Jesse N. Smith Home

Located in Parowan, Utah – this is the oldest adobe structure in Utah. Jesse also discovered the first lead mine in Utah.

Dedicated to the memory of Mary Aikens Smith and her sons Jesse Nathaniel and Silas Sanford and to the memory of all the pioneer settlers who founded Parowan in 1851.

Constructed 1856-58 by Jesse N. Smith

Restored 1967 by Jesse N. Smith Family Assn.

Plaque provided by National Society Sons of the Utah Pioneers

Utah Historic Homes

Jesse N. Smith Home

Built by: Jesse N. Smith, 1856-57

Registered by: Jesse N. Smith Family, 2-3-71

Construction notes: Original portion made of adobe brick

Located at 45 West 100 South in Parowan, Utah and added to the National Register of Historic Places (#75001807) on June 20, 1975. The following is from the nomination form when it was added to the register:

The Jesse N. Smith hone derives its significance from two factors. It is an excellent and well preserved example of an early Mormon Pioneer lone built of stuccoed adobe. Secondly, it was the home of one of Southern Utah and Northern Arizona’s most prominent pioneers, Jesse W. Smith. According to family records,. Jesse N. Smith, born December 2, 1834, in Stockholm, St. Lawrence County, New York, was the youngest cousin of the Mormon founder Joseph Smith. As a boy Jesse lived in Kirtland, Ohio, and in 1839 his family moved to Missouri. Intending to settle at Far West, word of Governor Bogg’s Extermination Order caused a change of plans and eventually the family made their way to Illinois. At the age of thirteen Jesse traveled to Utah with the Parley P. Pratt Company, reaching the Great Salt Lake Valley on September 25, 1847.

Four years after his arrival in Utah, Jesse N. Smith was called to help with the establishment of the Iron Mission. Making his home in Parowan, lie soon became one of the leaders in church and political affairs in Southern Utah. In 1855. at the age of 21, he served as a Representative to the Territorial Legislature and three years later was elected Mayor of Parowan.

It was during this period that work on his Parowan home began. In his journal Smith notes that in the spring of 1856 he made adobes to build a house. The June 28, 1856, journal entry offers some insight into the hazards of house-building, “While quarrying rock for my house, I fell and rolled down the face of a steep cliff, some thirty feet, wrenching one of ray ankles so severely that I could not work for several days. The events of the Utah War in 1857 delayed completion of the home until March 1858 when, the Smith diary notes, the family moved into the new home. In 1860 Jesse was called to serve a mission to Denmark. Me proved a successful missionary and in May 1862 he assumed responsibility as President of the Scandinavian Mission and served in that position for more than two years before returning to Utah in 1864. Pour years later in 1868 he was again called to return to Scandinavia where once more he presided over the Scandinavian Mission until 1870. Although Jesse N. Smith had provided his family with a modest but comfortable home, the five years lie was away from his family serving missions for the Church were undoubtedly a difficult time for his two wives and their children. One of his daughters, recalling the Christmas of 1862 in their Parowan home, wrote: “All of us children hung up our stockings. We jumped up early in the rooming to see what Santa had brought, but there was not a tiling in them. Mother wept bitterly. She want to her box and got out a little apple and cut it in tiny pieces and this was our Christmas.

Nine months before Jesse Smith returned home from his first Scandinavian mission his second wife Margaret died leaving two children to be raised by his first wife Emma. Jesse married a total of five wives and fathered 44 children. The Smiths remained in Parowan until 1878 when Jesse was called to help lead the Mormon colonization efforts in Arizona. Apparently this call came in response to a controversy which developed between the Smith brothers, Silas S. and Jesse H. , and William U. Dame in something of a power struggle for the position of ecclesiastical leader in Iron County. Jesse N. Smith was nominated as Stake President in a meeting presided over by Brigham Young but was not sustained by a majority of Saints because of objections to Smith’s arbitrary and tyrannical nature. In the end Dame was successful in becoming Stake President and the Smith brothers left for other areas Silas to the San Juan Mission and ultimately the San Luis Valley of Colorado and Jesse to the Little Colorado Region of Arizona. Here he did become the spiritual leader of the Snowflake area serving as President of the Fast Arizona Stake from 1879 to 18S7 and President of -the Snowflake Stake from 1887 to his death in 1906. In addition to his church responsibilities, Smith was President of the Arizona Cooperative Mercantile Association. He was active in railroad construction and a leading figure in water development on the Little Colorado River. His 1 1/2 story brick home in Snowflake, Arizona, was listed on the National Register in 1972.

In the Forward to the 1970 edition of The Journal of Jesse Nathaniel Smith, Charles Peterson outlines the significant role of Smith in Utah and Mormon history:

Of all the Latter-day Saint causes of Smith’s time none were more important than those of the gathering to Zion and the extension of the physical bounds of the Kingdom. Like many Mormons, Jesse N. Smith devoted his life to these causes, but, more than most of his contemporaries, he played roles which cut across the full fabric of the Mormon experience. He was in the truest sense of a church leader one who may be classified accurately as a field commander. Directing the preaching and convert migration of a proselyting mission abroad and directing the water development and homebuilding of long-term colonizing missions in the West, he at once shared the attitudes and experiences of the church’s top hierarchs, yet worked, aspired, and sacrificed with rank-and-file pioneers in opening new frontiers.

Style and significance:
During the period from June, 1856, to March, 1858, Jesse N. Smith constructed, a two-story home facing the town square in Parowan. He quarried the rock, baked the adobes and, hewed the timber himself. The original building consisted of four rooms, two upstairs and two downstairs and a rock basement. As originally constructed, it an “I” house, i.e., it had a one-room deep rectangular plan, two stories high. In 1865, Smith built a lean-to addition on the rear of the house consisting of four rooms, two upstairs and two downstairs. The front façade of the house was also plastered at that time, In 1879, Smith sold the house to a William Bentley for $2,700. For several years the building was unoccupied, but in 1962 the Jesse N. Smith Family Association purchased the building and began to raise money for its restoration. This restoration took place between 1967 and 1969 and cost $12.000. The roof was repaired and the adobe walls, which because badly eroded due to the defective roof, were repaired and replastered. The front wall on the main story had lost its original plaster, but because of protection from the long front porch the wall had not eroded and was left with its adobe bricks exposed.

In profile, the building is a modified saltbox. Though the lean-to was added later, its roof has the same pitch as the original gabled roof.

The front façade of the house is symmetrically arranged with a centered door and two large flanking windows on the lower floor and three double-hung sash 6 over 6 paned windows on the upper floor, The windows have wooden lintels and sills and are trimless. The cornice is moulded and skirted and returns slightly along the gable-ends. Two gable-end chimneys complete the Federal style façade. The large porch which extends along “the entire length of the home is supported by decorative lathe-turned posts. The porch entablature is simple and the porch soffit is boxed. The porch is believed to have been added later, as was the front door with its glass pane and the small window to the right of the door. The windows on the lower floor are fixed with transoms above. These, too, were doubtlessly modified after initial construction.

The interior features the same room arrangement as the original plan, The staircase is centralized and in the lean-to. There are six fireplaces in the home.

Despite the few alterations that have been made to the building, its general form-and simple detailing continue to reflect its 1856-58 construction and styling. It is typical of old Colonial American houses and is thought to be the oldest home in Southern Utah.