The bigamist who came back a bishop

A federal court jailed Otis Terry for polygamy

A federal court sent Otis Terry, Jr. to prison for part of a nine-month sentence. His crime was polygamy. He had married two women before Congress and the courts cracked down on the practice across Utah Territory.

Terry came out of prison to a life already collapsing. His first wife died in 1899. His second wife left him. That left him alone with thirteen children to raise on the Provo Bench, the farming shelf above Provo where Orem would later grow.

He did not stay alone. In 1900 Terry married a third wife. The next year he bought a house at what is now 815 East 800 South, about three quarters of a mile from where you stand. A farmer named Richard Carter had built the house two years earlier. Carter had owned the land for about a decade before selling it to Terry.

An imprisoned polygamist became the ward's bishop

Terry moved his rebuilt family into the house and settled into the community. In 1903, two years later, he became the second bishop of the Timpanogos Ward. The Timpanogos Ward was the Latter-day Saint congregation that then covered nearly the whole Provo Bench. A man once imprisoned by the federal government for his marriages was now leading its church congregation.

Terry held the house and the bishopric as Orem grew from scattered farms into an incorporated town in 1877's wake. He kept the property until 1917, when he sold it to Orvis J. Call. The house still stands at that address today. It is one of the oldest homes left from the years when this bench was still mostly orchard and grain field.

Wartime houses rose to answer a steel plant's needs

War found the Provo Bench again. This time it came as an industrial order, not a court summons. The federal government picked Orem for a new steel plant in 1942. It was safe from the coast. But it was close enough to serve Pacific shipyards. Building it took thousands of construction workers. Every one of them needed a bed.

Federal planners built the answer a quarter mile from where you stand. It became the Christeele Acres Historic District. The houses followed a strict wartime formula. Each was about 700 square feet. Each had two bedrooms. Each was sized for a family of three. War Production Board rules even limited how many brass keys could go into a single lock.

Washington did not want temporary camps that would rot once the war ended. The houses were built to last as ordinary neighborhood homes, not barracks. Sixty-two houses and three duplexes went up on the bench. They were minimum houses meant to outlive the emergency that built them. They are still there. A permanent street raised to answer a crisis that was supposed to be temporary.

A busy transit center opened, then closed within decades

Transit on the bench found its own version of that same problem. Something was built to meet a need. Then a bigger one left it behind. Utah Transit Authority opened the Mount Timpanogos Transit Center in August 2000. It was about a quarter mile from where you stand. It was beside the University Mall.

For over a decade it was the busiest bus stop in the whole UTA system. Utah County's routes converged there. Then a train changed everything. FrontRunner's commuter rail line reached Provo in 2012. Traffic through the open-air station fell away. One last bus route hung on before it too was cut in 2018. The transit center closed for good in 2019. It was a structure built for a peak that had already passed by the time it opened.

A senator who broke McCarthy's power died in Orem

Arthur Vivian Watkins built a career on confronting a different kind of reckoning. He was elected to the U. S. Senate from Utah in 1946. In 1954 he chaired a committee. The committee recommended censuring Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy's conduct during the anti-communist hearings gripped the country. The vote broke McCarthy's power in Washington.

Watkins lost his Senate seat in the 1958 election. That was partly for that same stand. He came home to the Provo Bench. He spent his remaining years there. He died in Orem in 1973. A bishop had rebuilt a household on this same bench decades before, eluding federal punishment. A wartime housing tract had risen here. A busy little bus station had operated here. Each ran out its use. Each gave way to what came next.