This squared limestone block building likely was constructed in the 1870’s or 80’s. The upper floor served as the City Hall, with a raised front entrance and tall plastered ceiling. The lower floor was the City Jail with its separate front and side entrances and two iron-barred jail cells. The front porch has been altered but otherwise, the broadside-facing structure is architecturally intact including the six over six windows and their Federal style lintel caps.
Old-timers claim there were more than two jail cells, but this is not structurally indicated. Most inmates were vagrants or drunks from the train, who disturbed neighbors with their loud complaints from the jail. One elderly gentleman remembered the police arresting some young miscreants (he was one of them) for disobeying the curfew law, and locking them up for a few hours to persuade them to be law-abiding. The building is now a house, but the exterior is largely unchanged from the days when it was a jail; iron bars still remain on the basement windows. The prison cells in the basement are now a guest room and storage room; the jail entry area is a study and bookshelves and a fireplace. The main floor has a kitchenette, dining area, and a living room.(*)
The Peter Greaves and William Price Deakin house is located at 118 South Main Street in Ephraim, Utah and was built in 1880 and was considered to be one of the finest homes south of Provo.
The Greaves-Deakin House is significant because of its fine vernacular architectural design, its elaborate interior decoration, and its remarkable state of preservation. Greaves was a successful Ephraim merchant and his home was consistent with his prominent standing in the community. While basing his design on certain older concepts of internal plan and formal massing. Greaves exploited the stately verticality of the Gothic Revival style to achieve a particularly fine synthesis of traditional and innovative architectural ideas. With its subtle but well-crafted Gothic trim and its spectacular interior decoration, the Greaves-Deakin house ranks as one of truly exceptional examples of early domestic architecture in the Sanpete Valley.
The Greaves house plan is essentially a “T” plan, or “modified temple” vernacular type. The house has a gable facade central axis with a side wing on the north which contains the front door. The gable-facade house plan finds its source in Greek-Revival architectural thinking of the early 19th century when people demanded houses which resembled classical temples. Scholars have called the earliest versions of the Greek Revival house which had the front door on the central gabled axis a “temple form” house. As the century wore on and the house type moved into the upper midwest the main door was increasingly found on the side wing. This house has been called appropriately a “modified temple” form type and reached its height of popularity during the 1840-1880 period in the midwest. The house persists through a number of stylistic changes and can be found in Utah both with Greek Revival and Gothic Revival stylistic- features. This modified-temple house forms an important part of the Utah vernacular and can be viewed as one of the typical house types of the 19th century.
Peter Greaves was born in Patterson, New Jersey in 1837. The family moved through Ohio to St. Louis and eventually joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the late 1840s. Greaves journeyed to Provo in 1852 and moved onto Fort Ephraim in Sanpete County in 1856 where he established himself as a fine carpenter and farmer. By the 1870s Greaves was expanding his operations to include freighting as a “buyer and shipper of wools, hides, and grain.” By 1886 he was president of the Andrews and Co. shipping firm which was based in Nephi. Greaves holdings included in 1898, 100 acres of land and a “comfortable town residence.” He participated in the community as churchman and city councilman and served in the territorial legislature during 1891-1896. Family records indicate that the house was constructed during the 1875-1880 period.
The Greaves-Deakin house is a two-story stone “modified temple” vernacular house type. The type grows out of a Greek Revival attempt to create a gable-facade home patterned after classical temples. Surfacing in the early 1800s the “temple form” homes had the main front door on the central gable facade which was often flanked by side wings. As the house moved into the midwest around mid-century, the front door increasingly was found on the side wing; this variant has come to be called a “modified temple house.” The modifed temple house has a “T” plan, with the “T” lying on its side. Though inspired by Greek thinking, the Greaves-Deakin house is composed primarily of Gothic Revival stylistic features.
The central gable facade axis of the house is two rooms deep and really 21/2 stories high. This section contains a frame segmented bay window on the first floor and gingerbread scroll-cut bargeboards crested by a finial. The side wing is two stories high and has a two-over-two piercing pattern. The tops of the upstairs openings break the eaves slightly and are gabled. The bargeboards and finial pattern here follows the example of the main gable. A hipped porch covers the side front door. While the vertical proportions and principle decorative features of the house reflect Gothic stylistic concerns, the pedimented wooden window heads represent a continued regard for classical motifs.
On the inside the Greaves-Deakin house is well preserved and retains much of its original painted woodwork and wallpaper. The first floor door frames and window mouldings are wood grained walnut. The ceiling in the front bay has a hand painted rosette. Each of the rooms on the first floor contain large fireplaces. The fireplace openings are sealed with wooden panels which at one time were painted with elaborate floral designs. This elaborate painting remains intact in the back room on the south – extending up the wall to the ceiling. The mantle in this room is painted to resemble white marble. Upper rooms reflect a similar state of preservation. Doors are painted in hushed Victorian tones – greys, pinks, and blues. Double doors lead out onto balconies which once graced both the front porch and bay window.
This house was constructed circa 1860s by Frederick Christian Sorensen and his Norwegian wife, Emelia Cecille Marie Flinto. They were some of the first Scandinavians converted to the LDS Church by Elder Erastus Snow. In 1853, with two children, they emigrated from Denmark with the John E. Forsberg Company. That first winter they lived in a wagon box in Manti. In spring if 1854, Frederick was listed as one of the first settlers who helped build Fort Ephraim and lived in a “little house” in the fort.
