Hyrum Willard Marriott (1863 - 1939)
Biography

When Hyrum Willard (Will) Marriott and his twin sister Esther Amelia were born in Marriott, Utah on 6 December 1863, white men had been living in Utah's Salt Lake Valley for less than twenty years. In fact, Marriott Settlement was only eight years older than Will; it was founded by John Marriott, Will's father, in February 1855, just one year after he married Will's mother, Elizabeth Stewart, John's second wife.

Will's parents were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and they welcomed the hardships of the rough frontier if it meant freedom from the religious persecution they had suffered elsewhere because they were Mormons. Being Mormon, Will would discover as he grew up, meant two things: complete devotion to one's family and the Lord; and constant, hard work. The Marriott's thrived on hard work, however. John Marriott lived to be eighty-nine; and Will, his children said, could still outwork any of his sons until his death at age seventy-five.

The Church permeated the lives of the Marriott's, even to the names of their children. Will's older brother, Moroni, was named for a military general and prophet who was an important figure in the Book of Mormon. Hyrum Willard Marriott was named for two Church leaders contemporary with his father, Hyrum Smith and Dr. Willard Richards. John Marriott had served as a bodyguard to the Prophet Joseph Smith, founder of the Church, until 27 June 1844, when the Prophet and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob at Carthage, Illinois. Two other Church members, Dr. Willard Richards and John Taylor, were with the Prophet in jail, but were not killed.

Mormons, especially missionaries, were persecuted wherever they went, by rock-throwing and sometimes even gun-toting mobs. England was the first foreign country to be visited by Mormon missionaries, and by 1848 had over 17,000 members. Two of these converts were John Marriott and Elizabeth Stewart.

Both of Will's parents were born in England. Elizabeth Stewart was born in Colmworth, Bedfordshire, England on 12 April 1829. Her brother, William Stewart, married Mary Ann Marriott, her future husband's sister in 1843. In 1850, Elizabeth crossed the Atlantic with her brother and his two daughters to first New Orleans and then to St. Louis, where they joined different companies of Mormons bound for Utah. John Marriott, who had come to Nauvoo, Illinois in 1843, was waiting for his sister's family in St. Louis, and he, his wife Susannah Folks, and their four children crossed the plains with the Stewart's. The group arrived at Salt Lake on 15 September 1851, but moved on to Kaysville, 25 miles to the north, where they spent their winter living in their wagon boxes.

John and Elizabeth were married 26 February 1854 in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City. They returned to Kaysville, in Davis County where Will's oldest sister Elizabeth was born 22 April 1855. In June 1855, at the request of Church leaders, John moved his family, including the eight children of his deceased first wife, north to a wilderness area a few miles northwest of Ogden, in Weber County.

The family lived first in the wagon, then in a dugout, while John built a house of logs, the first structure in what became Marriott, Utah. The rest of John and Elizabeth's ten children were born in Marriott, and Will spent almost his entire life there.

There was plenty of work for each Marriott child to do just to coax their food from the land. There were crickets and grasshoppers to battle for the wheat crop, irrigation ditches to dig and keep filled, and even occasional visits by Ute Indians, which fortunately were mostly peaceful. The struggle with the land and the climate was never-ending and even by the time Will was big enough to work in the fields or to herd the sheep up to the mountain pastures or to the Ogden railhead, the land still resisted the diligent efforts of the people struggling to subdue it.

During the 1870's and 1880's Marriott Settlement kept growing, as did Will. He saw new settlers pour into the Salt Lake valley, converts uniting with other Latter-Day Saints in building up their new Zion. After the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, which passed through nearby Ogden, in 1869, travel to Salt Lake City was easier. Visitors began to come by the thousands to the valley to see the oddity of civilized, orderly, neat towns in the middle of a brawling, earthy frontier. In 1875 President Ulysses S. Grant visited Salt Lake City; he was impressed by that thriving community of hard working and clean living people.

During these years, although the Saints were no longer being driven from their homes by angry mobs, their practice of polygamy brought on increasing pressure from neighboring states and the U.S. Government. In 1890, however, the Church ended this practice, although plural marriage was considered by the Saints to be a divine principle. Following the passage by the U.S. Congress of anti-polygamy laws in 1882 and 1887, many men had been jailed for their refusal to abandon their plural wives. Will's father, John Marriott, was one of these, for he had taken three more wives after his marriage to Elizabeth Stewart.

