FEATURE — In the spring of 1882, London journalist Phillip Robinson visited Orderville, Utah in the company of LDS apostle John H. Smith. That Sunday, as he sat in a church meeting, he experienced something that put his teeth on edge:
The perpetual bleating of babies from every corner of the building makes it seem to this day as if religious service was being held in a sheepfold. … The Apostle’s voice in prayer was accepted as a challenge to try their lungs, and the music (very good, by the way) as a mere obligato to their own vocalization. The patient gravity of the mothers throughout the whole performance, and the apparent indifference of the men, struck me as very curious—for I come from a country where one baby will plunge a whole church congregation into profanity, and where it is generally supposed that two crying together would empty heaven.
The caterwauling of the Orderville babies may well have offended Robinson’s Anglican sensibilities, but he was impressed by the natural wonders in the Long Valley area and perplexed at the town’s unique economic system.
He shared his thoughts on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a book titled Sinners and Saints, still in print today. Perhaps anticipating the artist Maynard Dixon, Robinson wrote that Orderville was situated.
“Amid scenery that might distract an artist, and fossil and insect treasures enough to send men of science crazy,” he wrote. But he was skeptical of an economic system which “assured a comfortable house, abundant food [and] good clothes,” but which “deprived” a man of the “noblest ambition [to] become a proprietor, an owner, a master.”
The economic system referred to was the United Order, in which members of the community held everything in common and there was no private property. John R. Young, assigned by his uncle Brigham Young, established the system in Long Valley.
Observed in his memoirs: “There were no rich and no poor — for all were equal. From that start onward no man could say ‘this is mine.’” Mute proof of their communal society was the site of the church meeting — a social hall that doubled as a dining room in where young and old gathered daily for their meals.
Townspeople were summoned to breakfast, lunch and dinner by the coronet of the town’s blacksmith, Thomas Robertson, who played a different hymn for each meal. It was a self-sufficient village in which residents grew their own food, made their own clothes and entered into a baptismal covenant to work for the good of the whole. They lived in a U-shaped fort surrounded by farms, orchards and fields from which they survived.
Brigham Young had spoken of such a community a few years earlier in the Salt Lake Tabernacle:
I have looked upon the community of Latter-day Saints in vision and beheld them organized as one great family of heaven, each person performing his several duties in his line of industry, working for the good of the whole more than for individual aggrandizement; and in this I have beheld the most beautiful order that the mind of man can contemplate – Discourses of Brigham Young, Deseret Book
In Building the Kingdom of God: Community & Cooperation Among the Mormons, Leonard Arrington wrote that while wintering at St. George in 1874, Brigham Young established the first United Order, which became the model for others to follow.
The founding document called for “a closer union and combination of labor for the promotion of our common welfare” to address ills wrought by “a spirit of extravagant speculation.” The solution to such ills, he wrote, lay in becoming “self-sustaining,” less dependent on imported goods, and guided by the principles of “economy, frugality, and the simple grandeur of manners that belong to the pure in heart.”
Beginning that spring, over two hundred United Orders were established in towns large and small throughout the state of Utah. Some failed to operate, or dissolved within the first year — and almost all failed by 1877.
The United Order in Orderville was unique both in its success and longevity, lasting for more than a decade. For many who lived there, it was the pinnacle religious experience. The first president was Howard Spencer, son of the first president of the University of Utah, Orson Spencer.
Among the reasons for Orderville’s success is that its founders were destitute — refugees from the Muddy Mission forced into exile when Nevada annexed a degree of latitude from Utah. They forfeited their homes and farms for back taxes, carrying with them only what they could load in their wagons.
Unlike most United Orders who had accumulated property and were understandably reluctant to share their hard-won gains with others, the settlers of Orderville had nowhere to go but forward.
According to Martha Bradley’s History of Kane County, within two years of its establishment, the little community created three dairies and acquired farms in Long Valley, Kanab, Leeds and Moccasin, Ariz.
