Sinners and Saints: A Tour Across the States and Round Them, with Three Months Among the MormonsRobinson, Phil
General
Sinners and Saints: A Tour Across the States and Round Them, with Three Months Among the Mormons
Robinson, Phil
Latter Day Saint churches; Utah -- Description and travel; West (U.S.) -- Description and travel
The settlement itself is grievously disappointing in appearance. For
as you approach it, past the charming little hamlet of Glendale, past
such a sunny wealth of orchard and meadow and corn-land, past such
beautiful glimpses of landscape, you cannot help expecting a scene of
rural prettiness in sympathy with such surroundings. But Orderville
at first sight looks like a factory. The wooden shed-like buildings
built in continuous rows, the adjacent mills, the bare, ugly patch of
hillside behind it, give the actual settlement an uninviting aspect.
But once within the settlement, the scene changes wonderfully for the
better. The houses are found, the most of them, built facing inwards
upon an open square, with a broad side-walk, edged with tamarisk
and mulberry, box-elder and maple-trees, in front of them. Outside
the dwelling-house square are scattered about the school-house,
meeting-house, blacksmith and carpenters' shops, tannery, woollen-mill,
and so forth, while a broad roadway separates the whole from the
orchards, gardens, and farm-lands generally. Specially noteworthy
here are the mulberry orchard--laid out for the support of the
silk-worms, which the community are now rearing with much success--and
the forcing-ground and experimental garden, in which wild flowers as
well as "tame" are being cultivated. Among the buildings the more
interesting to me were the school-houses, well fitted up, and very
fairly provided with educational apparatus; and the rudimentary museum,
where the commencement of a collection of the natural curiosities of
the neighbourhood is displayed. What this may some day grow into, when
science has had the chance of exploring the surrounding hills and
canyons, it is difficult to say; for Nature has favoured Orderville
profusely with fossil strata and mineral eccentricities, a rich variety
of bird and insect life, and a prodigious botanical luxuriance. Almost
for the first time in my travels, too, I found here a very intelligent
interest taken in the natural history of the locality; but the absence
of books and of necessary apparatus, as yet of course prevents the
brethren from carrying on their studies and experiments to any standard
of scientific value.
Though staying in Orderville so short a time, I was fortunate enough
to see the whole community together. For on the evening of my arrival
there was a meeting at which there was a very full gathering of the
adults--and the babies in arms. The scene was as curious as anything I
have ever witnessed in any part of the world. The audience was almost
equally composed of men and women, the latter wearing, most of them,
their cloth sun-bonnets, and bringing with them the babies they were
nursing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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