret News printing press should be moved from Salt Lake City and hidden in the basement of the statehouse in Fillmore. Because the press was a vital means of communication, they decided to move it beyond the Provo evacuation point.
Model of the statehouse: The basement also contains a model of what the Territorial Statehouse would have looked like, had it been completed.
Jail cell: In the late 19th and early 20th century, a room in the basement of the Territorial Statehouse was used by local authorities as a jail. Prisoners were shackled to the floor, and bars were placed on the windows. Offenses which resulted in possible jail sentences included drunkenness, fighting, profanity and unlawful horseback riding.
The first floor
The Teachers Room: Today, this room looks just like it did in the late 19th century when the Territorial Statehouse served as a Presbyterian mission school. After the American Civil War, missionaries of many faiths flooded Utah in an attempt to convert Mormons and bring about a speedy end to polygamy. On the political end, laws were created to make polygamy illegal. In the religious sector, several churches organized mission schools in Utah to help combat polygamy. The Territorial Statehouse was turned over to the Presbyterian Church to run as a mission school.
The Governor's Office: Brigham Young designated this room as the Governor's office because it caught the morning and afternoon sunlight, which was considered by many to be preferable to lamp or candlelight.
The second floor
The second floor consists of the Assembly Hall where the territorial legislature met. The Assembly Hall contains a piano, a podium and several chairs. It also contains maps showing the location and size of the Utah Territory.
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