The house that raised a mayor
The Charles E. Davies House, built around 1885 in Provo at 300 North, is a double-gable H-plan Victorian with a distinctive bay window, the only one of its kind in the city. It changed owners nine times between 1885 and 1945, none of whom held civic office.
A future mayor grew up in a pioneer farmhouse
Thomas N. Taylor was born in Provo in 1868. His father was Thomas N. Taylor, who had opened the city's first furniture store two years earlier. The store grew into the Taylor Brothers Company, Provo's earliest department store. Thomas's mother Eliza ran it as president. Taylor grew up in the house now known as the Clark–Taylor House. It was a two-story farmhouse. An English immigrant named Edward W. Clark had built it around 1854, only seven years after the first wagons reached the valley. Clark had crossed from England in 1852. He became bishop of the Provo Third Ward. Later he signed the house over to Brigham Young himself as a religious consecration. By the time Taylor was a boy living there, the house had already passed through a blacksmith named John H. Carter, who added its second story, and a man named Benjamin Bachman, who took it in trade for 85 acres of land. Taylor went to Provo's schools and then to Brigham Young Academy. He married Maud Rogers in the LDS temple at Manti in 1889. He began a career that would keep his family's name over Provo storefronts and pulpits for another sixty years.
Taylor ran Provo from a few hundred feet of ground
Taylor bought his childhood home outright in 1898. These were the same years he began climbing into Provo's public life. He served as mayor from 1900 to 1903. He was bishop of the Provo Third Ward for nineteen years. He was president of the Utah Stake of the LDS Church for twenty more years. He sat on the board of trustees of Brigham Young University and chaired it. He also sat on the University of Utah's Board of Regents. He helped found Utah Valley Hospital. In 1920 he ran for governor of Utah as a Democrat and lost. None of it moved him out of the family house on 315 feet. In 1915 he gave the place to his son, T. Sterling Taylor, as a wedding present. It stayed in the family for decades after. A few doors away, at 292 feet, stands a grander house. Taylor built it for himself in 1904. It is a Classical Box mansion. The National Register calls it the finest of its kind ever built in Provo. Thomas N. Taylor died in 1950. He had spent his whole life inside a few hundred feet of the ground where he was born.
A militia massacre cleared the ground beneath these lots
Before any of the Taylors owned a foot of this ground, the valley belonged to the Timpanogos. Settlers under John S. Higbee built Fort Utah in 1849. They built it right against a Timpanogos village near the Provo River. Relations held for a while, then broke. In January 1850 three settlers shot a Timpanogos man. They accused him of stealing a shirt. They sank his body in the river with rocks in his bowels. His own people called it murder. Brigham Young ordered a militia campaign in response. Through February 1850 the militia surrounded a Timpanogos encampment on the river. They attacked with guns and a cannon. Between forty and a hundred people died, along with one woman. Survivors' heads were brought back and displayed on the walls of the fort. The lots that would later hold farmhouses and mansions, including the one the Clarks and Taylors lived in, were surveyed onto ground cleared this way.
Provo's leading men built showpiece mansions near each other
The Taylor house on Clark–Taylor House was not the only mansion going up in these years. Between 1893 and 1908, Provo's most successful men built a cluster of showpiece homes. They built the Charles E. Loose House, the William H. Ray House, the Knight-Allen House, the John R. Twelves House, the Jesse Knight House, the Knight-Mangum House, and Thomas Taylor's own house. They borrowed from every fashionable style available: Eastlake, Shingle, Craftsman, Italianate, Classical, Moorish, Colonial, Romanesque Revival. Built mostly of brick, they were the most ornate houses the city had. Six were later listed on the National Register together as one submission. The seventh, the Loose house, was found eligible but left off at its owner's objection. Provo's leading families did not just hold office and run stores. They put their success in brick, on view, a few doors from each other.
The farmhouse changed hands five times before Taylor
Edward W. Clark built the farmhouse on 292 feet around 1854. This was two years after he crossed from England to Provo. He rose to bishop of the Provo Third Ward. He served as a war veteran and a director of the county's Agricultural and Manufacturing Company. In 1855 he signed his own house over to Brigham Young in a consecration deed. He gave up ownership to the church itself. The house then passed to John H. Carter. Carter was an alderman and blacksmith who had served as Clark's counselor under him. Carter added the second story in 1863. Sometime in the 1870s he traded the house away to Benjamin Bachman for 85 acres of land. George H. Church bought it in 1897 and sold it the next year to Thomas N. Taylor. The house had already changed hands five times, by trade, by church deed, by sale, before a Taylor ever lived in it.
The Davies House passed through nine owners in sixty years
The Charles E. Davies House was built around 1885 at 300 North. It changed owners nine times in sixty years. David L. Van Wagenen bought it from Davies in 1907 and stayed until 1922, even after selling it in 1912. It went to Eliza Smith Stewart. Then it went to Thomas Callister in 1918. Then it went to Georgianna Parry in 1920. She sold it three years later to Clyde Bunnell. The Bunnells kept it until 1929, when Ray Barrett took title. Madeline Hales bought it in 1945 and sold it that same year to Arthur S. Roberts. None of these names ran the city or filled its pulpits. None of them held the house past a decade.
The Clark–Taylor House still stands on this block, the only one of these old lots that never left its family.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.