This afternoon I transcribed a letter written by a missionary serving in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, in 1898. In reporting a conference, he wrote:
Elder B.S. Rupp sang, “There is a place in Utah.” Elder E.W. Croft also sang the old favorite, “Israel, awake from your long silent slumber.” Elder Croft, who is one of the sweet singers of Paris, Idaho, did justice to the selection he sang.
My first reaction was to smile a little at the apparent shade being thrown at B.S. Rupp – did he not do justice to the song he sang? My second reaction was curiosity about that song, which I soon found appeared in the 1889 Latter-day Saint Psalmody (from which the music reproduced here comes), and the 1890 Liverpool hymnal, Sacred Hymns and Spiritual Songs for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which gives a fuller set of words.
There Is a Place in Utah
– Text by Willliam Willes
There is a place in Utah, that I remember well,
And there the Saints in peace and joy and plenty ever dwell;
My Mountain Home, thou’rt dear to me; to thee I fondly cling, –
While here I roam, far from my home, my Mountain Home I sing,
My Valley Home, my Mountain Home,
The dear and peaceful Valley!
When wintry winds are storming, and snow is falling deep,
Then rich supplies are forming among the mountains steep;
The fertilizing crystal steams, when sunny skies illume,
Make nature’s verdant bosom teem within my Mountain Home.
My Valley Home, my Mountain Home,
The dear and peaceful Valley!The storm-king has no terrors when wintry winds blow cold;
We lighten all life’s sorrows in our lovely Mountain Fold;
We worship there; we dance and sing among the joyful throng,
And there our tithes and offerings bring, which to the Lord belong.
My Valley Home, my Mountain Home,
The dear and peaceful Valley!We plow, we sow and irrigate, to raise the golden grain;
And all unceasing toil that they may independence gain;
Some haul the wood from kanyons wild, some tend the flocks and herds;
And all our moments are beguiled by industry’s rewards.
My Valley Home, my Mountain Home,
The dear and peaceful Valley!Both fruit and flowers we cultivate with much success and care,
And strive our tastes to elevate by products choice and rare:
The desert blossoms as the rose in many a mountain vale,
And rich abundance ever flows, on which the Saints regale
My Valley Home, my Mountain Home,
The dear and peaceful Valley!Our leaders, they are men of might, and truth and justice too;
They’re ever battling for the right, with glory full in view;
The people are united all our leaders to sustain;
And cheerfully obey each call with all their might and main.
My Valley Home, my Mountain Home,
The dear and peaceful Valley!
.
.
The real surprise to me was that this song, which I had never heard of before, appeared in multiple LDS hymnals, as recently as 1940.
I’m sure we are all of the opinion that this song should not be revived for the upcoming new edition of the hymnal … but the more I look at it, the more I like it. Oh, not because it is a gem of art, and not because it is so exclusive to Utah, but because of what I think it might have meant to the generation who first sang it. Many of the Saints of that generation, or their parents, had emigrated to Utah to live among the Saints, some of them after undergoing social, familial, even legal difficulties because of their faith. I can read this hymn as a sort of homespun version of “This is what Zion is like” – a land of plenty, favored of God, led by men of God, where, through their own hard work, the Saints could contribute to a relative – a relative paradise on earth.
I would like to feel that way myself, without limiting the scope of that Zion to Utah.
B.S. Rupp was burned, big time!
I confess, living in the Antipodes, that there are definitely certain Hymns in the current hymnal that aren’t on high rotation due to their strong association “Alien” lands and non-shared experience. “In Our Lovely Deseret” is the exception to the rule, although I do still cringe (for numerous reasons) when we’re encouraged to open our hymn books to good ol’ number three-oh-seven!
I am certain I have never joined the congregation in singing 337, even though I live in a state of Australia where you could almost get away with it.
“There Is a Place in Utah, would not, however, get a look in locally. It will certainly be interesting to see how the new hymn book will more fully reflect a “Global Church”.
Thanks for reconstructing your earlier comment, Colin.
I’ll bet, though, that some homesick missionary sang this in your part of Australia back in the day — and thought it was entirely suitable, even inspirational! And like you, I have hopes for a fully inclusive hymnbook — although I wouldn’t at all mind an occasional sing-along of Utah/mountain anthems, here IN Utah, and not inflicted on the Church at large.
Wait, you mean to tell me that after a long week it doesn’t raise your spirits to sing about irrigation?
LOL! Hurrah for the snowpack that makes those “fertilizing crystal streams”!!
Seth, perhaps you jest, but growing up in Orem back in the days of irrigation ditches I really did find the times of year when the water would flow in a little bit of extra magic, and I was sad as they began to disappear, along with the orchards. I’m told some subcommunities of Utah still value them and realtors can talk to prospective buyers in terms of half turns and quarter turns of irrigation and people respond… but it’s not the same thing as the community-wide weave of water and growers. Pipes we have now — for water and data — might still be Zion in a different way, but they’re Zion under ground: nothing to sneeze at, but also not *quite* like wrapping more of the domestic neighborhoods in a networked creek that you can watch find its way to gardens, or playing kids, or the light as the sun sets.
I’m probably treading well past the bounds of sentimentality and now I’m that old guy who misses the world of his past, but yeah, I could sing about irrigation.
Last year my cousin found a photograph of me and my sister playing with her in her flooded yard during the water turn. (Yuck! How disgusting.)
We still have a garden that we flood irrigate. But as I work in my garden, I usually sing a different song. “I am hoeing, daily hoeing, scattered weeds of good and ill . . . .”
You will all think I was an abusive parent, but when my daughter Betsy was born we lived in a little house where we watered our front lawn from cold ditch water when it was our water turn. To help Betsy learn to walk I would stand her on the cold wet lawn barefooted. When she would lift her foot I would gently move her forward until she was walking all over the lawn with me holding her up by her hands. I can’t believe I did that but it worked.
Granted, there’s something pleasurably nostalgic about public irrigation water shares. But I think I can do without having to get up at 2:00 a.m. to turn the gate in the gutter to divert water into my grandmother’s garden just south of the BYU campus in the 1960s, because that was her assigned time. 🙂
One would think that there was nothing in Utah but agriculture from the words of this song, but perhaps it’s just because Bro. Willes didn’t (couldn’t?) wax lyrical about the coal mines of Price, the rail yards of Ogden, the smelters of Murray and Garfield.
Sounds an awful lot like the hymns of North Korea, with happy schoolgirls singing the praises of Dear Leader as they plant or harvest rice.
No … no, I don’t think it sounds like that warped view. At all.
Aw, I think this is a sweet hymn, for Utah folks anyway. (Which I ain’t.) I am pretty sure I have seen writings about singing about ‘our mountain home’ and this must be the hymn referred to.
The old irrigation systems remind me of a memoir I read once, “Where nothing is long ago,” by Virginia Sorenson. She recalls playing in the ditches, and her neighbor Brother Tolsen running up in a panic, having killed his neighbor in a fight over water. The neighbor had twice diverted water to his fields during Brother Tolsen’s time. Tolsen was put on trial and acquitted for self-defense, and everybody felt so sorry for the dead man’s widow, because who could believe that her own husband could be a water-stealer? It was a really startling story.
My grandfather was watermaster in his small Utah town for many years. Oh, the stories he told!
My mother’s uncle was murdered in the 1930’s as a result of an ongoing argument with a neighbor over irrigation rights.