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Show Volume XXVIII Issue VII The Ogden Valley News Page 9 February 15, 2021 Stories of Ogden Valley by Halvor Bailey: Part I Note: This historical narrative by Halvor Bailey (Jan. 27, 1920 ~ Dec. 30, 2003) was generously shared by Lyle Bailey, son of Halvor Bailey. The narrative was recorded after Halvor agreed to share his story with students at Valley Elementary several years ago. Valley students drew the pictures to go with the narrative. My father came from Denmark in 1890 when he was about thirty years, and my mother came from Denmark in 1881 when she was one year old. So there was a difference in age of my father and mother of about 42 years. I had ten brothers and sisters. There were six brothers and four sisters. When my older brothers and sisters started school, they couldn’t speak English for the simple reason that my parents were from Denmark and they all spoke Danish. This carried on through my lifetime. I was one of the last ones born and I could speak English when I started school. This was because my older sisters spoke English to me, but I could understand the Danish Language. The only people my parents associated with spoke Danish. Whenever they’d talk to me, they’d speak Danish and I’d answer them back in English. My father came here because his cousin was married to one of the first millionaires in the state of Utah. His name was [David] Eccles and he lived in Ogden. He was in the lumber business. He had a saw mill in the mouth of Ogden Canyon and he cut all the logs in Ogden Canyon and floated them down the river to where Rainbow Gardens is located now. That’s where he sawed his lumber and made most of his money. When he went to Oregon to start in the lumber mills there, my father went to Oregon to work for him. My mother was an illegitimate child and her mother was twenty years old. A missionary from Huntsville went over to Denmark and was given $75 by an old gentleman in Huntsville. He asked the missionary to find him a young wife. He ran into my grandmother and that $75 brought her over here to Huntsville where he married my grandmother. She was twenty and he was seventy-five. My mother had one half-brother and two half-sisters. She couldn’t go to school because she had to do all the farm work for her stepfather. She would harness a team of horses and farm the farm that’s right across from the school parking lot. She couldn’t lift the harnesses up on the horses so she’d pull the harness with a rope on a rafter in the barn and drop the harness on the horses. When she was eighteen years old, my father had come back from Oregon and they got married. The bishop who married them was David O. McKay’s father. Whenever something would go wrong or I would have a toothache, my father would take me down to the Eccles house that’s on Jefferson and 26th Street [in Ogden]. It is a big sandstone building [now the Eccles Art Center]. It was a castle in those days. The sandstone was made up here by the monastery in a quarry they called Quarry Hall. When I was real young, the Indians would migrate down around the lake in the summer. They would camp around Spring Creek. The Indians were friendly. They would come to my mother’s house and beg for flour, sugar, and anything you could afford to give them. My sister told me of an incident where she watched an old squaw catch squirrels with a snare on the knoll. The squirrels would stick their heads out of their hole and she would pull the string and catch them in the snare. When she got a basket of squirrels, she packed them in clay out of the stream bank. She would throw them on the fire and bake them till they were done. When she pulled the clay off, the fur would come off with the clay and they would eat the squirrels. The Indian squaws all wore blue, red, and brown velvet dresses. The men who were called “bucks” at that time, all wore a big black hat and regular clothes. They would stay in this area a very short time and then would migrate as food became available elsewhere. There were very few deer in the mountains at that time so most of their livelihood was from small furs and fish. In the town of Huntsville, there were three blacksmith shops. They repaired farm machinery that was pulled by horses. There was a small dairy where people brought their milk. They made cheese and butter at the dairy. This whole valley was a farming area. No one had jobs in Ogden. If you wanted to survive you built your living right here in this valley. They had a railroad that came up the canyon and it would bring livestock to the stockyard where the [Ogden Valley] library is now. They would push the boxcars down onto a siding to unload the sheep. The train moved by electricity that was generated by power from Hyrum, Utah. There was great demand for electricity in those days. All the streets of Ogden had a streetcar running up and down those streets. The Toonerville made three trips a day up to the valley. It stopped at what is now [was] Wood’s Market [and Leon’s Market—now the Sorenson’s reception center, on the corner, kitty-corner from Huntsville Park south of the library]. It had a conductor who gathered the money from the people who rode the streetcar. He collected the money for the freight that was hauled down on the train. The conductor would pull the trolley cable that connected the electricity down so the kids wouldn’t be able to jump in the train and run off with it. When he was ready to go down the canyon, he would go to the other end of the train, pull on the other trolley, and that would take us down the canyon. This train would haul coal, bricks, produce, and lumber. There were two coal yards up here. The people up here raised sugar beets at the north end of town. They’d take the sugar beets and dump them into the railroad cars and take them down to the sugar factory on Wilson Lane. They also hauled ore out of LaPlatta and dumped it in a pile. They made a big skiff where they had a team of horses on the other side of the ore cars to pull the ore up the side and down into the car. Then they’d take the ore to Magna to have it refined. All the students from tenth to twelfth grade were transported to Ogden on this train. They went to Weber High School where Stop “N Shop is located now [Currently where ShopKo, Vassa Fitness, Baskin Robbins, etc. are located on the northeast corner of Washington Blvd. and 12th Street]. Sometimes snow slides would come down in the winter and they would have to get out and shovel the snow off the tracks [in Ogden Canyon] so the train could bring them on home. School - I went to a big red brick school [in Huntsville] built in 1902. The old school had a sandstone foundation up about four feet then the rest was brick. The ceilings were 20 feet high and it had eight rooms. There were four big windows on each side to allow light to come in so we could see. The school was heated with coal. There was a big boiler which heated the water. The water was turned to steam which went through all the rooms in these big radiators. In the school that I went to the lunchroom wasn’t called a lunchroom; it was called the soup room. The lunch cost sixty cents a month for a real small cup of soup. That amounted to three cents a day, which was pretty cheap in those days to get a cup of soup for three cents. We had a different kind every day. We would take a sandwich with us. In this school we were signaled by a big bell that was up in the top of the school. They’d pull the rope to ring the bell and everyone knew it was time to be in class. We played in the park and the pine trees at that time were two feet high. In the winter, we never had warm enough clothes to go out there and romp in the snow. We were transported to school by wagon or sleigh when I was in first grade. They didn’t have kindergarten back then. In the wintertime, a covered wagon was put on a sleigh and a man had a team of horses in front of the sleigh. He’d look through a slit. Iit was a covered wagon like the pioneers had. It was all closed in and he’d drive these horses looking through the little slit in the front of the covered wagon. A potbelly stove was in the center of this wagon and he’d keep a fire going in the wintertime. We quite enjoyed that old stove in the wintertime when HISTORICAL cont. on page 10 From The Past . . . Halvor and Lucille Bailey. Photo courtesy of Lyle Bailey. TAX SPECIAL for TEENAGERS: 1040: $49.95 (no matter how many W2’s) “Kids living at home” returns only $35.00 with parents returns. MASSES: Saturday Night website 4:30 p.m. Call or check Sunday Morning 8:00 a.m. for current Mass anda.m. Sunday Morning 10:00 Reconciliation schedule. Tuesday Night 6:00 p.m. PAROCHIAL VICAR Fr. Joseph Minuth 801-399-5627 josephop@gmail.com StFlorenceHuntsville.org Saint Joseph Catholic Elementary, Middle School, and High School Providing a challenging, college-focused education in the proven tradition of Catholic schools, for the families of the Ogden Valley. We want to teach your children! For information on our program, financial assistance, tours, or application, please call 801-393-6051 or 801-394-1515. 2668 Grant Avenue, Suite #104A, Ogden, UT 801-612-9299 |