This 1 1/2-story house is an American variant of the older Scandinavian folk house or “Pair House” type. Built of adobe, the house was covered with red adobe plaster and scored to resemble brick. Frederick was a polygamist so the house was built to accommodate at least two families. It has a central “best room” flanked by a smaller room on each side. The three rooms give this house its “Pair House” or “Parstuga” name. The house has a second story that is reached by two steep stairways on each side. In the rear, a long kitchen adjoins the three main rooms. The roofing system is a heavy timber technique with axe-hewn rafters, rarely found in Sanpete County. Frederick was a skilled blacksmith and crafted hinges, hooks, and latches in the home.
The home’s tall front door was open to many early pioneers, who made their way through Ephraim during its early history. Unaltered through many generations, except for the exterior veneer, this enduring home is an important example of Scandinavian heritage in Utah.
Frederick Christian Sorensen’s marriages that resulted in 22 children:
This building is a Neo-Classical style and was built before 1905. H.P. Larson owned it and he sold it to D.W. Anderson in 1910. It has been the Anderson Drug Store ever since. If you have time walk inside and note the original ceiling and the two old signs on the back wall.(*)
The Malt Shop in Ephraim has always been one of my favorite places in Utah to eat. I love finding old photos and comparing them to the present, here’s what it used to look like:
Spring City was first known as “Allred Settlement”. The original settlers in 1852 were under the leadership of James Allred and most of them were his family members. When an LDS ward was organized there in 1853, Ruben W. Allred was appointed the first bishop. The settlement was abandoned in the summer of 1853 because of ongoing conflict with the indigenous people of the area, the Ute people, including San Pitch Utes (Sanpete county derives its name from the San Pitch Utes). The village was reestablished as “Springtown” in 1859 by William Black, George Black and Joseph S. Black. Christen G. Larsen was made bishop of a new LDS ward in 1860. Beginning in 1853, the Allred family and other church leaders had begun to encourage Danish immigrants to settle in Sanpete County, and, particularly after the community was reestablished in 1859, to join the Allred Settlement. By the mid-1860s locals referred to the north side of town as “Little Copenhagen” or “Little Denmark”. Spring City was also a site of fighting during the Black Hawk War.(*)
Manti was one of the first communities settled in what was to become Utah. Chief Wakara (or Walker), a Ute Tribe leader, invited Brigham Young to send pioneers to the area to teach his people the techniques of successful farming. In 1849, Brigham Young dispatched a company of about 225 settlers, consisting of several families, to the Sanpitch (now Sanpete) Valley. Under the direction of Isaac Morley and George Washington Bradley, the settlers arrived at the present location of Manti in November. They endured a severe winter by living in temporary shelters dug into the south side of the hill on which the Manti Temple now stands. Brigham Young named the new community Manti, after a city mentioned in the Book of Mormon. Manti was incorporated in 1851. The first mayor of Manti was Dan Jones. Manti served as a hub city for the settlement of other communities in the valley.
Relations with the local Native Americans deteriorated rapidly and the Walker War soon ensued. The war consisted primarily of various raids conducted by the Native Americans against Mormon outposts in Central and Southern Utah. The Walker War ended in the mid-1850s in an understanding negotiated between Brigham Young and Wakara. Shortly thereafter, Welcome Chapman and Wakara oversaw the baptism of scores of Wakara’s tribe members. Although immediate hostilities ended, none of the underlying conflicts were resolved.
In 1865 Utah’s Black Hawk War erupted when an incident between a Manti resident and a young chieftain exploded into open warfare between the Mormon settlers and the local Native Americans. Forts were built in Manti and other nearby communities. Smaller settlements in the area were temporarily abandoned for the duration of the war. In the fall of 1867, Chief Black Hawk made peace with the settlers, but sporadic violence occurred until 1872 when federal troops finally intervened. Many Mormon settlers who fought and died in the wars are buried in the Manti Cemetery. Most of the Utes were eventually relocated to the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation in Eastern Utah.
Ephraim was founded in 1854. Located directly opposite a Native American settlement, Ephraim served as Sanpete County’s most important fort through the end of the Black Hawk War in 1868, which is also the year the city incorporated. The presence of the fort drew diverse settlers to the city, and by 1880 the city was nearly 90% Scandinavian. Although the city’s initial growth was based on the fort and later on agriculture, more recently its growth can be attributed primarily to the presence of Snow College. Ephraim surpassed Manti as the largest city in the county during the 1960 Census and has since surpassed 6,135.
President Brigham Young, in 1876, gave the Relief Society sisters an assignment to store wheat for a time of need. This historic, oolite limestone building was constructed as a granary in response to this concept. Pioneer women and children followed the threshers to glean wheat leavings. They sold handmade items and Sunday eggs – eggs laid on Sunday – to purchase wheat to fill the bins. Wheat was given to the bishop for the needy, and grain was given to farmers for seed with a repayment of five bushels for each four bushels given.
Relief Society Wheat and flour were contributed to San Francisco after the earthquake in 1906 and to China during the famine in 1907.
In 1915, the granary was converted to a flour mill that functioned for forty years. In 1969, the granary and adjoining cooperative store were threatened with demolition but were preserved through valiant community efforts. The granary interior was completely reconstructed into The Central Utah Art Center in 1990.
