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Show 26 The Grouse Creek Cultural Survey Second Coming of Christ and the creation of a Kingdom of God on earth. The Kingdom was not to be a random collection of homesteads; instead, it would stand as a series of planned communities where people lived together in righteousness and harmony. The earthly manifestation of the heavenly city was the nucleated farm village, a small gridiron town plan based loosely on the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith's Plat of the City ofZion. The Mormon village, as it is often called, became the cornerstone of Latter-day Saint settlement in the Great Basin. It is characterized by the concentration of people in town; the farmers commute to surrounding fields and pastures. The exigencies of cattle ranching perhaps precluded the implementation of such a circumscribed settlement type, and Grouse Creek does not have a gridiron plat. Yet Mormon ideals are visible. Grouse Creek may be described as a kind of "line" village; the ranches are laid out along a single road with their narrow ends facing the road. The line village provides, as geographer Lowry Nelson has pointed out, the advantage of having the "residence on the operated farm, while at the same time bringing the families as close and accessible to each other as possible" (Nelson 1952:19). The heart of Grouse Creek is the Mormon meetinghouse, or chapel. Located about midway up the main valley on a rise at the northern end of town, the meetinghouse effectively symbolizes the religious identity of the community (site 31). A log building, constructed in the 1870s, was replaced by a large stone structure in the Victorian Gothic style in 1912, which was replaced in turn by a frame and masonry structure in 1984. In conversation today's residents express their admiration for the old stone church, but always allude to its deteriorated condition. Marge Thompson said, "I'm one that always lived here and grew up here and loved that building, had lots of good memories and the day they razed it was hard, but by the same token, I was just as anxious as the next one to have the new one built." The nearest rival to the meetinghouse in the community's affection is the school (site 30). The citizens of the area place a high priority on education and take pride in the quality of the Grouse Creek school and its reputation for producing excellent students. The school, built in three sections between 1902 and 1912, currently offers classes from kindergarten through grade ten. Children attend high school in larger communities to the north and east. The domestic architecture is overwhelmingly vernacular and best understood in terms of several specific house types. From the time of first settlement until at least the 1920s, traditional Utah housing forms such as the hall (or single-cell), double-pen, hall-parlor, and central-passage types were common. These houses are built in a variety of sizes and materials, generally with gable roofs, symmetrically composed facades, and rear kitchen ells. The most common early house was probably the single room or hall-plan type, although such small houses are likely now to be found embedded in subsequent layers of remodeling (sites 15 and OGC 23). Another important house from the initial settlement period is the double-pen type, consisting of two roughly square rooms. |
