Francis Marion Lyman
1888-1939
Son of Amasa Mason and Rosannah Reynolds Lyman
Husband of Hazel May Snow
In the early days of Utah when new towns and settlements were being established, times were hard, privation and poverty common. Hard work was a necessity for survival. Communication and travel from one place to another took days and even weeks. Death was news and a man would nearly run a horse to death to take word of it to a down. Some places were utterly isolated from the rest of the world. One such settlement was Boulder in Garfield County, Utah. Boulder is nestled among the valleys at the foot of the south side of BoulderMountain which is a part of the Aquarius Plateau. The altitude atop the BounderMountain exceeds 9000 feet and graduates downward into the valley. The Lyman ranch in Upper Boulder was at an altitude of around 7000 feet while in Lower Boulder it is 5000 feet.
The town of Boulder is not a town at all; not as you would think of a town – a group of homes centrally located with next door neighbors, a church around the corner and a school a block away. Rather, it is made up of several valleys covering many miles. A common remark about Boulder is “it’s a house wide and thirteen miles long.” Up through the valleys and behind sand rock ledges are ranch houses, sparsely scattered and seldom a neighbor within a mile. People traveling through Boulder have gone the length of the town only to inquire, “Where’s Boulder?”
Boulder was first located by stockmen seeking new range land for their sheep and cattle. The thick, lush grasses in the valleys and mountains grew tall and the horses and cows abounded belly-deep in the good feed. Wild horses roamed freely in the open country. To this Boulder country Amasa Lyman, France’s father, brought his poverty-ridden family to homestead in June 1890. The family had spent the previous summer at Haw’s dairy on the south side of the BoulderMountain on the West Fork of the Boulder Creek.
Amasa settled his family on a cold, rocky bench, thickly covered with black boulders, oak brush, scrub pines and cedars, and sage brush. Upon arrival they strung a wagon cover up between several trees for shelter. They unloaded their belongings. Part of their things had been left at Oak Creek, half way over the mountain because of the poor roads or no roads and the fact that the horses were poor and weak. They had an old Charter Oak stove which they set up and had difficulty making the pipe stand up with the scant pieces of wire spared from the wagon and boxes. They also had a homemade table, a few stools, and benches to sit on, but they all slept on the ground with only a few quilts.
Later, some ground was cleared and corn and ordinary vegetables were planted. Later a 14 x 18 foot log cabin of three ridge poles, a dirt roof, two windows, door, and a roughly built fireplace was built. This became the Lyman family’s home for the next fifteen years.
Amasa and Roseannah had a large but young family, four boys and three girls, when they moved to Boulder. France was the youngest at the time, being only two year old. There was also a son and daughter of Amas’ by his first wife.
Amasa was a cowboy, a rider, and a hunter. He was gone much of the time leaving his wife and family to shift for them-selves. Rosannah was very resourceful and talented and only through her ingenuity did they survive as well as they did. They never had enough clothes; their food consisted mostly of corn bread ground in a coffee mill, deer meat, and molasses. It was a real treat to have bean soup with bacon rinds in it.
This is the kind of life France had as a child. He was born on the 26th of November 1888 in Thurber, Wayne County, Utah, where his parents had lived for seven years. He was the youngest in the family when his parents moved to Boulder France as he was called was named, “Francis Marion Lyman” after his Uncle Marion of the same name, who was an apostle in the Mormon Church.
As youngsters, the Lyman boys placed with stick horses, rock cows, and even used the small bones from animal’s feet as their play cattle. As they grew up, they learned to ride the frisky calves and burrows and then the bucking horses. They loved to fish and hunt and France did both well. As a young man France wrangled cows, herded sheep and farmed on the Lyman 160-acre homestead in Upper Boulder.
France and the other sibling in the family attended school in Boulder first in a one-room log school house built in 1896 It has a dirt floor and was heated with a Franklin stove. School was from November to April. Many times they walked to school four miles each way. The children learned reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, spelling and grammar. Parents were responsible for their children’s desks in this school. Many just had a bench to sit on.
A new school house was built in 1904. This school house was one large high-ceiling room. A rope hung down in the center from a belfry that housed a large bell. The bell was rung each morning. Desks were brought in from Panguitch. In 1913-14 this school house was partitioned off with curtains making two class rooms. Then in the summer of 1914 France and Horace Hall were hired by the county to partition the school house. They made a folding partition seven feet high in the middle of the room. This partition opened from the center and folded together on the south and north sides of the building. The two parted partitions were held in place with straps. The space above the partition was open – it made one large room where meetings, dances, funerals, and other activities were held. On Sundays the two rooms were divided further with curtains for classes. This school house was destroyed by fire in 1935. These school houses were the only meeting places in Boulder for nearly 36 years.
