28 thoughts on “Latter-day Saint Images, 1931 (2)”

1. Yay, Dominguez & Escalante! They came from Santa Fe as I have many times. The route is much different now,and they were pretty much lost, but travelers from New Mexico still come down Spanish Fork Canyon which is sort of named for them.

2. I’m intrigued by the Rancagua, Chile photo. I served there as a missionary in the mid 70s. Missionaries weren’t formally assigned to Chile until 1956 and the Chilean mission wasn’t formally opened until 1961, so where did these primary kids come from?

   In the Andes outside of Rancagua is an underground copper mine called El Teniente. Wikipedia says that copper was discovered there in 1819 and that a subsidiary of Kennecott Copper ran the current mine until 1971 when copper was nationalized by the government of Salvador Allende. There must have been several LDS families affiliated with the Kennecott subsidiary who lived there in the 30s, enough to create their own Primary.

   Members in Rancagua told me about the town of Sewell, near the mine in the Andes, where the miners and their families lived. Richer veins of copper were discovered underneath the town and gradually the town was dismantled and the miners moved to Rancagua, located in the valley below. By the time I arrived the miners all lived in Rancagua and every day large buses would drive around town and pick up the miners for their shifts in the mountains.

3. Hi!

   This collage is great! I am wondering if the Garland Blazer boys pic is of my great grandmother Hattie Miller Moore, who lived in the Garland, UT area from roughly 1880-1940. Thank You…

4. KLC, a paragraph accompanying a group of Rancagua photos in the Children’s Friend says that Maurine Bennion Folsom (a former member of the Primary General Board) and her husband were “making their home at present in that land,” and she started this Primary for the non-member families she came to know there. One of the sponsors was “Club Teniente” — you landed on the answer to your question with the first shot! At the time this photo was taken, there were about 30 non-member children, Sister Folsom, and four assistant teachers. She refers to “the Gringo townsite” so I presume most of these were ex-pat Americans.

5. Lew, I don’t know who the teacher in that picture is. However, many of these scans were made before I started keeping track of all the names in the captions (I should have known people would want that information but it took me a while to catch on to that). I’ll go back to the magazine I scanned it from and see if by any chance the teacher is named. Might take me a few days, so keep checking back.

6. Some interesting symbolism in those photos. First, the swastika in the Indian pageant photo from Panaca, Nevada–a reminder that the symbol appropriated and made a symbol of evil by the Nazis had appeared in numerous cultures around the world. Even now, Japanese maps are littered with swastikas, indicating the location of shrines or temples.

   And what of the headbands that the seagull girls are wearing. Are those cut-out birds on their foreheads?

   Finally, I lived in Provo for 20 years, and never saw that Dominguez-Escalante monument. Turns out that it’s on the grounds of the City-County Building, directly across University Avenue from the old tabernacle-new temple. I guess I should have opened my eyes, since I’ve been past that site hundreds of times.

7. Couldn’t stand it — went down to look up that picture immediately. Good news is that the teacher *is* named — bad news, at least for Lew, is that she is Eva Hansen rather than Lew’s great-grandmother.

   I hope that added bit eventually turns out to be good news for some future visitor.

8. Good eye, Mark, for headbands if not for monuments. Those *are* seagulls on the girl’s headbands. The Children’s Friend provided instructions and a pattern for the girls to make them, as a sort of uniform. The other girls’ classes had related headbands. I don’t think they were worn for very many years — maybe for about as long as the Trail Builders classes wore beanies.

9. I remember, thirty years after these pictures, doing maypole “dances” in elementary school. Anybody else?

   Also, I can’t help wondering, looking at these and other pictures of Church members in Europe, if World War 2 had especially devastating effect on Church membership. I wonder if similar pictures from the late 1940s/early 1950s would show a much different turnout?

10. I’m sure it’s no surprise to Ardis that the Circleville picture is what intrigues me. Were Circleville and Junction separate wards in 1931, or is there a good chance that I have kin in this picture? I’m pretty sure there was a period of time where everyone in southern Piute County went to Circleville for church.

11. I really enjoyed this set of photos — thanks. 1931 isn’t that long ago, and yet, it feels so old. Wonderful. Thanks.

    In response to Gary’s maypole comment, I remember participating in a couple in late 1970’s Primary activities! The Gunnison one appears to be all girls, but by the time I came along, they were “co-ed” affairs.

