History of Jerald Wesley Glenn (1904-1991), Part 3: Addendum

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History of the Kimberly, Idaho Ward

JERALD WESLEY GLENN - ADDENDUM

From an interview of Jerald Wesley Glenn by Mary Annette Bates Grove, granddaughter, and

Patricia Ann Glenn Bates (Miller), daughter, summer of 1988. Wesley was 84 yrs. old and lived at

535 Adams St., Kimberly, Twin Falls, Idaho.

My grandfather, the first one to join the church was born in Ireland. We don’t know just where, we haven’t been able to find the town. He was born there in 1839. They lived there until sometime in the 1840s during the potato famine and then they immigrated back to Scotland. But, if you want to go back farther, I got a book from Georgia that traced the Glen family back through Scotland to 1600 and he found there the two Glen brothers immigrated to Ireland in 1602. Our ancestry lived there until they immigrated back to Scotland in 1840s. So, it is about 200 years there we don’t know anything about them. My grandmother was born in Scotland and they met there in Paisley, Renfrew, Scotland and were married in December 1861. And after they joined the church, they immigrated and landed in Salt Lake City in 1869. I think they came up through New Orleans, up the Mississippi to St. Louis, and took a train part way west. I don’t know how far the train went. Then the rest of the way by wagon train and landed in Salt Lake. My grandfather worked on the temple block for ten years, he kind of supervised building the wall around the block. It was 1869 when they immigrated. My grandfather was Andrew Glen and Ann Craig was his wife. He was kind of a stonemason. They then moved up to Snowville, which everybody called starvation country. It was a poor farming area. They lived there three or four years. My father has a sister buried there in the Snowville Cemetery. We went up there one time and couldn’t find it. Nobody took take care of it, so it is just lost. I don’t know what time they moved into Elba, Idaho. Somewhere about 1880 and that is where my grandfather lived until he died in 1914. My dad was born in Salt Lake City in 1873, course he moved with the family into Snowville and to Elba. Then he lived there until he married Mary Elizabeth Tolman in 1900. (At the time of this interview the information given by J. Wesley Glenn was to the best of his knowledge. With the advancement of technology and the exchange of information, we have corrected, documented information on the above. Patricia Ann Glenn Bates Miller.).

My mother’s side, the Tolmans, as near as I can remember landed in New England in the 1600s. They lived in this area most of the time. They were among the early settlers. The Tolmans were early converts to the Church. The Tolmans were in Rush Valley, about 40 miles out of Tooele, Utah. Then when Mom was two years old, 1882, they moved to Marion, Idaho, near Oakley. Marion doesn’t exist anymore, not even the church house.

Dad and Mom left there and moved to Rexburg (Rigby), Idaho. My dad and another man bought 160 acres somewhere around Rexburg. Of course, it was in sagebrush. They cleared it and farmed it for two years. My dad sold his 80 to the other fellow for the same as they had bought the 160. Then they moved to Sublet, way back in the hills, east of Malta. That was a cold country. I don’t think it ever got above freezing. They raised cattle and hay. That’s about all they could raise. I was born at Marion where Mother’s mother lived, but our home was in Sublett. I was born 3 May 1904, so I am now 84 years old. We lived in Sublett until the spring of 1906.

There were about two years between each of us children. Mom had a miscarriage between Wendell and me. There is a little over three years between us. My Dad was never a real pal to me. Mom was always too busy. By the time she cooked for all the hired help and all the rest, there wasn’t much time to play with the children. At harvest time when we had hired men to help with the thrashing, Dad would kill a lamb and hang it up overnight. Mom would have lamb chops for breakfast, cook the roasts for dinner and have lamb stew or soup for supper. There would be twenty men to feed, besides her own family, and also the washing, ironing and babies, etc. It was a lot of work.

Then they heard about Emmett country where they could grow fruit. They had never had fruit in their lives. So, they moved up there. About the first thing I can remember was eating peaches off the tree when we lived there. I remember that was the end of the railroad line. The steam engine couldn’t be backed up as they do now. They had a turntable. They would drive them on there where they had power, turn the engine around and drive the engine off. We didn’t like it up there in Emmett. The fruit and all that were nice, but the mosquitoes were big enough to carry you away. We didn’t like that, so in the spring of 1908 we moved to Kimberly.

The town of Kimberly was started in 1905. We moved here the 20 March 1908. The farm is one mile north, one-half mile east, and one-quarter north of Kimberly. Dad had eighty acres in the middle of the square mile. Dad got the 40 in 1908. He bought the other 40 acres in 1912. As I remember, Kruggers cut the sagebrush. When they came in here, they had a big overgrown alfalfa crowner that they pulled with their steam engine. The sagebrush was cut, then raked into windrows and burned. Krugers cleared almost all that whole section. Kruger’s father bought that whole section except for the 80 acres my dad had. He cleared it with that old sagebrush grubber, as we called it. He was a thrasher man in Nebraska, that’s the reason they had the steam engine. He bought his trashing machine and shipped it out here. He thrashed grain for us. The railroad came in 1905 and Kruger’s came in 1910. My dad cleared the first 40 in 1908. He bought the other 40

from a Jewish man in Boise, Idaho. He made the deal to buy it in 1912.

