Stone Buildings of Beaver City

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 43, 1975, No. 3

Stone Buildings of Beaver City

BY RICHARD C POULSEN

LATE IN 1855 and during 1856, the colonization and settlement of the Beaver River valley was begun; this initial work was undertaken mainly by residents of Parowan who were called to this duty by LDS church leaders. Situated west of the Tushar range, about two hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, Beaver City was solidly established in the ensuing years mainly by hardy Scots and English. The county and the town were named Beaver by the early settlers because of the abundance of this furbearer in and along the Beaver River and other streams.

As other people have commented about other places in Utah, Beaver City cannot be seen, let alone appreciated from the speed and glare of the interstate; and few, if any, of the city's stone houses can be seen at all from the freeway. After locking at other towns in the county, mostly mining and railroad boom towns—mere shantytowns despite their "modernization"—one is forcefully impressed with the solidity of Beaver City: the abundance of heavy stone and red-brick buildings many would call "old pioneer" and the clean, logical, symmetrical planning of the town itself. Beaver is, in fact, a stone oasis in a desert of wooden shanties.

Henry Glassie, one authority on material folk culture in the United States, has said: ". . . the telling of a tale and the building of a wagon are frequently repeated parallel culminations of culturally determined knowhow. The wagon type would not have to be invented, nor the tale type composed, by the group whose traditions incorporate that form, but a tale told or a wagon built by a person who does not have that tale or wagon as part of his own tradition cannot be folk." Glassie's statement should adequately explain why the folklorist would study the stone buildings of Beaver and not the architecture of the new Chevron station. Since the book from wdiich this quote was taken devotes roughly half of its entirety to the study of houses and house types, one can substitute the word house or building for wagon in Glassie's paragraph and assert that folk architecture and building is as important and viable an act of the folk as the transmission of a tale—long or short. But possibly more important: the stone buildings of Beaver were and are part of the tradition of the folk, a specific group of people; and studying those traditions, here and now, could very well bring one closer to an understanding of the people that perpetrated them and, ultimately, closer to an understanding of ourselves.

Folk building traditions were, in Beaver, as in other parts of Utah, a marriage of folk culture directly transplanted from northern Europe and an earlier United States culture, also brought from Europe but transmitted and grown in the eastern United States. According to Mrs. Kathleen S. Farnsworth, the masons and builders of Beaver came there from the Scottish counties of Fife and Clackmannan. But many of the stone buildings in Beaver were undoubtedly constructed by laymen, just as the log buildings were.

Henry Glassie classifies two house types in his "The Types of the Southern Mountain Cabin" as cabins because ". . . both are ccmposed of a single construction unit and both are less than two stories high." Many of the stone houses of Beaver, if one uses Glassie's criteria, can be classified as cabins.

Many Beaver residents say the pink stone or tufa that many of the stone houses are built of was quarried in a small side-canyon about five miles up Beaver Canyon, but no quarries are mentioned for the ubiquitous black volcanic rock, although it could have been quarried there too, since it is everywhere surrounding the pink stone. The river bed is full of it.

Most of the oldest stone dwellings in Beaver are composed of the black pumice; the tufa was evidently a later discovery. Interestingly, most of the pink rock houses stand on the east side of town, while the black rock dwellings are mostly west of Main Street.

According to Kathleen Farnsworth, most of the stone houses of Beaver were at one time accompanied by stone outbuildings. Many of these outbuildings served a dual purpose: the "upstairs" was used as a granary and the "downstairs" for storing eggs, butter, milk, and other perishables. Even though those days preceeded the coming of the LDS churchwide welfare program, they at least sound Mormon. The Beaver outbuildings resemble none of those drawn and discussed by Henry Glassie in Pattern, except many in the East do have upper and lower levels.

To the east of Beaver, almost in the foothills, stands the last remaining building of what once was Fort Cameron. Construction of Fort Cameron, a United States military installation, was deemed necessary in southern Utah because of Indian raids and the Mountain Meadows Massacre (there are many versions of why the fort was built, both folk and "historical"). Local stonecutters and builders helped with construction that began in 1861, and all the buildings were composed of black volcanic rock, quarried in the nearby mountains. Thomas Frazer was one of the stonemasons. The only remaining building of the old fort is thought to have been the laundress quarters. It is reminiscent of the black-rock cabins, but was probably built from architectural plans; however, this structure does resemble the Welsh longhouse. In 1873 a detachment of two hundred fifty United States troops arrived at Fort Cameron. The fort was abandoned in 1882 by the army, and taken over partially by the LDS church, which established the Murdock Academy, an extension of Brigham Young Academy. Most of the fort buildings were converted to school use, and other buildings were constructed; but by 1922 and the advent of the public school system, the doors were closed and the land sold to private individuals.

Besides the fact that Beaver City, Utah, is worthy of being declared a National Historic District and that by sheer numbers it almost has more stone buildings than all southern Utah combined, it shows a unique blend of European folk architecture, eastern United States building tradition, and Mormon utilitarianism. Beaver is a microcosm of the Mormon West in a very real sense, a stage where all the drama of everyday life, the life of the folk, was played out on the American frontier, a place where men and women not only left their mark on the land, but a place where the land left its marks on the people. And here, these marks are very evident.

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