Historic Houses in Beaver: An Introduction to Materials, Styles, and Craftsmen

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 51, 1983, No. 3

Historic Houses in Beaver: An Introduction to Materials, Styles, and Craftsmen

BY LINDA L. BONAR

THE TOWN OF BEAVER IN SOUTHWESTERN UTAH sits in a high, broad valley surrounded by mountains, some of which tower above 12,000 feet. The valley's cold climate and 6,000-foot elevation were avoided by early settlers in southern Utah who searched further south for farmland with a longer growing season. But as soon as land in the warmer valleys was taken up, newcomers were forced to take a second look at Beaver. Thus, the area was settled in 1856 by those who were necessarily stock raisers first and farmers second.

Beaver represents a fairly typical example of the Mormon settlement pattern in the Intermountain West. A group of men ventured out from Parowan — a town some thirty-five miles southward — at the suggestion of church leaders to colonize the Beaver River Valley. Both the town and the nearby river derived their names from the profusion of beaver that once populated the vicinity. These first pioneers surveyed the land, divided it into ten-acre plots, and cast lots to determine ownership of the property. That same spring, when the area had attracted more settlers, they platted a townsite and gave families one-acre lots upon which to build their homes. In keeping with the "City of Zion" plat, a gridiron plan was emblazoned upon the landscape with broad streets in line with the cardinal points of the compass. The residents lived in the village and commuted to outlying fields and grazing areas to work, thus reinforcing the strong social fabric typical of Mormon towns.

Also true to the controlled Mormon settlement pattern, church leaders included in the Beaver pioneer group people with previous experience in founding new towns and craftsmen such as blacksmiths, carpenters, masons, etc., to insure the success of the new village.

The first dwellings in Beaver were modest one-room log cabins or dugouts. These structures were seen as temporary but adequate shelters until the demand for food and clothing could be met and more substantial, permanent dwellings could be built. All Mormon pioneer towns went through this temporary phase. But the settlers saw nothing temporary about their communities, and they constantly sought to improve their material lives.

Although few dugouts are extant in Beaver, perhaps many resembled the Robinson residence (fig. I). This dugout was built into the side of a small hill with the ridge of its roof running parallel to the face of the slope. Approximately 14 x 17 feet, with a stairway descending into a rectangular living space, the dugout is about 4.5 feet below ground level. Its gabled roof protrudes at its peak about 2 feet above the ground. A small window in one gable end allowed some light into the dugout. The roof consists of pinyon or juniper log rafters with a layer of dirt spread thickly on top of them. The interior walls were lined with small cobblestones, and at one time a stove for heating and cooking probably sat at one end. While several pioneer accounts told of how snug and warm a dugout could be, John F. Tolton remembered one of the disadvantages:

In the month of August, 1868, shortly after we moved into our first home in Beaver, "the cellar" [actually a dugout], there occurred a great cloudburst which submerged the streets in all parts of town knee deep with water. In our cellar home we had all our earthly possessions, our beds, books, boxes containing valuable papers, our newly threshed grain for our foodstuff for the following year . . . our grain and foodstuff were all water-logged and ruined, and all other contents of our home badly damaged.

Besides dugouts, log cabins were also very popular as temporary dwellings. Although the Jessie Orwin cabin does not date from Beaver's founding, it is a good example of log cabins in town because of its relatively unaltered state (fig. 2). Its rectangular plan is approximately 18 x 24 feet, with a fireplace at one gable end. The entire cabin rests upon a black basalt foundation. The logs are saddle notched, and the facade displays bilateral symmetry, a clue to its later construction (probably during the late 1870s).

At one time scores of log structures dotted the Beaver landscape, but scarcely a dozen survive today in their original form. It is, therefore, difficult to make any representative statements regarding log cabin construction in Beaver. However, the remaining log cabins reveal that square and saddle notches were frequently used, these two types being the easiest to construct because they demanded relatively little craftsmanship. Examples of the more difficult halfdovetail notch are few, and the full dovetail and V-notches found in other Utah communities are nonexistent in Beaver.

How long residents continued to live in log cabins or dugouts varied from town to town, but in Beaver it was apparently too long for the LDS church leaders in Salt Lake. In 1862, on one of his annual tours of the southern Utah communities, Brigham Young "rebuked the local people [of Beaver] for their failure to build up the kingdom." As recorded by J. V. Long:

He showed the lack of local improvements of every kind, and stated that instead of visible improvements calculated to attract his attention on leaving, everything had remained in statu[s] quo since his last visit. . . . We left the folks at Beaver feeling well, most of them showing signs of contrition and evincing a determination to improve the habitation of both man and beast by the time of the President's next annual visit.