The people in Boulder, although far away from other towns and people, still had a patriotic spirit land loved to get together for socials. Grandpa Amasa Lyman went up on the Boulder Mountain in about 1900 and found a nice pole and brought it down to be used as a flag pole on which the flag was raised for nearly a decade. Even before Boulder had the new school house the people from the various ranches would get together for dances. They would dance ‘till morn on the dirt floor of the log school house. Doyle Moosman says he remembers when France would go upon the mountain with pack horses and bring back pack bags packed with snow so the folks could make ice cream for celebrations like the 4th of July. This would have been in later years.
The Lyman boys worked out on the various ranches and farms. They were paid $1.25 a day. This pay was usually taken in trade rather than money. It may have been a gallon of molasses, a side of bacon, or some other commodity.
France did not spend all his single life in Boulder. In 1904 the Lyman family moved to Cainsville, Wayne County, Utah. The children went to school there for one year, 1904-1905. Grandfather Amasa was not satisfied there and they moved to Teasdale, where the children went to school in 1906. They moved again to Boulder and were in Boulder a couple of years. Grandmother Lyman then decided the younger children should go to high school.
France herded sheep to help earn the money to go to high school. He and his brother, Maurice, attended the SnowAcademy in Ephraim for three years, 1908-1909-1910-1911. They majored in carpentry. They made their mother a set of furniture including a sideboard, bookcase, and cupboard. His mother and youngest brother, Amasa, were also in Ephraim. She kept house for them and Amasa went to grade school. After the boys finished school in Ephraim their mother never went back to Boulder. She resided in Teasdale. Uncle Maurice graduated from school, but France did not. To quote Uncle Maurice, “France had quite a temper.” They had been to OakCity at Christmas time visiting with their Uncle Fred Lyman’s family. Later in the spring Uncle Fred died. France wanted to go to the funeral but didn’t have the money to go. This upset him and made him angry. In his anger he foolishly quit school before graduation time.
France and Emery King bought the ranch from his folks on January 3, 1914. Later France bought Emery’s interest. On May 20, 1914, France married Hazel May Snow, a daughter of Charles and Sarah May Coleman Snow. They were married in the MantiTemple. France only held the office of a deacon in the Aaronic Priesthood. It was necessary that he be advanced to the Melchezideck Priesthood and ordained to the office of an Elder before he could be endowed and married in the temple. This ordination to the office of an Elder was done at the temple that day by Louis Anderson who also united them in marriage at that time.
Hazel was born the 29th of April 1893 in Teasdale, Wayne County, Utah. Teasdale was a typical early Utah town. People didn’t get far from home. The horse and buggy days were a slow way of t raveling as compared with the transportation of the late 1900’s. Travel was by foot, horseback, wagon, or buggy. In those days, too, there were no household conveniences. They used coal oil lamps and candles, scrubbed clothes on a washboard, ironed with irons heated on the stove and they carried water from the creek in buckets for drinking and household use.
In the summertime the children played with rag dolls, stick horses and rock cows. They also made whistles and water guns from green willows. In the winter they attended school in a one-room school house for five months out of the year. Later school was stepped up to seven months. For amusement and fun at recess they played baseball, steal the sticks, run sheep run, hide and seek, tag, jump the rope, guina, marbles, jacks and etc. These were the kind of games that Lyman kids played in Boulderwhere they were growing up too. Winters were severe and there was lots of snow, so they enjoyed skating and sleigh riding.
Orchard Hill in Teasdale was where they put sticky pine gum on the big rock and then built a fire around it. When the gum was cooked it made good chewing gum. The Lyman kids grew up knowing about gathering pine gum for chewing but they didn’t put fire to it but rather gathered the gum (dried sap) from the pine trees. It had a zingy taste and could be chewed for several hours before it became hard. It was a pink color.
In the summers, the Charles Snow family usually went to DarkValley on the Westside of the BoulderMountain where they milked cows and made cheese. Since Hazel had only one older brother to assist with the outside chores and to milk and do other outdoor work, she and the younger girls learned to milk and do other outdoor work. She was a good hand with a lasso rope and many times when the men-folk were away she and her sister, Emma Jane, Lassoed the bronco cows and milked them. She was a good horsewoman too.
