N O . I U H Q
In the century-and-a-quarter since the Utah State Historical Society was established, no one individual has had a greater impact on the growth of the institution than Melvin T. Smith. Melvin was hired in 1969 to establish the Utah State Historic Preservation Office and was then appointed director of the Utah State Historical Society and Utah Division of State History in 1971. Melvin served as director of the Utah State Historical Society from 1971 through 1985, a time of unprecedented growth and expansion of the historical society’s programs and activities. In recognition of his service as an administrator, public historian, and contributions to the study of Utah history, Melvin was named a fellow of the Utah State Historical Society in 2007. He passed away in St. George on September 5, 2020, at the age of ninety-two.
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Melvin T. Smith, 1928–2020
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IN MEMORIAM
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Melvin Thomas Smith was born in Cowley, Wyoming on June 15, 1928, to Heman and Edetha Smith. He was the fifth child in a family of ten that included eight boys and two girls. The Smiths were deeply rooted in Mormonism, tracing their heritage back to Samuel Harrison Smith, a younger brother to Joseph Smith Jr. Melvin’s grandfather came to Utah in 1848. His father, Heman Smith, traveled by wagon from Utah to the Big Horn Basin in 1901 as a participant in one of the last Mormon settlement ventures in the West. From an early age, hard work was expected of all the Smith boys. They milked cows, chopped wood, cut ice, plowed fields, irrigated crops, thinned sugar beets, and rounded up cattle, along with many other duties. As a boy, Melvin drove a truck by himself to Thermopolis, more than a hundred miles away, to haul ten tons of coal back to Cowley. As a teenager during World War II, he transported German and Italian prisoners of war from a nearby camp and Japanese American internees from the Heart Mountain Relocation Center to help with the sugar beet harvest. Cattle drives to the summer range, annual fall round ups, and wild horse chases in the Pryor Mountains were his dreams and his reality. Melvin earned recognition as a respected “horse breaker” and, during a forty-year career, broke hundreds of horses to ride. If Melvin was not the
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