“Agreeable to appointment notice previously given,” the minutes read, “the L.D.S. residing in Marysvale Branch met in the School House on Sunday March 24″ at 11 a.m.” This was a meeting with a particular purpose, and to mark the occasion, the stake presidencies of both the Sevier Stake (to the north) and Panguitch Stake (to the south) were in attendance.
Marysvale is a special place, at least to me. It’s where my mother and grandfather were born; my great-grandfather, Jared Taylor, was one of its first permanent settlers. Marysvale is a tiny town in Piute County, Utah, at the top of the southern third of the state, and about midway east and west, tucked in a nook in the mountains. When the place was first described by Mormon explorers in 1849 it was a valley watered by the Sevier River, covered in tall grass with not a sagebrush in sight. It was also home to huge, ancient pine trees, similar to the California Redwoods, but of a species found nowhere else in North America (the last of those trees fell in a 1970s windstorm, with the wood salvaged for woodshop projects at the county high school). Today, while the contours of the land are still beautiful, residents fight sagebrush and bunchgrass the same as every other farmer and rancher in Utah, and almost no one remembers the ancient pines.