12. Fantastic, as always, Ardis. I’m curious about the Sunderland Branch football team. Did/does the church sponsor branch and ward soccer leagues in the UK like they do basketball (and softball? Is that still a thing anywhere?) in the US?

13. Chad Too, I’m pretty sure they were separate wards in the ’30s, before transportation improvements made it easier to combine those tiny wards into one larger one.

    Gary, I’ve done a few picture compilations post-war. They seem to be good sized groups, but I’ve never considered them from your question before. Besides the devastation of war, there was so much emigration in the years following — I’ll have to look into what that did for numbers, and whether conversions made up for the losses. I just don’t know.

    Chris, I don’t think the sports teams were sponsored by church units, although the missions did occasionally field teams of elders as a publicity/proselyting tool. Rather, I think these are just Mormon boys forming their own teams for civic leagues. At least, I’ve never seen anything to suggest that branches sponsored them officially, or that there was any kind of league play, one branch against another.

    So much still to learn!

14. The sixth grade girls used to dance the maypole at Joaquin School in Provo until at least the mid-1960s. Then in 1964 we moved (along with a bunch of the other kids, it seemed) and went to Rock Canyon Elementary School for sixth grade. There was no maypole dance for the sixth grade girls there, which caused one of the other “movers” in our class to go into a two-month long pout. It’s truly wonderful that even an old memory can dredge up the high points of life from nearly 50 years ago.

15. By happy accident, I discovered this paragraph in the Millennial Star, vol. 100, no. 52, p. 825 (1938):

    Towards the close of the summer season the Church broke again into prominence in athletics when the Rochdale team garnered the National Baseball Cup. Playing before crowds of 5,000 people or more, the baseball team established a reputation for the Mormon players of efficient and clean sportsmanship.

    There’s no way of telling whether the “Rochdale team” emerged from a intra-church competition, or if it was just a bunch of Yankee ringers who schooled the Brits on a game they know nothing about.

16. How fun!

17. A definite highlight of May in fifth grade was to dance the Maypole in the ‘Mayday’ assembly. This was in the 1960s and 1970s in south-central Utah. I love this photo series.

18. Mark B., the maypole tradition continued at Joaquin in Provo up to at least 1979. There is a photo in my parents home of me receiving the Kiwanis Hope of America award and we are standing in front of the maypole. It just occurred to me why this country is in such a mess, I was the hope of America. Sorry, my bad.

19. Mendon, Utah, in Cache Valley, still does the Maypole dance. Either last week or the w4ek before there was a colored picture in the Herald Journal of the maypole young women in best dress around the maypole. Did you notice that several of the young girls doing the maypole dance had coats on, so it must have been a cold day.

    I loved the picture of the cute Seagull girls of the Swiss-German mission with their long braids.

20. I’m not sure whether to blame the decline and fall of this country on Carl C’s failure to live up to his calling as the Hope of America, or on coed Maypole dances at Primary. Whichever it is, Keepa has once again shed a bright light on a hidden part of our past.

21. I should install a “like” button — Mark’s last would certainly earn that.

22. Thanks, Mark and Ardis, for the additional info/input on the nature of these sports teams.

23. I hate to be clueless or too lazy to look it up, but how old were the Beehive Girls in 1931?

24. And when did it change to the structure of Beehives/Mia Maids/Laurels that we know today?

25. Ok, still clueless, but I did look it up. Correct me if I am wrong. The organization for Young Women was called the Beehive Girls in 1913. Mia Maids and Young Gleaners were introduced in 1950 and age groups differentiated as now. In 1959 the Young Gleaners were re-branded as Laurels.
    To my History Experts out there-Correct or not?

26. Pretty much, with one twist. When the Beehive Girls were first organized, it wasn’t an age group/class the way it later became — it was an activity group, primarily for summer months, and was open to girls of all MIA ages (and in some cases to older women). It had kind of the relationship that Scouting has to priesthood quorums. At some point the Beehives became the 12-14-year-olds year round, with the older girls being Juniors and, um, um, um, the older girls’ group name is escaping me at the moment. The Juniors and the Whatever-They-Weres lasted until the MIA Maids and Gleaners came along.

    I need to work out a table of classes and ages and years to help us all keep it straight, with both girls’ and boys’ classes.

27. I danced the maypole as a sixth-grader at Wasatch Elementary in– I think– 1989, though it was at the last-day-of-school assembly, where each grade did a dance, rather than at a May Day assembly.

28. My son’s class did the Maypole dance in his sixtge grade class at Joaquin Elementary in 1993 or 1994/95

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