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Folk Material Culture 131 them; they represent thoughts, reactions, and feelings as much as they represent historical movements or processes. Without understanding the symbolic meaning of cultural artifacts, we cannot come to an adequate understanding of the past since these items embody a vitality and immediacy unattainable by the printed word, or even the spoken word in stories, yarns, and facts narrated by the teller of history. T h e symbolic immediacy of folk artifacts is of quintessential importance to our understanding of Utah's past and, in particular, the past and perhaps present of the Sanpete-Sevier communal chain. 2 Man's need for and use of symbols is very likely the single most important element that distinguishes him from the animals. My central thesis here is that the material culture of the folk is a direct product of the symbolic process and that these symbolic artifacts represent much more than simply houses, barns, gravestones, wagons, or other material art forms; they, in fact, represent the latent desires, aspirations, and hostilities of communal human beings. In Utah this is perhaps especially true among the Scandinavian settlements of Sanpete and Sevier counties. According to S. I. Hayakawa, "the symbolic process permeates h u m a n life at the most primitive and the most civilized levels alike. There are," he continues, "few things that men do or want to do, possess or want to possess, that have not, in addition to their mechanical or biological value, a symbolic value."'However, for h u m a n beings the symbols of value are constantly changing and fluctuating according to societal pressures, family wants and needs, religious changes and discoveries, and, indeed, any influence that works a change in our basic perceptions of reality. Let me illustrate this fluctuating symbolic process by discussing an item of material culture found in Spring City, Utah. T h e building in Spring City, known now by residents as the Old Rock Schoolhouse, 1 was built of local limestone in 1870, apparently as a schoolhouse. Because of three symbolic signs that were c a n e d in a shaped stone in the front facade (fig. 1), the building was also known—and still is by some, I might add— as the Endowment House. These symbols from left to right were of the square, the beehive, and the compass: symbols of transcendent impor2 I use the term communal chain quite literally, since the region is bound together by the north-to-south string of towns and hamlets. J S . I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action (New York: Harcourt Brace Tovanovich, 1972), p. 22. 4 Cindy Rice, "Spring City: A Look at a Nineteenth-Century Mormon Village," Utah Historical Quarterly 43 (1975) : 267. The school was also called the First West Schoolhouse and the John Frank Allred Schoolhouse. Ms. Rice, I think, adequately makes the point here that the building was definitely built for and used as a school. See pp. 266-67.