Mary Wright Jones: Childhood and Youth
(Excerpted from “They Came from England: The Wrights of Coalville, Utah 1850 – 1972” by Norma Jean Wright Trietsch, pages 87-89)

MARY WRIGHT JONES (Mrs. George Leopold Jones) tells her granddaughter Marie Hansen Mower about her parents THOMAS and ANNIE DALE WRIGHT.

None of Mother’s people became Latter-Day-Saints and were not in favor of her becoming a Mormon. But she was baptized at Sheffield in 1868 by Edwin Walker and confirmed by him. My son Ralph visited Mother’s sister Mary in Woodhouse when he was on his mission in 1923. She was very interested in all of us and treated him very fine.

Mother walked most of the way across the plains getting very tired; and they were short of food.

In the fall of 1868 Father worked for W. W. Riter in Weber Canyon near Devil’s Slide on the railroad which was being built. Here they shoveled the snow off the ground, pitched their tents and made their beds on the frozen ground where Mother caught cold in her back, from which she suffered all her life.

I was the eldest girl in the family and Mother was never well after the exposure in Weber Canyon. We used to go fishing and berry picking for food. Those were good times for us. We had a very few clothes. I always went barefooted in the summer. In the winter we walked to Coalville to school. Many a time the snow was over the wire fences and it was noon before we got to school.

I had to stay home a great deal to help Mother so I was quite a big girl when I attended Summit Stake Academy. Later I went to Mary Fisher’s Sewing School and made my living before I was married doing sewing for other people.

My parents were not able to get things to use as there was no way for transportation only with oxteams or horses. And they were few. It took three of four days to go to Salt Lake City to get provisions. They hauled Coal to Salt Lake City and got provisions for it. Flour was $13.00 per hundred pounds, butter $1.00 per pound. Mother said the flour tasted like sun flowers. I supposed they did not have facilities to clean wheat in those days.

Our house was in the northeast part of town. Father filed on land up Spring Hollow or Chalk Creek. He cleared it of sagebrush, cultivated it, raised wheat, oats, and hay. He built a two-room rock house on the land. They lived on it one summer without a roof on so they could take care of the land and keep cattle out. This is the house I remember living in.

I learned to milk cows when I was about seven years old and do other work such as strain the milk in pans for the cream to raise, then skim it; feed calves and pigs with the skimmed milk.

We had to go on the hills and get wood to burn. My brothers and I did that. There was coal washed down the big ditch from the coal mine. I would take buckets and pick up the coal in the ditch. This way we got all our fuel for the summer months.

I remember rubbing clothes on a washboard when I had to stand on a little stool so I would be high enough to rub. We didn’t have washers in those days.

Father furnished the logs to build the first schoolhouse up Spring Hollow so we wouldn’t have to walk so far to school. But I always had to stay out of school one day every week to help Mother on washday. I enjoyed going to school very much. Miss Munson was very nice to me. She gave me a little red purse for Christmas. It was the first purse I had; I surely enjoyed it and thought a lot of it.

I learned to crochet when I was going to school. My teacher Maggie Salmon taught me. I crocheted mittens and hoods. I worked at recess instead of playing. My teacher was very good to me when I was willing to learn.

This first school I attended was a Presbyterian school in one room taught by Miss Munson. She read a chapter from the Bible every morning before school started. I had to walk a mile and a half to school and it was real cold. I didn’t have the privilege of going to school when I was six years old. I was ten when I started as there wasn’t school buildings or facilities for schools before [that].

I was born in Coalville in 1871 in one-room log house with a dirt roof, in a bedstead made of quaking aspen poles. Our table was a packing box and pieces cut from trees were our chairs. Father built the Rock House up Spring Hollow later.

Before I was thirteen years old I had pieced seventy-two nine-patch blocks (for a quilt) and blocked them out; sewed it all by hand. I don’t know if mother had a sewing machine then or not. Perhaps she did, but they didn’t let children sew on them. They wanted us to learn to sew by hand.

There were no picture shows or entertainments. We had to make our own pleasures with work and play. When I went to Sunday School and Primary that was fine; but in the early part of my life we didn’t have them.

When I was fourteen I learned to make wax flowers and made a big bouquet which I thought was quite an accomplishment. A lady taught me who came from Salt Lake. By this time Coalville and vicinity was growing. The railroad was the source of transportation.

I taught Sunday School for six years and was President of the M.I.A. until I was married and moved to Cache Valley.