Actually, things for man and beast improved very little. The following year, a member of Brigham Young's party complained to the Deseret News that

... we were unable to discover all those marks of enterprise and improvement so eagerly looked for by the Presidency on their entrance into the various settlements. The houses are built chiefly of logs, with a few adobies, and I saw two shingle roofs and one frame stable. The meeting house is built of logs also. There has been a great neglect on the part of the people of Beaver.

A year later, in 1864, the church leaders decided to import new leadership.

Owing to factional differences, lack of unity, and the inability of the local authorities to carry on the Church work, the General Authorities decided to graft new blood into the community in the way of new leadership. John Riggs Murdock of Lehi was to become the new leader.

Under Murdock's hand things began to improve in Beaver. In May 1868 George A. Smith reported: ". . . much improvement is going on at this place; several new burnt-brick houses are going up. The walls of a large and commodious brick school-house are being enclosed and a number of good frame barns ornament the town." The town also boasted a new tannery, a stream sawmill, the Beaver Co-op Store, and a branch office of the Deseret Telegraph Company. Not only was the town beginning to prosper, it was growing too. By 1868 about a thousand people lived in Beaver, and it appeared that the tentative settlement had finally taken root as a permanent community.

One of the first permanent buildings to be seen on the Beaver landscape was the adobe brick home of Robert Kershaw, ca. 1864 (fig. 3). Adobe brick was a very popular nineteenth-century building material. It was widely used in Beaver and throughout most of Utah. Adobe had good insulating qualities, could be used to construct sturdy and aesthetically pleasing structures, and could be utilized by unskilled laborers.

Robert Kershaw, a farmer by occupation, probably built his own house. He would have mixed the adobe, pressed it into brick molds, and laid the dried bricks up in courses that were two or three bricks thick. The house originally had a rectangular cabin plan and was probably quite plain in appearance. It has a shallow pitch to the roof and a simple cornice along the eaves, two allusions to the Greek Revival style. For a decorative effect Kershaw used red sandstone for the window sills, and after the house was completed he plastered the adobe bricks with a lime stucco to protect them from the weather. Thus by 1868, some twelve years after the town had been founded, Beaver citizens were well on the way to making the transition from temporary to permanent houses.

As the settlers began to think in terms of permanent dwellings they found various construction options open to them. If a family needed more space but was of modest means, extra rooms could be added to an existing cabin. Dugouts were seldom enlarged but served later as tool sheds, basements, root cellars, or some other type of utility building. Usually, a new addition was built with a more refined building material such as burnt brick, and the original cabin was often sheathed in the same building material to match the addition. Consequently, it is not uncommon even today to find original adobe walls veneered with brick or a log wall covered with milled wood siding. In some instances, so many additions to an original cabin were made over the years that the cabin may be just one more room in the house, surrounded by later construction.

Another alternative for a family considering a permanent home was to abandon the original cabin or dugout as living quarters and build a completely new home. Such a family may have accumulated enough wealth to afford a professional builder instead of having to rely on their own skills as they did during the "temporary" building phase. Builders were more likely to be sought if the cabin was being replaced by a house of either stone or brick.

Brickmaking in Beaver can be divided into two phases. The first period, from ca. 1865 to ca. 1875, occurred when church officials put pressure on Beaver citizens to "build up the kingdom" and make the transition to more permanent dwellings. A search for suitable brick clay revealed that there was little in the town's environs. Members of the Patterson family, who had acquired some experience in brickmaking in their native England, finally located some clay at South Creek, about four miles south of town. Like nearly all early residents of Beaver, the Pattersons were primarily farmers, and they confined brickmaking to spare hours when the chores in the fields were finished. They made and burned the brick at South Creek, though their output was understandably limited. It was probably from the Pattersons' bricks that a group of about eight stylistically similar houses were built. Many have been drastically altered over the years. These vernacular buildings were very much influenced by the Greek Revival style, and their characteristics included end-wall chimneys, one-story height with a shallow roof pitch, Greek Revival cornices with paired wooden brackets, two to four windows located symmetrically on the front facade, common-bond brickwork, and usually a hall-and-parlor plan (though a few have rectangular cabin plans). One example of these early brick dwellings is the Horace Skinner house, ca. 1865 (fig. 4).

By about 1875 brickmaking fell into a ten-year decline in Beaver for several reasons. The brick itself was quite soft because highquality clay was nonexistent in or near town. Another factor would have been the cost of hauling the fired brick four miles from the kiln to Beaver. An additional reason must have been the arrival in Beaver of the stonemason Thomas Frazer who, judging from the great number of rock structures he built, provided an economically competitive alternative to the early brick industry.