Hazel started to school when she was five year old. She was fifteen years old when she graduated fro the eighth grade. In the fall of that year she went to USAC in Logan for her first year to high school. Her brother Charley, two sisters, Emma Jane and Lucina; and two cousins, Ves Williams and Sarah Coleman, all went to Logan together. They kept house and boarded themselves in a three room apartment. The next winter Hazel worked until Christmas doing housework for her cousin, Edna Nielson in Richfield. During the winter of 1911 and 1912 she went back to USAC to school. She lived with her cousin, Willard Gardner, and did housework for her room and board.
It was in the summer of 1912 when Hazel met and started seeing France. The first time France called on Hazel was not a planned occasion. It seems he was out from Boulder with some of the other cowboys and riders and they were all gathered around the front of the town store whittling and “shooting the breeze” one afternoon. Henry Haws and the other fellows dare France to call on Hazel.France had had a few drinks, at least enough to be bold, so he took them up on the dare and went to call. This first call was a short one, but as time shows, it was not the last one.
In September 1912, Hazel started to do housework for Anna McClellan in Loa. She worked there until Christmas and then went to Monticello to live with her brother, Charley and his wife, Ada, on a dry farm. She stayed there with them until the first of July, then came back home and went to the Dark Valley Ranch. During the winter of 1914, she lived at Manti with her Grandmother Coleman, who had moved there in 1905 to work in the temple and she was alone. Hazel attended her third year of high school that winter in Manti.
By the spring of 1914, Hazel had decided to marry France. They were married on the 20th of May 1914 in the MantiTemple, after a courtship that began in July 1912. This courtship progressed mainly through correspondence for they only saw each other thirteen times during the time before their marriage. Her interest in France was not wholly shared by her parents and they tried to discourage her in this marriage.
As mentioned earlier, France as well as Hazel received their endowments and were married on a Wednesday by Lewis Anderson in the MantiTemple, at Manti, Sanpete County, Utah. There were few cars in those days, so they came to Salina the next day riding in a white-top buggy with team. The next day they came to Teasdale and visited for a few days before coming on to Boulder to make their home.
It was in the early June of 1914 that France brought his new bride to his father’s old homestead in Boulder. They had spent the week following their marriage in Teasdale visiting with their families. The road to Boulder then was not much of an improvement over when France’s father first took his family to Boulder 25 years earlier. The couple traveled in a covered wagon, bringing all of Hazel’s possessions and other things for setting up housekeeping. They made the trip, a distance of fifty miles, in a couple of days.
France had built la new frame house for mother, but upon arrival in Boulder, they lived for a couple of weeks in the old log house across the creek where France had grown up as a boy, while they got the new house in order. The new house was a 3 room dwelling, consisting of a 9 x 12 foot kitchen, a 10 x 11 foot bedroom land a large 14 x 20 foot front room. They put oil-cloth in the kitchen from top to bottom and put linoleum on the floor. The front room and bedroom were of blue plasterboard for the first year. Grandfather Snow had given the newly married couple $50 with which they had bought a bed and the oil-cloth, and linoleum for the kitchen. They had a fold-away bed that made into a couch. Aunt Anne, Hazel’s oldest sister, had given her a dresser and a rocker. They had a Home Comfort cook stove and an old secretary (bookcase) which belonged to France’s mother, also a table and chairs and a cupboard form her. With these few material household things they began their new life in Boulder. France and Hazel spent the next 25 years together in Boulder.
The first summer in Boulder was a relatively carefree and easy one for France and Hazel. Much of the time was spent fishing and horseback riding on the mountain with work on the farm spliced in between. And then after the first year, as Hazel said, the babies started to come – twelve in all – and in this order: Truman, Conrad, LaRue, Ivan, Kirk, Edith, Opal, Dale, Olive, Lincoln, and Loya (twins), and Yvonne. Olive and Yvonne died young and Conrad was killed in an auto accident during World War II. So there were six sons and six daughters. Nine are still living, have all married and have families of their own.
Life in Boulder was not easy. France spent his time working on the farm, tending cattle, and sometimes herding sheep to help support his increasing and growing family. He was very proud of his family. In those early years in Boulder, travel which was by wagon, buggy or horseback and other communications were slow and difficult. It wasn’t a very exciting place to be. Nothing much went on except an occasional Sunday School. People visited back and forth with each other, coming to spend the whole day when they came. Only the dire need of medical assistance prompted them to seek the aid of a doctor There was not a doctor within fifty miles and that was over the mountain to WayneCounty. The nearest hospital was at Salina, Utah. Hazel delivered all of her children at home mainly with the assistance of midwives.