To provide forage for their livestock, they bought ranches throughout Kane County and were granted grazing rights on the Buckskin (Kaibab) Mountains by local Native Americans. In addition to producing their own food, the settlers manufactured their own clothing. Wool from their herds was woven into fabric and cattle hides were tanned for leather. In addition to providing leather for shoes, boots, harnesses, and saddles, the Order tannery also processed deer hides for buckskin.
By 1876, the Order bought stock in the Washington Cotton Factory and began to exchange wool for cotton cloth. Within a year, they purchased land near the factory and members of the Order were called to raise cotton and operate their own cotton gin.
The Order initially shipped its raw wool to Manti, where it was carded and returned to be spun into yarn for woolen goods. Within a few years, they built a factory to make their own cloth. Soon they were producing hundreds of yards of fabric from which they made everything from baby clothes and men’s pants to dresses and suits.
The Order’s board of directors assigned members to manage herds, cultivate fields, run the dairies, harvest timber, operate the grist and sawmills, freight goods, raise hogs and chickens, prepare and serve the food, cultivate the gardens, orchards and vineyards.
Shops were created for blacksmithing, tinkering, cobbling, cabinet making, wagon making and repairing, coopering, tanning, leather-work, soap and broom making. And, departments were formed for baking, beekeeping, midwifery, carpentry, millinery, tailoring, weaving, sewing and knitting.
Clerks kept records of the time each member spent on the job and work credits were then redeemed at the bishop’s storehouse for food, clothes and household supplies. At the end of the year the accounts were balanced, with those who contributed more than they redeemed given praise and those who contributed less forgiven and encouraged to do better.
Reminders of human frailty presented themselves as squabbles erupted over water rights, allocation of assignments and sometimes normal foolishness.
The town’s young people weren’t immune from outside influences. Dixie Wine began to appear in Long Valley and Bishop Thomas Chamberlain noted in his diary that he “had a good talk with some of our young brethren [and] gave them some little reproof for using bad language & giving way to other temptations.
Henry Esplin wrote of an experience he had in a sheep camp with two young men who lacked a firm commitment to the Word of Wisdom. They were smokers who rolled their own cigarettes, but when they ran out of cigarette paper a struggle ensued. Henry had a copy of the Book of Mormon he was reading, which they wanted to smoke.
They compromised by agreeing no pages would be smoked until Henry read them, but he had to move quickly to stay ahead of them. “I read the Book of Mormon that winter and those two men smoked it,” he recalled. “They might not think so, but I do believe that I got the most out of it.”
There came a time the young men of Orderville grew tired of being ridiculed by the boys at Mt. Carmel, who made fun of their homespun clothing. Following a meeting with a visiting apostle, Bishop Chamberlain records that he “settled a fine of $16.20 that was imposed on two of our young men who had a little fight with some of the young men of that place.”
The Orderville boys had “been imposed on & insulted by some bully characters” who thought they would not fight back, but “some of our young men could not bear it longer … [and] came off first best, but they had to pay for their fun.”
As Emma Seegmiller tells it in her history of Orderville, one of the boys eventually decided to do something about his homespun clothes. Envious of the jeans worn by the young men at Mt. Carmel and Kanab, he hatched a plot to get himself a pair of “store pants.” When the lambs’ tails were docked in the spring, he gathered them up, trimmed off the wool, and stored it in a sack. When assigned to help haul the wool to market, he sold his little stash of wool and got enough money to buy a pair of store pants.
Proud of his venture, he kept quiet until he got back home where he wore them to a dance in the dining hall. His entrance created a sensation, with one of the young women rushing up and giving him a kiss. When the truth came out, he was mildly chastised, praised for his initiative, and made to forfeit the pants so they might serve as a pattern for the tailors to use thereafter.
But it didn’t end there. Other boys wanted new pants too but had to wait until theirs wore out. Suddenly there was a rash of tattered pants, all curiously worn at the seat. The mystery was solved when the bishop discovered that the young men were sneaking to the tool shed where they used the grindstone to speed up the fraying. Realizing there was a full-blown pants rebellion underway, the board decided to send a load of wool to the Washington factory to trade for cotton cloth, thus allowing the tailor shop to make the pants the young men preferred, instead of the coarse gray jeans they were used to.
