OCR Text |
Show ,! . - - - -a , ? A . j r ' ... . t - . 4 NUCLEUS OF HISTORIC PIONEER VILLAGE Here are two venerable buildings, a 90-year-old early Utah meeting house and a store built some 65 years ago, both in Rockport, Summit county. Brought to the Sons of Utah Pioneers historic museum in almost perfect preservation, the two units, together with drug store, blacksmith shop and other ancient dwellings, will form Pioneer Village for permanent exhibition at the museum. O P FSTORFD FOR U,P, MUSPUM Once upon a time, some 90 years ago,, the first settlers in Rockport, Utah, built a large meeting house of logs with windows and doors and a sloped roof. Today that ancient structure, brought from Rockport intact, stands as one of the focal points around which a Utah Pioneer Village Vil-lage is being reconstructed at the Sons of Utah Pioneer Museum at 2998 Connor street. And while the old meeting house used for school classes, church worship, town meetings and social events is being preserved as a permanent monument to Utah's earliest settlers, the place where it once stood is being converted into a $70,000,000 U. S. reclamation project, the Wanship dam, to double dou-ble the storage of water in the high Summit county areas. Some 60 or 70 residents of Rock-port's Rock-port's 16 families were dislocated last summer as final stages of negotiations ne-gotiations were completed between them and the bureau of reclamation, reclama-tion, Alton Peterson, dam construction con-struction engineer, reported. Clinton D. Woods, project engineer engi-neer in Ogden, with Stuart Mc-Masters, Mc-Masters, reclamation attorney, set about to dispose of what valuable properties they could and decided de-cided to offer the National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers the ancient meeting house for its SUP Museum. E. O. Larson, regional reclamation reclama-tion director, gained necessary approval. ap-proval. Now a 90 year old log meeting house is not common. Neither was a 65 year old store in the same township. So the Pioneer Sons seized the opportunity to have both brought intact to the museum. The old meeting house is familiar to hundreds of folk who have vis ited this quaint little town of Rockport. So is the store. Made of T-locked hand hewn logs, the meeting house was so sturdy, that despite Its 90 years, it crumbled and cracked not one bit in being moved to the museum. An old and historic organ will be installed in it, together with ancient an-cient vintage bench seats and a pulpit and some very, very old pictures which again will be hung in the edifice. The store, while not so old, is equally historic, and takes its place beside the meeting house as a vital part of the Pioneer Village. The front posts and the aged porch shelter must be restored and the olden time wooden sidewalk will be placed in front of them. The interior will take on the appearance of a genuine general store, common in these parts at the turn of the century. Ancient and yellowed journals, ledgers and books the business end of such concerns will be properly placed and the goods and items bought by customers of yesteryear will be stocked on the shelves. Also an old barber shop, complete com-plete with its mugs, shafing dishes and soaps and tonics, will be set up. A dentist's office, too, with all the tools of that then-modern age will be restored. The dental office was operated by Dr. E. I. Evans, whose daughter daugh-ter and son-in-law, the Fred E. Curtises, gave it to the museum this past year. Dr. Evans began his practice in 1905 and his historic instrument case includes a foot pedaled drill, a dental chair, and his first instrument instru-ment case which he took with horse and buggy to make home and rural calls on patients. j |