A telephone conversation between Bennett Peterson and Randy Peterson.

October, 2020

Bennett: I remember Ted telling about when they got on the wagon with a team of horses and they went down to the brick yard in Bountiful and got loads of bricks and carried them up to the house to build the new house and talking about  the iron wheels of the wagon cutting into the sand as they went up the hill and about the dog on the wagon seat with them.  So this was a do-it-yourself kind of project.  I don’t know who laid the bricks or that kind of thing.

Randy:  Were these the bricks for the yellow brick house.

Bennett:  Yes.

Randy:  So what you are saying is that that is probably Peterson craftsmanship on display in those brick walls.

Bennett:  I don’t know.  I don’t think dad was a brick layer.  But the house was a huge improvement.  It was modern technology after being used to the frame building that was kind of temporary and more like what they were used to in Mississippi with the dogs underneath the porch and that kind of thing.  This new place had a basement with a concrete floor.  Charlie and Ted used to roller skate on the basement floor.

Randy:  How big was the family at that point?

Bennett:  It was to Jeannette, and then Mary was born.  There is quite an interval between Mary and Jeannette.  Jeannette was born in 1922 and Mary was born in 1928-29.  Mother had a couple of miscarriages during that period.  So Mary and Dorothy and Jane and I were born in that brick house.  Dr. Stotts was the general physician in Bountiful and so he would come up and deliver the babies in that house.

Randy:  Would that house have been standing out in the middle of fields?

Bennett:  Oh yes.  It was oriented to face northwest, and would have been looking out over the whole valley.  You could see clear to Ogden and west to the Oquirrh Mountains.  That was one of the features that dad talked about later in life, that they could prosper there if they could live off of fresh air and scenery.

Randy:  I don’t want to interrupt the story, but I remember the house that I knew, I remember hearing stories about the farm being up on the hill and reading stories in the history.  Where did the farm lie in relation to the home that I knew?

Bennett:  About one half mile directly south.  The mountains were closer to that piece of ground than they were to the place where I grew up.  Continuing the chronology, the yellow brick house was built with a $5000.00 loan.  They were never able to repay that loan though they had been on that property since 1902.  They moved there when Bennett and Addie Mae were married, and so there was a long period of time in which improvements were made there, but the intense development of the property in terms of the planning of the fields began after Bennett and Florence were married in 1910.  The original house they built was sometime after that.  They had lived for a couple of years in American Fork and then somehow bought that 120 acre parcel.  I read just today again where one of mother’s sisters had written about that period of time and said that Bennett had bought the property from Henry, his brother.  That is the only reference to that that I know about.  It could be true or not. 

Randy:  Why would Henry have owned 120 acres of land in Woods Cross?  Weren’t the Peterson connections all down in Utah County?

Bennett:  I have no idea.  Just thinking about it now, Henry did own a farming property in American Fork because that’s where he and Aunt Alice, mother’s mother’s aunt lived, because that all has to do with the story of how Florence and Bennett met.  I think Bennett was already living in Davis County because the story is that when Bennett came to visit Henry, his brother,  in American Fork when Henry’s wife, Alice, who was Emma Louise Smith’s sister (It was my mother’s aunt) was Henry’s wife.  It was when Henry came to visit when one of Henry and Alice’s children was born and Florence, who by that time was a late teenager was visiting there to help Aunt Alice with the birth of her child that she met Bennett.  Florence and Bennett were married when Florence was 20 years old.  Addie Mae had died the prior year. Addie Mae was born in 1880 which, interestingly, was ten years before Florence was born.  Addie Mae died on the fifth of September 1909.  By that time Florence would have been 19 years old, and Florence and Bennett were married on December 10th of 1910.  So Bennett had been living alone with the children since Addie Mae’s death.  So the next chronological space was a two year period  when they lived in American Fork and that is when Ruby was born in 1911 and Emma in 1913.  Soon after that they were living back on that property in Bountiful.

