John and Sarah McAffee Ritchie Home

This house originally belonged to John and Sarah McAffee Ritchie. It is an excellent example of late Victorian Eclectic home (built in 1924). The curved porch resembles a Queen Ann style. The details on the house are fancier than many of the other Victorian homes in the neighborhood.

John Ritchie was born in Scotland in 1843. Sarah McAffee was also from Scotland and was born in 1847. John crossed the plains and came to Utah in 1863 and moved to Heber the next year. There he met Sarah. They were married in 1867 and then moved to Charleston. The couple had eleven children, two of them died young. When one child died in a ranching accident, the LDS Stake President gave Sarah a blessing and said she would have another child. Her youngest daughter, Ella Louisa Ritchie, was born when Sarah was fifty-seven years old. Sarah died in 1919. The Ritchies lived in Charleston for sixty years where John raised hay and grain. They then move to Provo. As was customary at the time, the Ritchies owned a quarter of the block and he built the home to the north for his daughter, Mary Wagstaff.

John W Stubbs, a farmer, married Margaret Ritchie, one of John and Sarah’s daughters. When she died during the flu epidemic, he married the Ritchie’s youngest daughter, Ella Louisa. John and Ella lived in the house in 1929. John died in 1932. Their daughter Nila Stubbs and her husband Robert Lee then lived in the house

124 South 600 West in Provo, Utah