''The Best of Its Kind and Grade": Rebuilding the Sanpete Valley, 1890-1910 BY T H O M A S C A R I E R
Early adobe house in Mount Pleasant with a ca. 1873 Italianate crosswing addition. Sanpete County tax photograph, ca. 1920. Unless otherwise noted all drawings (dated within parentheses) and photographs are by the author.
Mount Pleasant, John Henry Seely could well be proud of his accomplishments during the preceding decade. Starting with little more than his own initiative, he had built up a thriving livestock business, and now, in the summer of 1890, he found himself one of the community's most wealthy and influential citizens. Realizing that the key to success in the rapidly expanding sheep industry lay in improving the wool yield of his herds, Seely had journeyed to California in the early 1880s S T A N D I N G BEFORE HIS NEWLY COMPLETED HOI^SE IN
Mr. Carter is an architectural historian with the Ltah State Historical Society and adjunct assistant professor in the Sc hocjl of Architecture at the l'ni\ersity of t'tah. He woidd like to thank Charles Peterson, Stan Layton, and Dean May for their insights into late nineteenth-century Mormon history, Kent Powell for his interest in the research, and Barbara Murphy and Peter Goss for help in the fieldwork.
