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Robert Price History by Alvera Price Sims

Page history last edited by Steven M Law 14 years, 11 months ago

Biography

of

ROBERT PRICE

 

By Alvera Price (Sims), daughter of George B. Price, and granddaughter of Robert Price

 

Grandfather, Robert Price, was born June 19, 1835, 100 years ago today, in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire (Bucks County), England, the son of Simon Price and Mary Louisa Stanners

 

His grandfather, Robert Price, came from a moneyed Welsh family by the name of Phryce in South Wales. After his marriage he settled in Windsor with his brother. Robert became an innkeeper and was building a brewery at Great Missenden when he succumbed to asthma at thirty years of age. Grandfather's father, Simon Price was apprenticed to a tailor. He married Mary Louisa Stanners at Great Missenden on April 4, 1833.

 

She came from a fine family. Her father was John or William Stanners, a lowlander of Scotland. He was a resident of Great Missenden, a builder and plasterer, with a kiln making his own brick. He was known to be an upright, straight tradesman who served his country by good work and best material, hence houses upwards of one hundred years old stand firm and strong still. Grandfather's mother was the youngest of five children.

 

Simon Price and Mary Louisa Stanners had two boys and two girls who died in infancy. Those living to maturity were Robert, Harry, George, Annie, Louise, Ellen and Mary.

 

Great Missenden, where Grandfather was born is fringed with Chiltern woodlands and is very near the beach. In this spot in the early part of the 19th century lived Wilberforce, the Abolitionist. William Timble did much missionary work there and Grandfather's sister, Mary, says she remembered as small children, she and Robert skipping over the coarse common to hear him preach. They loved music in the Missenden Chapel but it didn't come very often; occasionally a Prima Donna would come on date occasions or sometimes some voluntary organ player. She refers to their home as a wood house which was a castle. She mentions their riding in coaches to London. Their living was plain but substantial and they never wasted anything.

 

Grandfather's father was a politician and a clever writer of satirical verses which were published in the press. At an election his verses that were published in that community did so much harm that he was forced to move from Great Missenden. He adopted the wish of a friend, who was a Congregationalist Minister at Boston and moved his family and all his worldly goods there when Grandfather was about eleven or twelve years of age. Here, there father was successful, he became a Deacon and Superintendent of a Chapel and their mother a valiant member.

 

Grandfather worked in the tailor business with his father until the winter of 1849-50 when he had a severe attack of rheumatic fever. When he recovered, a chance offer apprenticing him to a pawnbroker silversmith in Long Acre, London. He was very glad to leave his father's business, the only real trouble to say good-bye to his mother, whom he loved very dearly. However on May 6, 1850 he departed for London. He began as a warehouse boy in the establishment of Mr. Ashman.

 

After being there a few weeks a vacancy occurred in the house of a Mormon Elder, named George Sims, and Grandfather answered the advertisement. This man preached the Gospel to member of the house and was the means of Grandfather's joining the Church. Elder Sims told him afterward that he was shown in a dream that he should be the means of hurrying someone into the Church through his work in that house.

 

Grandfather was baptized a member of the Holborn Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in September 1853; Elder Sims had emigrated to America a year or more before. He labored as a teacher and counselor in the Islington Branch and preached at many street meetings.

 

His mother was never well in Boston and after a few short years there, she fell in the street on her birthday and never recovered consciousness. She was so loved and respected that the Church buried her and the Deacons carried her to the grave. Aunt Mary says, "I well remember Robert and I had to go home to the funeral, how scared he looked; Harry's face was white as snow; Annie fainted in the coach and I was held up at the grave."

 

A little more than two years after, Grandfather's father married again, a Mrs. Broughton, with one child. "She was a woman of some considerable means, a Christian of very high character who devoted a great deal of her time and money to religious work." Religion in their home was of a Puritan style and Sundays were rather dreary. Grandfather and Aunt Mary had a great attraction for one another and so spent much of their time together.

 

Aunt Mary says, "our father was a man of sterling piety, orthodox, never wavering, always a church worker but in the early years of his children's lives he didn't make religion a lovable thing. He was very hasty and severe and I remember Robert saying to me as he was going to London, 'Mary, Religion is a Humbug!'"

 

Writing of the time after Grandfather joined the Church, she says, "I could not tell you all that my father did to correct him from his course. He employed ministers and friends and then they all seemed to desert him. It hurt me but I kept up a correspondence with him--it didn't matter to me what he was--he was my brother, Bob. I believe my letters cheered him up a bit when he thought about home and all the hard ugly things that were written to him, then not one note of retaliation came back, he was unruffled by it all. I am glad to remember this and write for you, that call him father. How he trekked across the country and the hardships I have only heard, since he kept all that from me at all times."

