* Named after George Washington because of his parent's great admiration for the first president.
* Grandfather was a drummer in the Revolutionary War and his Great Grandfather died in the same war.
* Was ayoung child when his parents joined the Church. Moved to Kirtland, OH with the Saints in 1850.
* Apprenticed as an iron worker.
* His mother died on the plains enroute to SLC (Loupes Fork, Nebraska) His family was probably part of the Cpt. Isaac Bullock Company. Arriving in SLC in October of 1852.
* Farmer and carpenter. Build furniture for Dinwoody's Store in St George. Many pieces still exsist in Dixie area.
*Shingled the roof of the first Social Hall in SLC.
*Called on missions to settle cities in Dixie and Panacea, NV.
George was just a young boy, when his parents joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. After that George had many fights with school mates because his parents belonged to the despised “Mormon” sect. He started to school when he was four years old, but most of the time was only able to attend for three months of the year. In the spring before he was thirteen, he went to work for a hotel-keeper. He worked for him for nearly two years. He arose at four in the morning without being called and swept out four rooms and a porch the length of the house. In the winter he made three fires before going out to the barn, which he cleaned and where he cared for two cows and four horses. It was also his duty to see to the harnessing and unharnessing of the horses and the care of the buggies. In the summer he was given the additional care of a half acre of garden. Any "spare" time had to be spent tending the bar in the hotel and again at night after the chores were done, until it was time for him to shut up the house, never earlier than ten o'clock.
Later he became apprenticed to learn to make iron at a dollar a day. He took care of a garden to earn his board. After a year his employer quit making iron, but he had learned the trade. In 1850, when George was nineteen, his parents and Henry, his youngest brother, went to Kirtland, Ohio to be with members of the church. However, on arriving, they were very disappointed to find not even enough Mormons there to hold meetings. George and his youngest sister, Jane, stayed with their sister Sarah because their folks didn't have the money to take them with them to Ohio. George worked on a farm and Jane, who was fifteen, taught school. While taking some potatoes to Burlington, ten miles from Sarah's, George passed some men working on a railroad. He stopped and asked for a job and was promised a chance as fireman and then as engineer on an iron boat hauling freight, as soon as the ice was out of the river. He worked in a hotel while waiting and when the job didn't materialize, he and Jane left Vermont and went on to Kirtland in 1851.
In Kirtland he hired out on a farm at twelve dollars a month. He told his employer he wouldn't chop wood in the summer. So, when his first day's work was given to him and he found it to be chopping and when he saw that a good many acres of tree had been cut to be chopped into logs and stove wood, he quit at noon.
He became a carpenter at eleven dollars a month and board for four months. Later he made a dollar a day remodeling a horse barn and elevator for a farmer. This was the last work he did before starting for Salt Lake City with his parents. They went by boat to St. Louis, where the wagon trains were made up, and then from there to Kanesville (Council Bluffs).
“I well remember where I was sixty five years ago. I was camped on the banks of the Missouri River about to start for the Rocky Mountains, in a company of Mormon immigrants. That was the day on which I was baptized. It was also the last time I saw my Mother. She came out to the road to bid me good-bye. She crossed the plains with my brother, Henry (who was thirteen that month of July) in one company, I in another and Father in still another company. Mother died of cholera on the plains. (She died eleven days later, 15 July 1852 and was buried at Loups Fork, Nebraska, with bark stripped from trees under and over her.) We did not know about it until the wagon train reached Salt Lake City. I did not see Father and Henry until three weeks after I arrived as they had gone out of the city, down to Lehi.”
George's sickness and desires to go to California were known by his sister Ellen. She writes in her March 8, 1852 letter that she is “glad to hear George is well again.” She also states, “George, we hope you will do well if you go to California and I hop you will write to us.” She expressed a similar sentiment in a letter she wrote to George around 1851.
On his arrival in Salt Lake, George's first work was shingling on the Social Hall, a building used for recreational purposes, dancing, theaters etc., until the Salt Lake Theater was built. He met Martha Ann Townsend soon after his arrival. She came to Utah in August of that same year. In November 1852 George went to Mountainville (now Alpine), Utah County.
George and Martha were married on July 9, 1853 in Salt Lake City, UT. Their children were John, Florence, George Emma, Susan, Jessie, Jane, Marion, Vernie, Kate. Also in 1853 George was at the laying of the corner stone of the Salt Lake Temple and at the same Conference was ordained a Seventy by Orson Pratt. In the fall of 1853 George and Martha went to Salt Lake City and opened a cabinet shop in the Thirteenth Ward.
George and Martha's first home was in the 20th ward. George was a cabinet-maker, by trade, and had a shop and made all kinds of furniture from wood he hauled from the nearby canyon. Some of it was sold by Dinwoodey's store. Many of his pieces of pioneer furniture are yet to be found in different parts of the state, mostly in Dixie. Martha helped with the painting and stenciling. In 1854 George built a house and shop in Brigham Street.
In 1853-54 George served in the Sidney Willis' company in the Walker War and went as far south as Fillmore, helping to drive cattle on his return to Salt Lake. One day in 1855 Martha was cleaning house and put all of her furniture in the shop to be painted. That night the shop, furniture and all, caught fire and went up in smoke. They moved with their three children (George had adopted Martha's son, John, from a previous marriage and they had two, Florence and George) to a house on First South between Main and State. Here Susie was born.