Coincidental with Frazer's arrival in Beaver, the townspeole entered three decades of prosperity that in many ways influenced the appearance of the built environment. Beaver's high elevation and arid climate made the land more conducive to stock raising than extensive farming, and LDS church leaders were persuaded that Beaver would be a good place to locate a woolen mill. Thomas Frazer helped to construct this large factory, which was an instant success both in terms of employment and profit. "Although it has been running a little over half a year, a dividend of 27 percent was recently declared. The mill is quite a benefit to the people as money has heretofore been somewhat scarce . . . ," one account stated. Another author wrote, "This institution was responsible for the substantial growth of Beaver more than any other factor. Most of the prominent buildings erected in Beaver during the 1870s and 80s owe their existence to employment at this factory." 17 Indeed, a glance at nineteenth-century deeds and abstracts shows that most of the substantial rock and brick homes were built during this period.

Also contributing to the economic prosperity in Beaver during this thirty-year period was the construction of and later the supplying of goods to Fort Cameron. Work on the fort began in 1873, and soon contracts were offered to all local men in the construction business. Some twenty large buildings were erected to accommodate officers, their families, and approximately 250 enlisted men. Some staples were shipped to the fort from the States, but the army also came to depend on Beaver residents for a wide variety of goods, from which the townspeople profited tremendously.

By the 1870s Beaver had also become a crossroads for travelers. The town was the diverging point for Pioche, a booming mining town in eastern Nevada. Residents of Beaver supplied the mining town of Frisco (located in western Beaver County) with everything from culinary water to lumber. Beaver also lay on the route south to St. George, the thriving Mormon community where a new Mormon temple was being constructed. With so much activity and prosperity in Beaver from 1870 to 1900 it is not at all surprising that townspeople could at last afford the skills of someone like Thomas Frazer, a professional builder and contractor and the first person in Beaver who was able to depend on the construction industry for his livelihood. By about 1870 he was beginning to build houses in Beaver that utilized the black basalt found to the east on the benches or foothills above the town.

A native of Scotland, Frazer (fig. 5) had worked as a stonemason before converting to the LDS religion and immigrating to Utah with his wife Annie. They lived in Lehi for seven years before church authorities requested them to relocate in Beaver. This Thomas happily did, for it gave him the opportunity to play a large part in Beaver's construction industry. He and his family arrived in town in 1868, and for two years he was kept very busy with the construction of industrial and commercial buildings such as the Beaver Woolen Mills and the Beaver Co-op Store, neither of which are extant. During the 1870s and 1880s Frazer built scores of stone buildings, including many residences like the 1877 Duckworth Grimshaw house (fig. 6).

This home is one and a half stories tall with a hall-and-parlor plan, end-wall chimneys, dormer windows, a center gable with a door in it, and perfect symmetry on the front facade. The vernacular design owes much of its inspiration to the Gothic Revival's characteristic dormer windows, center gable, and steeply pitched roof. Grimshaw, a polygamist, shared this house with only one of his wives, for in Beaver polygamists' wives appear to have had their own separate homes. In his journal he noted that the house was "36 feet long by 20 feet wide, costing $2,000. We moved in on Christmas Day."

The Grimshaw house represents a summit of achievement in the folk architecture of Beaver. Its design is one that Frazer had been working to perfect for nearly a decade; and once he attained it, the design was repeated with minor variations all over town by Frazer and others in the accepted manner of folk designers. Looking at figure 6, one finds that the proportions of the dormers and center gable work well with the rest of the house to help create one balanced unit. The slopes of the dormer roofs and center gable repeat the pitch of the main roof, adding further unity. The white mortar joints and the white paint on the cornice and porch form a pleasing contrast to the black rock. The squared and plumb lines of the house give it a very precise appearance, so much so that the subtraction or addition of any element would seem to throw the facade out of balance. All the architectural elements work in unison to create a sophisticated, harmonious design.

At least eight other extant houses built after 1877 in Beaver conform closely to the characteristics of the Duckworth Grimshaw house. This replication of a proven design was perfectly acceptable within the conservative folk culture of Beaver. Such folk societies nearly always opted for a tried-and-true design rather than one that displayed change simply for novelty's sake.

By 1882 a new type of stone had been introduced in Beaver, a pink tuff from the quarry recently opened near the mouth of Beaver River Canyon. Because this stone was so much softer and easier to work than basalt, it soon replaced the black rock almost entirely, except in foundations. Alexander "Scotty" Boyter was a stonemason who excelled in its use.