 

She goes on to say about their father, "He was very different the last few years of his life and has frequently said, 'I have one son who never cost me an anxious moment,' meaning Robert. Fancy!! Well, his love spoke."

 

Grandfather married Matilda Louisa Kelsey, October 13, 1855 in England. He emigrated to New York in November 1855 at the age of twenty, leaving England, November 30th and arriving in New York, December 31st, coming across the ocean in the sailing vessel "Emerald Isle," a vessel of two thousand tons burden. There were five hundred Mormons on board, also six hundred Irish emigrants that were located in the hold of the ship.

 

They lived in New York until 1857, he worked at a variety of occupations. He learned the house painting trade at which he worked for some time. He also kept a fish market and peddled fish. From New York they moved to Wallingford, Connecticut, where most of his living was made in the house painting trade.

 

In 1861, he and his wife and three children emigrated to Utah, crossing the plains in a two-wheeled cart with a yoke of three year old steers. They had a number of narrow escapes from disaster, at one time being nearly drowned and having a dangerous tip-over on another occasion. The company of emigrants there with met Johnston's Army returning Eastward. On arriving in Salt Lake they camped on the spot where the City and County Building now stands. He soon began work as a carpenter and although he had never worked at that trade he soon became proficient at it. He did carpenter work on the Salt Lake Theater. After the theater was completed he worked there arranging scenery and prompting.

 

He acted as a member of the secret police force of Salt Lake and worked for Heber C. Kimball. He was appointed Lieutenant in the Militia under General D. H. Wells.

 

On March 2nd, 1863, he married Susannah Juchau and the two wives lived in the same house for a while until he could build another house.

 

In 1869, he was called to come to Bear Lake by President Brigham Young. He sold his home in Salt Lake, bought a span of horses and a cow and was ready to come within a week. He then had two wives and five children and they loaded everything they owned into the covered wagon and started for Bear Lake. They brought with them a 'Charter Oak' stove which was one of the first stoves in Paris.

 

When they arrived, as they were coming up a big mountain in Emigration Canyon, a terrific rainstorm came up and they were forced to stop on the hill all night. Grandfather put some blocks under the wheels to keep the wagon from going down the hill with the water. The stream of water that ran under the wagon was as large as an irrigation ditch. Grandfather said he saw a piece of gold roll down the hill with the mud and water.

 

When they arrived in Paris they stopped at Kimball's to find out where to go. He was given a whole block East of town. They had no home to live in the first winter, so they lived in a dugout on John Humphrey's property. The following year he built one home with a dirt roof near the fair grounds and all of them lived there until he could build another home. The second year he built another home on the same block, this house had shingled roof and was the first one in town.

 

He did carpenter work, painting and paper hanging until he was made manager of the Co-op Store, then when all the business houses of Paris were incorporated, he was elected manager of the company. He conducted the dairy at Nounan for some years. He was active in all public affairs, adding energetically in the building of the Tabernacle, Fielding Academy and other institutions. He was manager of the Pioneer Creamery for some years and continued in the lumber business until the day of his death. It has been said by many that if anyone needed work that Brother Robert Price would give them a few days at any time. He employed more men in the lumber business than any other industry did at that time.

 

Soon after his arrival he was appointed First Counselor to Bishop Horne of Paris Ward and when the town was divided into two Wards, August 25, 1877, fifty-eight years ago, he was appointed Bishop of the Paris 2nd Ward, which position he filled faithfully until a short time before his death.

 

He married Christina Shepherd, May 1, 1879, two weeks afterward his first wife, Matilda, died. On February 6, 1887, he married Wilhelmina Grey. At the time the Deputy Marshals were making their raids for polygamists, he had many wonderful escapes from arrest and when finally arrested was discharged.

 

Now, on his one hundredth anniversary fifteen of his thirty children are still living. He has one hundred eighty-four grandchildren, one hundred thirty-nine great-grandchildren and five great-great-grandchildren. Four of his sons have filled missions, one being in the mission field at the time of his death. Five of his grandchildren have also filled missions and one is in the field now.

 


 

This material was taken from my (Alvera's) translation of Aunt Mary's letter to Uncle Fred Price while he was in the mission field; from the account left to Aunt Ellie (Price Athay) by Grandfather, himself, and from things various member of the family could remember. I read this paper at the Price Reunion June 19, 1935 at Fish Have, Idaho, on Grandfather's 100th birthday. At the reunion Alvera Price (Sims) and a cousin, Pearl (Price Patterson), daughter of Joseph S. Price, sang a duet.)

 

 

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