In 1857 George went with Lot Smith to Fort Bridger to resist Johnston's army and with 24 others burned 70 wagons in two wagon trains on the Greene River and one on the Sandy. They destroyed provisions and captured over 1000 head of oxen and some beef cattle used by the army in hauling their outfit. He was also at Echo Canyon, defending it from the army. He and his family were part of the “move south” in 1858. The family went to Lehi along with Samuel and his family. George and Martha returned after two months, but Samuel remained there and it was the location where his son Samuel was born. Samuel ended up dying in Lehi.
George was a cabinet maker in 1860. He had a household of seven people, no real wealth and a personal wealth of $300. Also in 1860 and 1862 George went to California freighting. George and Martha moved to the 19th ward. He went to conference one day in 1862 and during the meeting was called to take his family and go on a mission to Dixie to help settle that part of the country. He was told to dispose of his property before going. George responded to the call and first settled in St. George but was sent to Virgin City, where his daughter Jessie was born in 1863. After three years, they were sent to Dalton on the Virgin River. Jane was born there in 1866. Martha told her daughter that she was happier there than in any place where she had ever lived. Their crops were good and the cattle increased. It was beautiful farming country.
There was an Indian uprising and the women and children were taken to St. George and the men prepared to fight. George was one of the five hundred men called from Kane and Sanpete counties to fight the Indians. The trouble was farther north and soon over, so the men did not have to go. George remained in St. George and continued as always with his cabinet making. He built an adobe house, the best he had ever had. Marion was born there in 1869. In a year or two, George was called to go to Panacca, Nevada, so he sold his house in St. George and moved to Panacca, where he built another house. In 1870 George was a carpenter, furniture merchant, and farmer with a household of 9, real wealth of $2000 and personal wealth of $800. Vernie was born in Panacca in 1871. George was then hauling ore from Pioche to Bullionville. He was not asked to go to the mining towns with his family.
In the spring of 1872, Erastus Snow; President of the Dixie Mission, came to Panacca and released George from the mission to go wherever he chose. He moved his family back to St. George while he disposed of his property in Panacca. In the fall of the same year we moved back to Salt Lake City. That same fall his daughter Florence and William Barron and his sister, Amanda, and Virgil Kelley of Springville, left St. George to go to the Endowment House in Salt Lake City. George and his family left the next month (November). Florence and William returned south by another route and the family did not see her again until she had two little girls. The eldest daughter intended to enter Brigham Young College in the fall, when she died suddenly in July. The second girl became Mrs. E.J. Norton, wife of the man who was the beloved “registrar” at the University of Utah for so many years.
The family went from St. George to Salt Lake in a covered wagon and it took ten days to make the trip. They arrived in Salt Lake on Thanksgiving Day. It was a gray day and surely seemed cold to the children. A daughter remembers, “We stopped at Auntie Pitt's (Mother's sister) and I have thought many times since and wondered how she felt to have a wagon load of people, dusty and dirty from their long ride, come-into her-clean, well furnished home. I remember a lot of good things she had for us to eat and we were plenty hungry.”
When the preparations for leaving St. George were being made, Apostle Ivin's mother and his father's (Israel Ivins) other wife came and helped with the sewing. They made the family hoods, the first they had ever had or needed. The children saw snow for the first time in their lives during this trip. The family stopped with some of George's friends from Nauvoo. They made Martha's home their headquarters
when they came to Salt Lake for the semi-annual conferences. Martha and the two youngest girls slept in the house. George, and his son slept on quilts on the ground. Three other daughters were put to bed in the wagon. Martha came out before she went to bed and told them to lie “spoon fashion”. When they woke in the morning the bed on the ground was covered with snow. The family stopped at Cove Fort where they drove inside the enclosure. George fried bread at the fireplace, the first and last time I ever saw him cook.
In Salt Lake again, George went into the transfer business and owned the Salt Lake Transfer Co. for five years. When he disposed of it he took up some land across the Jordan River from Salt Lake City at North Point in 1880. He was a farmer and President and manager of the North Point Canal Company of Salt Lake County.
In all the moving from place to place, Martha was able to make things comfortable and homelike. She was the best of cooks. (Her recipes were mostly in her head and not much help to others as her Directions were quite vague. She once tried to tell a daughter how to make biscuits -- enough flour for the number you need, salt to taste, enough lard to make them tender, soda for how sour the milk is etc.) George was a good provider and kept her cupboards and cellar well supplied. She was an excellent needlewoman and did fine hand work. Her embroidery was so beautifully done that it was hard to tell the wrong from the right side. She made many silk crazy quilts with fancy stitching around each “crazy” piece. In early days she used to make her father's pleated front shirts by hand. When she took her baby to spend the day with her mother, she knit a pair of little stockings while there.
Martha spent a great deal of time, money and energy in genealogical research and has a direct line of descent and has had Temple ordinances performed back to and including her thirteenth great grandparents. This makes eighteen generations from Jacob Townsend, about the year 1400, who have shared the benefits of the Temples. In 1884 the Logan Temple was dedicated and from 1885-7 George and Martha made many trips to Logan to the Temple. In 1888 George and Martha sold their farm and bought another home and farm in Logan. In Logan they were able to consistently perform more Temple work. In 1890 George made a trip back to the eastern states to try and get more genealogical records, but was unsuccessful.
From 1890-1 George was water master and Justice of the Peace in Logan. In the church, George was ordained to the office of High Priest on May 24, 1904, by E.W. Smith. For the last ten years of his life, on account of failing health, he was not been able to do very much. George passed away at 91 years of age on January 7, 1922 in Logan, UT. He had suffered from heart and stomach problems.
