In Memoriam

Melvin T. Smith, 1928–2020

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.

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 model for the bronco-riding cowboy silhouette on the Wyoming license plate, he could have been.

Melvin T. Smith, as pictured in 1971, the year he became director of the Utah State Historical Society and Utah Division of State History. Utah State Historical Society, photograph no. 13681.

Melvin graduated from Cowley High School in 1946 where he was student body president, an all-state basketball player, and student excelling in all subjects, including Spanish, which he expected to use as an LDS missionary to Mexico or Latin America. Instead, in 1948 he was called to the New England States Mission, where he spend much of his mission walking around western Massachusetts “without purse or script.”

After his mission, he joined the U.S. Navy and spent most of the next four years on the East Coast and aboard a newly commissioned destroyer, the U.S.S. Wilkinson. Sailing to New Orleans, Cuba, and other Caribbean ports, as well as England, Scotland, and Denmark, brought Melvin new perspectives on the world beyond his experiences in Wyoming and Massachusetts. While in the Navy, he married Marlene Threet, and their first two children were born before his release from active duty. Melvin and Marlene divorced in 1979 after raising nine children. In 1995 he married Lorna Collard McCarrie, with whom he lived in St. George until his death.

In 1956, ten years after graduating from high school, Melvin enrolled in college. He began at the Northwest Community College in Powell, Wyoming, then transferred to the University of Wyoming, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1959. A year later he was awarded a master’s degree in American Studies, writing his thesis on “The Image of Early Utah Mormons in Contemporary American Literature.”

Melvin returned to the Northwest Community College to teach classes in English, World Civilization, and Spanish. He also taught LDS Seminary and Institute classes with one of the benefits being free tuition for summer school at Brigham Young University, where he entered the PhD program in history. He left Wyoming at the end of the 1963 school year and moved his family to Provo. Working under the prominent western historian LeRoy Hafen, he passed the qualifying exams in 1965. That same year, he was hired at Dixie College in St. George, where he proved to be a popular and respected teacher. He sponsored the College’s Young Democrats and was elected Faculty Association president and president of the Southern Utah Teacher’s Association. His political and academic activities aggravated the college administration and, after three years, he was denied tenure and effectively blacklisted for positions with other academic institutions. The discriminatory treatment led to a lawsuit that Melvin won.

The Dixie dismissal came at a fortuitous time for the Utah State Historical Society. The 1966 National Historic Preservation Act had provided federal money to the states to establish historic preservation offices. By 1969, funding was available and the Utah State Historical Society had been designated as the state agency to house the office. Out of work, with no teaching possibilities in sight as the Dixie College lawsuit made its way through the courts, and with the strong endorsement of Utah State Historical Society board member Juanita Brooks, Melvin was hired to establish and run the Utah Historic Preservation Office. In 1971, when Charles Peterson resigned to take a teaching position at Utah State University, Melvin was hired as the new director of the Historical Society. The next year he finished his PhD dissertation, “The Colorado River: The History in the Lower Canyon Area,” which, according to the historian Gary Topping, is “perhaps the single most impressive piece of research on river history ever accomplished.”

In describing his administrative philosophy, Melvin wrote, “My basic premise remained that people wanted to do a good job, and would if they knew what to do, were given responsibility and credit for doing their work, and if a good communication system was in place. I felt that most people should be involved in actual professional work, and that administrative staff should be kept to a minimum.” His weekly staff meetings were an open forum to discuss issues and concerns, propose and debate solutions, and set plans to move forward. They were, for his young staff, a seminar in historical agency administration and, for the agency, a tool for extending the influence of history to all sectors of Utah.

Melvin saw one of his major legacies as the dedicated professional staff he brought to the historical society. They included at least twenty individuals; four later served as directors, others left to take teaching positions in higher education, and most of us remained at the historical society until retirement.

Melvin worked closely with Governor Scott Matheson to complete the historical society’s move from the Thomas Kearns Mansion to the Denver and Rio Grande Depot in 1980. Under Melvin’s direction, the State Historic Preservation Office expanded to include two sections— one for survey and research, the other for planning and development. The State Antiquities Section was established. The State History Museum Program was added in preparation for the historical society’s move to the Denver and Rio Grande Depot. Under his administration the Utah History Fair Program was established for school students. The Library saw an expanded collection program, the addition of an Oral History Program, and the appointment of a Place Names Committee.

Under Melvin’s direction as editor of the Utah Historical Quarterly, the quarterly published special issues on Utah’s ethnic minorities, architecture, folklore, women, childhood, sports and recreation, urban Utah and rural Utah, German immigrants, and Brigham Young, among other topics. In 1975, the historical society launched Beehive History, an annual publication for young people. The next year saw the publication of The Peoples of Utah, edited by Helen Papanikolas. This groundbreaking book was symbolic of the historical society’s mission under Melvin to represent all peoples and all aspects of Utah history. Also in 1976 Melvin was instrumental in organizing a bicentennial celebration of the 1776 Dominguez-Escalante expedition. His horsemanship was evident when he served as a reenactment rider on the Pony Express trail. He encouraged the continuing establishment of local historical societies and initiated the practice of holding the annual meeting and the annual Statehood Day celebration in different locations around the state.

While administration demanded most of his time, Melvin was active as a historian, publishing many book reviews and articles. From 1980 to 1981 he served as president of the Mormon History Association and, for his presidential address, delivered a timely and thought-provoking consideration of “Faithful History: Hazards and Limitations.” Melvin was a primary force in the establishment of the Association of Utah Historians and active in the National Council for Public History, the State History Administrator’s Association, the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers, and other history organizations.

After more than thirteen years as director of the Utah State Historical Society and as a new administration took over state government, Melvin was asked to resign. Many protested the forced resignation, but to no avail. He then moved to Boise and served as director of the Idaho State Historical Society.

Yet Melvin’s loyalty to the Utah State Historical Society never wavered. Each year until his passing, he purchased more than a dozen memberships for his children and siblings. He continued to write book reviews for the quarterly and contributed in memoriam essays for his mentor LeRoy Hafen and his friend and colleague Jay Haymond.

After leaving Idaho, Melvin returned to Utah and his ranch near Mount Pleasant, with the purpose of “finding out who Melvin really was.” That search included wide-ranging reading, workshops, seminars, extensive writing, conversations with family and friends, a rigorous study of A Course in Miracles, and an ongoing dedication to running. Melvin’s running led him to run more than a dozen marathons and countless races and instill within his grandchildren an interest in running while fostering family ties through his annual “Beat Grandpa Race.”

Writing for his children and grandchildren, Melvin observed, “Mine has been an incredibly rich, exciting, and challenging life, with many untold and unexpected ‘happenings’ that I neither anticipated nor planned for nor wanted.” Fortunately his life has had a lasting impact on a generation of Utah historians and the institution that he valued—the Utah State Historical Society.

—Allan Kent Powell Utah State Historical Society