by Evelyn Taylor Saxton
Pheba Martin, my Grandma, was 17 years old and Hyrum Heber Taylor, my Grandpa, was 21 years old when they were married on the 26th day of October, 1904 in the Salt Lake Temple. They were married on a Friday and the following Monday morning they left by covered wagon for Mapleton, Franklin County, Idaho. This is where they made their first home, at the ranch of his father and mother, Heber C. and Eliza Baird Taylor. They had to milk 32 cows, besides the other farm work.
Grandmother went back to Farr West the following late summer where my dad, Lester Hyrum Taylor, the first child of Pheba and Hyrum, both of English descent, was born October 24, 1905 in Harrisville, Weber County, Utah, weighing in at 12 pounds just two days before their first wedding anniversary.
Two years and nine months later, with several feet of snow on the ground, Les had a new little brother, born May 9, 1908 and named Heber James Taylor.
Two years later on July 5th, 1910, he had a little sister named Luella Pearl Taylor. That fall Eliza Baird Taylor, mother of Hyrum, sold the farm to the Wooleys so Les, my dad, moved with the family to Plain City, Utah, where they purchased a farm. At this time Les was not yet 5 years old.
It was during this time that times were hard, and food and necessities were scarce and hard to get together to keep going. The flu was really bad and Les, by then about 13, related how he was one of the few people not sick in bed and how he would travel from house to house all day for several weeks, milking all the neighbors’ cows for them.
His education only went through the 8th grade but he had a very quick mind in regards to math, reading, etc.
Ten years later Pheba and Hyrum sold the farm and moved their family back to Mapleton, Idaho, where they purchased the old home from Dick and Jacob Choules, who in the meantime had bought it from the Wooleys.
On Christmas even, December 24, 1920, Les was 15 years old, Heb was 12-1/2, and Pearl was 10, when they had a new baby sister arrive that they named Ada.
By now Les, Heb, and Pearl were getting quite grown up and there was a lot of work to do with a large farm to take care of and cows to milk. About this time Grandpa Hyrum had his fingers on his right hand amputated in the cogs of a threshing machine so it was difficult for him to do some things.
There were two houses on the ranch and they moved them together so they could have more room. Still there was water to carry, crops to care for and cows to milk night and morning.
The teenagers worked hard and the only entertainment they had were the dances in the old dance hall, oyster suppers and Sundasy dinners at different homes around the community.
When Les was 28 years old, and Grandma Pheba, his mother, was 47 years old, he had another sister added to his family who they named Mable. She was born the 8th of November 1932, the day that Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected President of the United States.
Les met his future wife Emma Elwood, while she was working in Preston for Stalder’s, at Fred’s. The second time he went to eat, my mother asked him where his wife, meaning Ada, and his little girl, meaning Mable, was and he told her he wasn’t married. On New Year’s Eve he went into Fred’s just before midnight and mother was working the late shift. He asked her if he could take her home when she was finished. Mike Chatterton was with him. They rode around awhile and she told him she was moving back to Cornish the next day. Fred’s was closing for good, so she was out of a job. My dad made a date for the following week to go to the show. Mom completely forgot about the date because she had been sick for a couple of days.
When Les, my dad, knocked on the door, my Grandpa Elwood answered and there stood this good-looking man; he asked if Patricia was home. My Grandpa George Elwood said there wasn’t anyone by that name, but he had “two girls in there if you want to see if it’s one of them.” Dad came in and when my Mom saw him, she remembered about the date, got ready and went to Lewiston to the show. Grandma Elwood was ready to go to a meeting and Dad teased them, saying he didn’t know whether to take Emma, my Mom, or her mother, Vivian.
Les and Emma went together about six weeks and decided to get married on February 21, 1938. Emma’s sisters, Barbara and Phyllis, went with them. Grandma and Grandpa Taylor were to have met them in Logan, but didn’t make it. The four of them – Dad and Mom and Barbara and Phyllis, my Mom’s sisters – went with them to get married and then to lunch. Mom and Dad then went out to Lewiston to visit his sister, Pearl Gregory. They ended up in Cornish where they stayed with Grandma Vivian and Grandpa George Elwood, my Mom’s parents. They were digging a trench to pipe the water to their house so my Dad dug trench all day with the guys. That was their honeymoon.
There just weren’t any jobs and you could work 12 hours for $2.00.
Les went to work in March 1938 for Ben Meek in Riverdale during the lambing season. He would be gone all week (sometimes came home during the week). Emma, my Mom, stayed home with her Mom and Dad for a couple of months. Then Les found work at the Sugar Factory in Whitney, Idaho. They were snowed in on the farm in Cornish for seven weeks the winter of ’38 and ’39. Les would ride a horse down to town to get the groceries they could afford.
They lived in Cub River for awhile. Les was working for his Dad then and they lived with his family. Then later they went to Lewiston to thin beets in May. While they were there, Grandma and Grandpa Elwood moved to Newton to take over the store so Mom and Dad ran their farm for the next year.
