Inez Cooley Parsons
The Big Fire
This is an excerpt from the autobiography of Inez Parsons’ son, Henry Lavell. It describes the fire that destroyed his father’s farm in 1922. It helps me to appreciate Grandpa Parsons even more as I see what a hard worker he was and the sacrifices he made to support his family. It also gives us insight about how this fire impacted the life of our grandmother, Inez Cooley Parsons. --Judith Ashcroft Peterson
“It was in the fall of 1922 that things got so hard on the farm that dad could no longer make a living on the farm. Between years of drought, insects, frost, and general low prices for our crops, he could no longer support his family, and decided that he would have to go back on the rail road as a brakeman, a job he had done years before as a young man, and before he was married to mother. The real thing that forced him to make this decision against his own wishes was the fire on our farm that summer. For once we had a pretty good crop, and the grain was ripe and just ready for harvesting. In fact, dad and Maurinas Peterson, (who worked together each year during the harvest season) were in our machine shed this day making the last minute repairs on dad’s header (a machine to cut the grain with in those days before combine harvesters). It was a clear early Fall day. I was up on the dry farm with our hired man getting in the last load of hay, and dad had told me to bring the horses in with me that night when we finished with the hay, so they would be ready to start harvesting the next morning. The horses were in our pasture next to the grain fields. Well, about two o’clock in the afternoon a large black cloud came up in the sky, and it stared lightening and thundering something awful.
The Big Fire
Me and the hired man were on the other side of the hill, and were just finishing up, and started back to the stack yard with the last load of hay for the top of the stack, which must have had close to 100 tons of hay in it. The derrick horse was tied to the derrick while we were after the last load, and as we started back over the hill the lightening flashed real close, followed immediately by a loud clap of thunder. As we came down the hill on the side of the grain field we could see smoke along our fence line, and then fire in our beautiful grain field. The wind had started to blow, as it always does in these thunder storms, and it wasn’t long until the whole field was burning fast and furiously, and not a thing we could do. It spread rapidly, and soon dad and several neighbors who had seen it came riding up on horses with wet sacks to beat our the fire, but it was of no use. It spread rapidly to the stackyard, and caught on the haystack. The derrick horse, who was still hitched to the derrick cable and could not get free, broke loose from her tie rope, but could not get free from the cable, so as the fire became so intense that the poor thing in desperation ran right into the burning haystack and was consumed, along with the derrick, all the hay, all the grain, and even the fences. And to cap off the whole thing, we later found that four of dad’s best horses, who had been reaching over the fence into the grain field when the lightening had struck the fence, were electrocuted. This was our whole year’s work, all gone up in smoke and fire in less than an hour. Can you imagine what a feeling of hopelessness, discouragement and despair that must have been for our father and mother? We children, of course, also felt bad about it, but the great impact of despair was on our good parents. We had nothing left to live on during the year to come, and soon after this tragedy is when dad decided to go back on the railroad. I was just turning fourteen years of age at this time. And it was a sad time for mother too, as dad had to go to Milford in the southern part of Utah to find work, where he could seldom get home, and mother was left with the major responsibility of raising and caring for the family for most all the years to come. Dad was never able to return to the farm.”
Lavell also tells about later selling the farm. He said that the ranch was divided into two parts – the west ranch and the east ranch. Maurinas Peterson had leased the west ranch, and after a few years his mother sold that one to the Utah Power and Light Company, who mainly wanted it for the water from our two lovely springs, which was piped to the Bear River Canyon dam site for culinary water for the people there. The East ranch was eventually leased out to Uncle Walter Cooley, his mother’s brother, who farmed it on shares. He eventually bought that ranch from Inez. LaVell said he didn’t know if she ever got paid for all of it, but that it was a pitiful little price per acre, and they never seemed to realize more than enough out of it to barely pay some of the other bills.