Will, himself, did not marry until he was thirty-four years old. His bride, Ellen Morris, was five years younger than Will. They were married 1 December 1897 in Ogden. Ellen was born 14 December 1868 in Marriott to William Morris and Elizabeth Russell Hamblin, and her life also had been one of constant labor and responsibility. First, at age thirteen she moved in with her arthritic grandmother for several months to take care of her and her farm work. In 1887, when Ellen was nineteen, her mother began a seven-year illness that ended in her death in 1894. During this time, Ellen's father broke his hip and her half-sister, Duane Hamblin Miller, became fatally ill. Ellen's father died in 1892, and his step-daughter Duane died soon after, leaving Ellen to care for her two sons, Dan and Thad Miller, who were ages four and one. Ellen's mother died in 1894, and Ellen had no one except her brother, Jim Morris, to help her raise the two young boys.

When Ellen married Will and moved into John Marriott's home, she brought Thad with her. Her brother, Jim, took the other nephew, Dan. Will and Ellen lived in Marriott with John and Elizabeth for a year, until after the birth in August 1898 of their first child, Doris. Will then moved his family to Ogden for one month. They found a house there for $400 and moved it back home to Marriott, close to the Marriott Ward Chapel.

By the turn of the century, the railroad, the telephone, and years of toil had improved living conditions in the Salt Lake valley, but it was still hard work carving a living from the land. In addition, sickness was still a fearsome thing. Although some medicines had been developed to combat diseases like smallpox, people still suffered epidemics of diphtheria, cholera, and typhoid. In 1903, Will's entire family came down with typhoid when they moved into a house called the James' place without knowing it was contaminated. Will later caught smallpox, but the rest of the family avoided that disease by quickly taking the vaccinations.

Will's family was still growing when a 300-acre farm near Marriott, known as the Faye Place, came up for sale in 1905. Mr. Faye gave Will first chance to buy the farm, and Will took it. Mr. Faye had boarded race horses, but Will stocked the place with sheep, as many as two or three thousand at a time, and with some cattle. In addition, the children were kept busy helping Will and Ellen raise sugar beets, twenty acres worth, and potatoes, corn, lettuce, and alfalfa. Ellen raised chickens and canned the food harvested in the summer. These hundreds of quarts of fruit, vegetables, and meats that would feed them through the winter were also canned. Will became successful in the sheep and cattle industry until winter storms combined with the depression that followed World War I that drove him and all the other farmer/ ranchers in the valley into financially hard times.

Will's last four children were born on this farm, and he depended on Ellen and the older children to run the place while he was out on the range, riding from one sheep camp to another, or driving cattle or sheep to market. Will had spent much of his boyhood working with sheep, living with them on the open range for months at a time. His friends claimed he was the fastest sheep shearer in Weber County; he could hold a sheep and shear it at the same time, a job that ordinarily took two people.

Will's family was proof of the progress taking place in Utah and in the nation as well. As children, both Will and Ellen had lost brothers and sisters to disease or the hardships of settling a new territory. Will's children had some close calls, but all lived to have grandchildren of their own.

One of these "brushes with tragedy" came when Will and his oldest son, Bill, were away from home picking up a load of hay in a wagon. The family had been on the Faye place about six years when the house caught fire and burned to the ground. None of the family was injured; fortunately Ellen had taken the children with her to milk the cows. But two of the younger girls had gotten wet in the irrigated fields as the children walked with their mother, carrying their tin pails, and the two girls returned to the house to change their clothes. The closet was dark and they struck a match to see by. A can of kerosene was nearby, and once started, the flames were impossible to quench in the dry weather. By the time Will and Bill returned with the hay, all the family had left were the clothes on their backs. A Japanese couple who worked on the Marriott farm loaned the Marriott's their house until a new home could be built with the help of their neighbors. Friends contributed food, clothes, and money to help the family rebuild; and within a year, the Marriott's had a new house, with an all-electric lighting system.

Will's home was near the Wasatch Mountains, and a summer camp-out in the nearby Ogden River Canyon became a family tradition. Each year Will would pile his family, provisions, and sleeping bags in the wagon; then two teams of horses would draw the loaded wagon through the canyon until they came to the south fork of the river, which was full of trout. Will loved to fish, and the entire family craved these outdoor vacations, away from the long rows of sugar beets.

