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Show Folsom: Pioneer Architect 243 Folsom was able to locate friends and employment in Keokuk, and his family remained there for the next two years while many of the Mormons headed west to the Great Basin. According to a family tradition, during this time Folsom demonstrated his prowess as a builder by adding a lower story to an existing two-story brick home that had been left awkwardly high above a newly excavated street. Folsom and several assistants raised the house on jacks, built a street-level story, and then lowered the original house onto the new foundation. 6 The house is still standing. In 1849 William Folsom turned his energies in a new direction. With financial backing from a friend, he left his wife and five children in Iowa while he departed for the gold fields of California. His route took him down the Mississippi to New Orleans and by ship to San Francisco via the Isthmus of Panama. He stayed in California for nearly two years, mining and doing construction work in two areas with appropriately colorful names, Rough and Ready and Coyote Diggings. In the spring of 1851 he helped to organize the Deer Creek Water Company and supervised the construction of a canal nine miles long. T h e following year he sold his share of the company and headed home with his earnings of $10,000 in cash and gold. For his return trip he took the longer but safer route, stopping in Hawaii, passing around Cape Horn, and arriving in Philadelphia in the fall.7 He met his family in Ohio, and, after a brief visit with his father in Buffalo, returned to Keokuk. His visit to Buffalo added another dramatic incident to his biography. Warned by a mysterious voice not to board a boat bound for Cleveland, he delayed his departure and escaped a disastrous collison that took the lives of nearly all the passengers. 8 Back in Keokuk, he divided his fortune with the friend who had paid the expenses of his voyage to California and invested his own share of the money in a grocery business. In 1854 Folsom sold his business and fitted himself out with three wagons to come west. H e arrived at the Missouri River more than a week too late to join the last wagon train of the season, however, and took his family to Council Bluffs for the winter. He quickly found work in the area, since O m a h a across the river was experiencing a building boom as the new territorial capital of Nebraska. The situation was so favorable that Folsom stayed in Council 6 Moss, History of William Harrison Folsom, 25. "Folsom, William Harrison, 1815-1901," dictation of William Folsom at Manti, Sanpete County, Utah, 1886, manuscript, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. 8 "Reminiscences of Church History." 7 |
