A teenager crossed an ocean alone for a faith he had never seen practiced

Two Swedish converts crossed an ocean and built a house

Erick Lehi Olson was sixteen years old in Sweden when he converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He had likely never seen the church practiced outside a missionary's telling of it. In 1882 he left anyway, crossing the Atlantic alone to join a community of strangers in Utah.

A young woman named Ingrid Larsen had made the same choice. She converted to the same church in Sweden. She crossed the ocean the following year, in 1883. She came to build a life among Mormon settlers gathering in Cache Valley.

Erick and Ingrid married and settled first in Logan, the young town platted in the valley just a few years before either of them arrived. They later moved a short distance to River Heights, a settlement still finding its shape. In 1891 they built a house there in the Queen Anne style. It was ornate for a farming town, with turned porch posts and a steep, fashionable roofline.

Erick did not stay a private man. He became bishop of the local LDS ward. He also became president of the Third Quorum of Elders of the Cache Stake. These offices made him one of the men who ran the valley's religious life. The house he and Ingrid built held that life for decades. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. That was a century after they raised it. It is the only lasting record of two teenagers who crossed the world for a church they had only heard about.

A mob lynched a man in Logan's streets

On Valentine's Day, 1873, a man named Charlie Benson was shot dead in Logan. He was accused of murder. A vigilante mob broke into the jail that same night. They overpowered the sheriff and the marshal. Then they lynched him in the street. A sixteen-year-old watched from the town's sidewalk. The valley where the Olsons and their neighbors were settling already had rough justice built into it. This happened nine years before Erick Olson ever stepped off a boat.

A second generation raised a church to last

By 1907 the Mormon settlers who first platted Logan were gone. A second generation had taken over. One of them raised a church meant to last. A builder named Olof I. Pedersen built the Logan LDS Sixth Ward Church. Architects K. C. Schaub and Joseph Monson designed it as a Gothic Revival building. It stands 520 feet from this spot. This was one more act of turning an imported faith into something fixed in stone and timber.

A temple rose to hold an imported faith

Starting in 1884, the LDS Church built the Logan Utah Temple. It was a permanent monument to the faith. That faith had pulled a Swedish teenager across an ocean. Ground broke just two years after he arrived. Where Erick and Ingrid Olson built a house to hold a life, the church built a temple to hold a religion. Both went up within a few years of each other. The valley was still being invented.

A Depression-era gymnasium did not survive to now

Not everything raised here to last actually did. In 1935 and 1936, Logan High School put up an Art Deco gymnasium. A Public Works Administration project during the Depression paid for it. Utah once had 233 such buildings. Only 130 survived into recent decades. This one did not. The Logan High School Gymnasium came down in 1999. It stood 0.65 miles from where you stand. A new gymnasium replaced it within a year or two.

A commercial building covers ground once farmed

The commercial building at 693 South Main went up in 2022. It is 4,171 square feet on a lot just under half an acre. Cache County's own record shows nothing built there before it. For most of the valley's history this ground sat open. It was part of the same farmland the Olsons and their neighbors worked and platted around it. New construction now sits on old valley ground. The newest layer covers land that people crossed oceans to settle.