Winters are cold in Utah mountains, and often on the gray Saturday afternoons and evenings when the water in lakes and ponds had frozen solid, Will would light pine-knot torches around the pond. Youngsters would come from all over the area to ice skate. Other times, Will would hitch the horses up to a bob-sleigh, pile in all his children, plus as many others as would fit, and drive over the snow that blanketed the open fields.

As the children got older and could do more and more of the work of running the farm, Will became even more involved in Church affairs and in politics. Respected and well-liked, Will was active most of his life in Weber County Republican circles, and in 1912 was elected to a two-year term in the Utah State House of Representatives. For 17 years, from 1908 to 1925, he served as second and first counselor of the bishopric of Marriott Ward, and later became a high priest in the Mount Ogden Stake.

Will insured for himself a place in Marriott secular history in 1914 when he became the first person in Marriott to own a Buick automobile. "Horseless carriages" were still a new and exciting spectacle when he purchased the shiny black touring car complete with running boards and isinglass curtains. The starting crank had a kick that would break an inexperienced arm. The first Sunday he had it, Will took the family to church in it and parked the exotic vehicle among the horse-drawn buggies and wagons. When church let out, Will found the hood of the Buick covered with initials scratched in it by enthusiastic youngsters. However, Will wasn't angry; he was rather proud of those initials and they remained on the car as long as Will owned it.

The family made their first motor trip in the car to visit Will's twin sister in Star Valley, Wyoming. The 200-mile trip required going through the mountains over treacherous trails and passes. The Marriott's almost lost the car when it stalled on an incline after crossing a bridge over the Snake River. The car would have rolled back down to the river had everyone not jumped out and hurriedly jammed rocks behind the tires. They did reach their destination, and the summer trip of 1914 would be remembered for a long time.

The post-war depression that followed the end of World War I was just beginning when Will's oldest son, Bill, left Utah in 1919 to preach the Gospel in Vermont and Connecticut. Although the family needed Bill at home, Will and Ellen knew that their son had work to do for the Lord. The family had no extra money to give to Bill, who as a Mormon missionary depended only on himself and his family for funds during the two years of his mission. Will sold the Buick and Ellen parted with two things dear to her; her son for two years, and her gold watch forever.

Will's fortunes, like those of all the other cattle and sheep ranchers in the country, declined as the depression continued. When Bill returned home in 1921, he found Will deep in debt but optimistic. Will's farm had always been one of the most prosperous in the valley, but it never recovered from the economic slump, perhaps because one year the snow covered even the backs of the sheep and they all either froze or starved to death.

Sixty years of life filled with hard work will tire out any man's body, even a strong one like Will Marriott's. After the children were grown and away from home, Will began to find the enormous amount of work the farm required more than he could handle. He loved the farm that had become the family homestead, but with most of his children living at least as far as Ogden, the farm wasn't the same. His son, Bill, bought Will and Ellen a house in Ogden, a pink frame on Jackson Street, where Will could enjoy the rugged mountains and beloved valleys without wrestling with them day and night for his livelihood.

In 1939, Will left Ogden for a brief visit to five of his children in Washington, D.C. His son, Russell, had just returned from his mission to England, and Will had a new grandchild, Bill's second son, he yet had to see. Will and his youngest son, Woodrow, drove over to Virginia one Sunday afternoon to escape the crush of the city for a while. When they returned, Will slipped while getting out of the car. He did not fall completely down, but he received a nasty bruise on his side as he fell against the open car door. It hurt quite a bit, so he went to Bill's house to lie down.

The next morning he was taken to George Washington Hospital and was still in a great deal of pain when he slipped into a coma. The doctors were not sure what was wrong, but surgery was impossible. Will died a few hours later, on Monday, 12 June 1939. His fall against the car door had ruptured the main artery leading from the heart, and nothing could have been done to repair the damage.

Will's family traveled with him on the train back to Ogden. On Friday, 16 June 1939, Will's body was buried in Ogden Cemetery on a rise in the valley which looked toward the Great Salt Lake. His 75 years of service to his family, the Church, and Marriott settlement were over. He had lived a good and productive life, one which encompassed a variety of experiences and which contributed greatly to the development of both Utah and the nation. Will's eight children continued his tradition of achievement, and for 28 years his wife, Ellen, remained active in family, church, and social activities until her death at age 99, on December 29, 1967.