The land was not level after being cleared. There were little bumps all over the ground. We didn’t have the equipment to level it. We did the best we could. We had to dig the corrugates over these bumps. The corrugator was kind of a sled with a couple of 4 x 4’s nailed underneath of it with steel point. It would make two corrugates at a time. Then you would ride it to hold it down. You could only corrugate soft ground.

The first house that my Dad built when he took the first forty acres out of sagebrush was four rooms, two downstairs, two upstairs, and no basement. It was built on the west forty near the canal, because we had to get water. Our household water was from the canal. In 1912, we moved the house down across from Kevin Glenn’s place now, (on the east 40 acres, 50 Highway 50, Kimberly, Twin Falls, Idaho.) Mother had a well drilled after Dad died. When Mom built the house there then we had the well drilled. I was about 16 yrs old when I started helping Dad with the farm work. We milked cows and things like that. Farm boys always learned how to milk. There were always weeds to pull out of the crops on the farm.

When I started school, they had the old brick school building over there by the park. When I went there, there were only four rooms on the bottom, four rooms upstairs, and the auditorium on top (third floor). We used that building until 1917. That is when the old High School building was built. I was only about 17 when it was built. Sometimes we walked sometimes we caught the school wagon on the corner one mile north of Kimberly. If we didn’t see the school wagon coming, sometimes we’d walk on into school and beat the school wagon there. We went to school from 9 AM to 4 PM with an hour off for lunch and a 15-minute recess mid-morning and midafternoon. I did not have any favorite subject. School was kind of a bore to me. Reading wasn’t very interesting, so I didn’t like to read. When I got started reading the Book of Mormon, then I became an avid reader. Out in the mission field I opened up the Book of Mormon to Third Nephi where the Savior visited and I got interested and I thought, well I better find out how it starts, so I went to the beginning and read up to where I had read and read to the end. Then I started reading other little books we had there in the mission home. That is how I got started reading. I got average grades in school. We were taught reading, writing, and Arithmetic. I graduated from Kimberly High School in 1923, going all 12 grades. I graduated from the old High School building. Our class picture hung in the High School building’s main hall for over 50 years. Before the high school was build, high school students had to go to Twin Falls High School.

Kimberly Elementary School--1908

My love of music started in grade school. I had one teacher that knew quite a lot about music. She explained the staff and so forth, and I took that all in. She was good at singing and I like to sing. I had a natural ability to pitch my voice. I picked up the piano later on. I studied maybe three or four years off and on, it wasn’t steady, in Twin Falls. I can play the church hymns and other music. I worked at it on my own. I was chorister most of the time. I was organist for the Priesthood in my later years. I led the Ward choir for a while in my later years. When the children were little, Marjorie Anderson played the pump reed organ in our Ward and I was chorister. We went over to Kimberly 1st Ward when Kevin’s baby daughter, Marceline [sic (that's me!)], was blessed and Marjorie was at the meeting. She was talking with Kevin and learned his name was Glenn. She asked if he knew Wesley Glenn. “Yes, it’s my granddad. He is right over there.” She came over and talked to us for a while between meetings. Couldn’t talk very long as we had to get out of the way for the next meeting.

The organ at Oakley, Idaho, where we went to Stake Conference, was brought from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Oakley by team and wagon. I don’t know if it was all one piece or it they had to assemble it after it got there. It had two manuals and foot pedals. They had an organist come up from Salt Lake to play it the first time. When I was there, I was about fourteen the summer of 1918. First Quarterly Conference I ever attended. Of course, when we got up there, there wasn’t anyone to pump the organ. President Jack (Stake President) spotted my Dad and I guess I was willing. He came down and had me go up and pump the organ for them. It had a lever that you pumped up and down while the organ was being played. It had a little gage on the side and they told me to keep the gage about so-so. So, I’d watch that gage. If it started to go down, I’d pump a little harder. It wasn’t hard and I kind of liked it. There were two session of conference, so I got to do it both sessions. It took us two hours to drive to Oakley from Kimberly, 40 miles in the car. We went up the old mountain road about 20 miles an hour.

There were 10 of us in our family, five boys, and five girls. They were Wendell, Elzina, Burton John (who was killed), and myself. He was killed after I was married. I don’t remember the exact year. We lived on the Highway l mile north and 3/4 mile west of Kimberly. The school bus came from the East, stopped in front of our house, (you had to get off and cross the road) a car coming from behind hit him. They didn’t have all the laws, etc., like they do now. Buses were a vehicle with a body on them and that is about all.

All the brothers helped on the farm until we left the roost. I went to college for one year at the University of Utah. I found out that wasn’t for me. I was trying to study science and music. I couldn’t afford the music and figured science wasn’t my lot, so …

I sang in the Tabernacle Choir for about six months while I was there in Salt Lake City. I enjoyed that. I think Cecil Gates was our director. Thelma and Elzina both sang in the Tabernacle Choir when they were working in Salt Lake City. Organ music has always been my favorite. While you were singing in the Tabernacle Choir you didn’t realize the organ was so large. When Edward P. Kimball played the organ, you could feel the vibrations through the floor. They would caution him not to play so loud, but he still did. He would make the old building vibrate sometimes, but it stood. I went to college before I went on my mission.