Randy:  Do you recall if this frame home was already there, or did they build it?

Bennett:  I assume they built it because I don’t know of any other structures around there that were there even after that house burned.  So, chronilogicly, the house burned in 1926.  In 1927 they borrowed the money, the yellow brick house was built and they lived there developing the orchards and the other stuff until about 1939 when the foreclosure proceeding was filed on that property.  In “The Old Place” I dug into the county records and  got the details of that proceeding.  It dragged on for quite a while.  I think that the appeal to the mortgage foreclosure even went to the state supreme court and they ruled in favor of the financial institution and subsequent to that they were given notice that they had to move.  But you have to remember that that was a time of great economic peril.  The Great Depression  was still having its impact, certainly on agricultural endeavors because though they had planted orchards and vineyards and had pastures and were trying to get things in profitable shape they just didn’t have enough money to make the installment payment on a $5,000 loan.  That in itself if a heart rending reality.

Randy:  Where did Bennett’s mission call and service fit into the chronology of all this?

Bennett:  Bennett was called on a mission the end of 1937.  This was a time when the legal burdens were not just in existence, they had matured a long way, so the decision that was made for them for him to serve a mission, even for six months, was monumental.  It would not have been possible in this day and age for anyone to have responded to that call.  By the time he got back, things were dire and had progressed to the point of the foreclosure and required that they move, so in 1941 midyear was when they moved out of the yellow brick home.  And they moved to the place that you, Randy, would have recognized.  And they purchased that from Joel and Molly Murray.  Glen and LaVon lived in that home for a period of time and then the Murrays lived there, and it was when the Petersons needed a place to live that they were able to arrange the financing of it somehow.  They bought that home for $2,000.  In the meantime, the Petersons had to move out of the yellow brick home and so they moved into a structure that was, how do I put it, it was fairly close to the Murray home, about in the location of the white church house where Grandma’s funeral was.  That area was all just sand dunes and sage brush, but there was a little frame house – a little two-room place—and it was within a short distance of that piece of property that that house occupied, and had a chicken coop.  These two structures were where Bennett and Florence moved their family which would have been Jeannette, Mary, Dorothy, Jane, and myself.  We lived in these make-shift circumstances for several months while the deal for the Murray house was worked out.  I think by the end of that year we were living in that yellow brick home.  I was five or six years old.  Actually, Jennette may have been living with Priscilla in Provo at that time.  She had a job then and it wasn’t too long after that that she went to Chicago.  Anyway, they moved into the Murray home and that is where I grew up.  I have some recollections of living in the brick house, but not much, because my teenage years of growing up were all at the other house.

Randy:  Some of the really memorable parts of that house are the garage with all the treasures that were in there and then the little sleeping room that you had out behind the garage, and when I say garage, there was the big double door garage and then there was a smaller garage or a shed or something that was just east, a corrugated metal shed.  That was the coal house.  Then, of course, I remember the little out house out by the shed, and I slept out there with you I remember.  And you guys were actually putting in the basketball backstop one day when we drove up from southern Utah and you guys were putting firecrackers in baby food cans in a dish of water.  I have these vivid memories.  It was like I had died and gone to heaven when we would come to visit you guys.  It was still extremely rural at that time.

Bennett:  We lived there until I went on my mission and returned and was married.  That is where dad lived out his remaining days.  His health was not good.  It was deteriorating even then.  It was what he called Siatica.  I don’t remember that it was associated with a single injury, it was progressive and it impeded his ability to get around and just kept getting worse and worse.  He eventually passed away and mother continued to live there until her death, upon which the property was sold.  Jake and Dorothy lived nearby for a while.  They bought some of the three-acre property that fronted out on the road and they built a house there.

Randy:  Is there any remnant of that house left?

Bennett: I think that the location is the same, but whoever moved there kind of built around it. It’s now a substantial structure so that it doesn’t look like it did when we were living there, but it is in the same place.