The fall after they were married, 1939, they went to Cub River to get their wedding gifts and Les’s overcoat they had left up there. Two days after Thanksgiving Day the family home caught on fire from an overheated stove. Grandma Pheba and Grandpa Hyrum were the only ones at home and they were out at the barn doing chores, which was quite a distance from the house. By the time they got to the house they could only save a few odds and ends of the furniture and a few clothes. They took what old furniture they could get together and lived in an old two room house of Priscilla Bowmans, which had been used as a granary.
They had been married about a year when they found out they were going to have a baby. Lester Gary Taylor, my brother, was born on the 8th of November 1939. Grandma and Grandpa Elwood had closed the store in Newton and had moved back to the farm. Les and Emma lived with them again the year of 1940.
They took over 40 acres of the farm from Grandpa Elwood that he had bought from the Baker’s. They moved a railroad box car up behind the hill on this farm. It wasn’t finished inside, so Les and Dresden Blanchard, Phyllis’s husband, plastered it. They moved into it in the fall of 1940. They bought a cupboard, baby bed, and borrowed a bed and dresser. Grandma and Grandpa Elwood had bought a new couch, so they gave Mom and Dad their old daybed to put in their front room. They bought a second-hand stove and a table and chairs from Sears. Eventually they got a new couch, so they put the daybed in the bedroom for Gary to sleep on. They borrowed the money from Lewiston State Bank to buy three cows. Just before they finished paying for them, one got milk fever when she freshened, and died.
They worked hard to make ends meet and didn’t have much, but they did eat. There wasn’t money for clothes and luxuries. It seemed as if every penny they could get their hands on went to buy hay for the animals. They hauled water in milk cans in the trunk of their car all the 13 years they lived on the farm. When my Dad was at work, my Mom had no vehicle, so she had to go down around the hill and would carry water in two milk buckets about two city blocks up the hill from Hansens, our neighbors, to our house.
Les and Emma worked hard. They had no luxuries or conveniences. Summers were hot and dusty and winters were cold and long. No indoor plumbing, no electricity until 9 years after they were married. A coal stove and a tin tub with water head on the stove both winter and summer. Cooking and canning was also done on the coal stove and many a meal was cooked for the hay men or the thresher crew, with all the water being hauled in milk cans from the neighbors.
Evelyn was born on February 7, 1945, in Lewiston, Cache, Utah.
They had a good crop two years after Evelyn was born so they finally got electricity up to the farm from the highway. Now they could have a wringer washer and a refrigerator and a radio. It seemed good to have lights out to the barn and a yard light. Up until this time, they had kerosene lamps in the houses, so there were chimneys to clean every day. Sometimes Les and Emma would buy a detective story magazine. They would put the lamp on the table and each would sit at the table to read for entertainment. They both did lots of reading and sometimes they would read until very late. Emma read whole books to Evelyn and Gary. They never tired of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Little Women, Little Black Sambo, The Three Bears, Cinderella, and dozens of other stories. They also read Bible Stores and the Life of Christ.
Les and Emma passed their love of reading down to their children.
The winters of 1947, ’48, and ’49 were terrible. They were snowed in and had to leave a car out to the highway and take a big sleigh pulled by Duke and Babe, our workhorses, to get out in the winter.
Les would take his children and several of the neighbors’ children in the big sleigh down to the Cornish school and back every day when the roads were closed. He did this for a few years, but then his health started to deteriorate.
In the summer of 1947, while they were in Cub River, Les had signs that something was wrong with his health. At first they thought it was his nerves, but he went downhill so fast that by fall he was so tired he could hardly keep going. He worked at the Sugar Factory in Whitney, Idaho, but was tired all the time. They had 12 cows to milk night and morning by this time. Gary and Mom would milk at night when Dad was working afternoons. The next year he was too sick to work, so he quit the Factory. Nothing helped. He went to Dr. Cragun and Dr. Skabelund and took iron shots, but his blood just didn’t build up. In the summer Dad ran Grandma Taylor’s farm and our own farm. He moved the horses back and forth hitched to the wagon with his equipment. He kept that up for a number of years.
In the fall of 1953, Mom and Dad and Gary and I moved from the farm in Cornish, Utah, down to the Irvin Kendall home across the street from the Cornish store, next to the gas station. That fall Les plowed the beets and Mom and Dad and Gary all three topped beets for a month. Mom worked in the store to pay for the rent on the house.
Mom got a job at the Cache Valley Diary in Amalga, Utah, and also worked at the store at night to help pay the rent.
Life settled pretty much into a routine. Les was in the hospital and out again while the doctors kept trying to find the answer. In 1956 he had 22 blood transfusions in the LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah. The family members from the Knights and the Taylors from Farr West, by Ogden, Utah, replaced the blood used. Les and Emma worked hard, were honest and lived with great integrity. Neither of them expected something for nothing and both lived and died with great dignity. Hopefully some of these traits are being passed down to the future generations.
After battling illness for 14 years, Les passed away in Battle Creek, Idaho, at his sister, Mable Talbot’s home, on July 25, 1959. He had gone there for a little visit and to give my Mom a two-day rest. We arrived about 30 minutes before he passed away. He had battled long and hard and went to a deserved rest. He was buried in the Preston Cemetery.