Like Thomas Frazer, Boyter was a Scots immigrant to Utah. However, he was not a convert to the LDS church but arrived in Beaver in 1873 with the U.S. Army to establish Fort Cameron. He learned his masonry skills while serving in the army, and upon his discharge practiced them on new residences for the townspeople. His own home (fig. 7), built entirely of pink tuff, originally had a hall-and-parlor plan with a rear extension (also known as a T-plan). His descendants like to tell the story that Boyter quarried all the rock for his home three times but sold it twice before construction actually began. The stone blocks in the original portion of the house were very finely chiseled, a characteristic of all of Scotty's work. The mortar joints were stained a red rust color, creating a pleasant contrast to the pink rock. Originally, Boyter built a bay window on the south gabled end of the house, but he later removed it and incorporated a flat window with stained glass. This bay window and the steeply pitched roof represent some of the influence of the Gothic Revival style, while the cornice is indicative of Greek Revival and the strict symmetry in the original portion of the house Georgian. Nearly all vernacular houses in Beaver and much of Utah are composites of various "high" styles of architecture and traditional designs.

About the same time that the use of pink tuff became widespread, the brick industry in Beaver was revived. New clay beds were located, and although the bricks were still relatively soft, they were produced in much greater quantities than during the 1860s. Consequently, brick houses became very popular and were built all over town. One such example is the James Boyter house which James, a talented gravestone carver, built himself, probably with the aid of his older brother Scott (fig. 8).

The James Boyter house is one and a half stories tall with a central chimney, three dormer windows, a hall-and -parlor plan with rear extension, and a Greek Revival cornice. Its design was undoubtedly influenced by the earlier work of Thomas Frazer.

Not until the 1890s did frame houses become popular in Beaver. In most pioneer Utah communities, the nearby stands of timber had been utilized for log cabins with the founding of the town, and the commercial exploitation of forests in the mountains usually had to await the construction of good roads. But by the 1890s milled lumber was widely available and somewhat less expensive to use than masonry. Besides this economic factor, the development of the balloon frame in the Midwest during the 1830s and wire cut nails facilitated the construction of frame buildings. They could now be erected with standardized pieces of lumber and nails instead of the expensive mortise-and-tenon joints. The John Grimshaw house (fig. 9) is an example of a frame house and of the Queen Anne cottage style.

The introduction of the Queen Anne cottage, ca. 1890, provided the first example of a nationally accepted style coming to Beaver. Previously, elements of various architectural styles were adopted piecemeal into folk houses, as noted earlier in connection with the Alexander Boyter house (fig.7). Although the acceptance of such elements added beauty and variety to folk buildings, the traditional methods of design remained unchanged. By 1890, however, traditional floor plans and even a building's massing showed the influence of nontraditional ideas. Floor plans were often designed asymmetrically, thus successfully attacking that most sacred of traditional design tenets, symmetry of the front facade.

John Grimshaw, a professional carpenter in Beaver, built his Queen Anne cottage in 1909. The design came from a housepattern book now in the possession of his son (compare figs. 9 and 10). Grimshaw was one of several builders of that time to cast aside the folk design process and embrace the increasingly popular national styles in architecture. He was active in the building industry from about 1885 to 1920, working not only as a carpenter but also as a manufacturer of decorative wood products such as cornice trim.

As the nineteenth century came to a close, so did an era of architecture in Beaver and most rural towns in Utah. The traditional building methods, materials, and designs passed from generation to generation increasingly gave way to new and often nontraditional ideas. Architecture in Beaver began to be influenced by the nation- wide fashions seen in house-pattern books. One phase of folk building in Beaver came to an end, but another phase continues even now, though it is radically different from the one that existed from 1856 to ca. 1900.

The architectural history of Beaver has many parallels in the numerous towns settled by Mormon pioneers throughout the Intermountain West. Most towns were established in a similar manner under a controlled Mormon settlement pattern. All of these towns experienced a "temporary" construction period before the metamorphosis to permanent structures could be accomplished. The replication of successful designs was yet another characteristic found in all of these settlements, though the designs might differ from town to town.

With the exception of stone, the types of building materials employed in Beaver — from the ubiquitous adobe to the status of burned brick — were widely utilized throughout the Intermountain West. When stone was used, it appears to have been favored mostly by European converts to Mormonism familiar with stonemasonry from their Old World backgrounds. A breakdown of the most significant structures in Beaver by building materials shows: log — 9; adobe — 6; brick — 54; black rock — 16; pink rock — 22; frame — 7.

Nineteenth-century architecture in Beaver was mostly vernacular in design, with frequent references to the popular Georgian, Greek Revival, and Gothic Revival styles. House types and floor plans, such as the hall-and-parlor plan, the rectangular cabin plan, the central-hall plan, etc., were traditionally used not only in Beaver but in most Mormon-founded towns in the West. The many craftsmen and folk architects responsible for the legacy of historic buildings in Beaver designed and built homes that are still admired today. The folk tradition of architecture — knowledge passed from generation to generation — guided and inspired them.

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