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RELIGION
Religion has been a strong element of cultural distinctiveness among Carbon County's ethnic groups, and the story of religious institutions within the county is a fundamental part of the county's diverse history. While most early settlers were members of the Mormon faith, it was not religion as much as an affinity for the frontier and the promise of economic betterment that brought the first settlers into the county. Where many areas of the state were settled in response to calls by Mormon religious leaders, Carbon County's experience was different: the first settlers took up homesteads along the Price River on their own initiative. Yet those independent early settlers brought their religion with them. They organized LDS branches, wards, and stakes; they built chapels and a magnificent tabernacle. Individually they strove to live the tenets of Mormonism, and codectively they expanded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints in their towns and through the missionaries they sent out into the world. Like their Mormon neighbors, immigrants from Finland, Italy, Greece, France, Yugoslavia, Japan, and other countries did not come 227