The Orderville United Order endured for a decade but ultimately yielded to the changing times. To some degree they were a victim of their own success. “Jealousy and ridicule from without the group were causes of disintegration,” Henry Esplin recalled, “jealousy because the Order owned so much property, and ridicule, usually in a good-natured manner, because of [our] mode of living and [our] home-spun clothing.” Members, especially the younger ones, did not like being “considered different” and “became envious and discontented.”
An improved economic climate, and the “store bought” goods that came with it, was also to blame. “As prosperity came, the spirit of discontent crept in,” Henry Esplin recalled. “People of the Order began to want things as others had them.” And there were slackers among them. “A certain class of people who would not share responsibility were allowed to join the Order, thereby throwing the responsibility for the support of their families on those who were already carrying a heavy load. If all had worked equally, shoulder to shoulder, all would have gone well … but this condition crept in, causing selfishness and jealousy.”
In the end, two blows ended the Orderville United Order. The first was the death of Brigham Young. “President Brigham Young was the pilot, the guiding star,” John R. Young wrote in his diary. “When he died the mastermind was gone … when that voice was hushed in death, the light was gone and the community dissolved.”
The final blow was the very real threat of confiscation of all the Order’s holdings as a result of the Edmunds Act, a federal law intended to force the LDS Church to abandon polygamy and embrace economic competition and political pluralism. Thomas Chamberlain records in his diary that in 1885 President John Taylor sent two young apostles, Brigham Young Jr. and Heber J. Grant, to Orderville to urge the Order to disincorporate.
After several sessions with the visiting authorities who urged them to fold the tent, Order members voted to disincorporate. Francis Porter recorded in the ward records the tenor of the meeting. “I will state here that when it was decided to dissolve there were some who shed tears and some who would not vote for dissolving the Order. The principle of loving their neighbors as themselves were made manifest among this people to a marked degree.” With the vote taken, the various properties and possessions owned by the Order were distributed among its members.
Was the United Order at Orderville a success or a failure? While it ultimately succumbed to human nature, the enticements of a free market, and the heavy hand of the federal government, it remains to this day an example of the common good prevailing over self-interest. Perhaps the blacksmith Thomas Robertson put it best in a letter he sent to a friend at the time:
Accumulating wealth was not our object, that was farthest from our minds. Our aim was to establish a principle of equality as near that spoken of in the Revelations as our fallen natures would admit of, striving always to grade upwards towards the mark … Now this command from God was our cement; this is what brought us together, what held us together, what comforted us in all our sorrows, what cheered us up when cast down … and make every sacrifice necessary to and consequent upon establishing a new order of things …
Artifacts from the Orderville United Order, including some of the tools and clothes manufactured at the time, together with photographs and other historical items, are on display in the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum on Orderville’s Main Street. A scale model of the United Order fort can also be seen in the old co-op building on Main Street.
These are reminders of a time when a small community dedicated itself to the goal of creating on earth a model of “the family of heaven.”
Photo Gallery
Young men of Orderville in repose but apparently ready for action. The author’s great-grandfather, Josiah Hoyt, is seated in the center | | Photo by Fred Esplin, St. George News Henry Esplin | Photo courtesy FamilySearch.org, St. George News Howard Spencer | Photo courtesy FamilySearch.org, St. George News An illustration of the United Order fort at Orderville by David Miekle, based on an 1880 drawing by Isaac V. Carling | Photo by Fred Esplin, St. George News Noted muralist Edith Hamlin, wife of artist Maynard Dixon, painted this mural of Brigham Young visiting Orderville. It covers the west wall in the entrance to the Orderville LDS Church Building. | Photo courtesy Fred Esplin Francis Lysander Porter was the ward clerk and unofficial historian of the Orderville Ward during the United Order period. His writings, which are available in the LDS Church History Library, provide rich detail on life in rural Utah at that time | Photo courtesy of FamilySearch.org, St. George News Thomas Chamberlain | Photo courtesy FamilySearch.org, St. George News Scottish convert Thomas Robertson was the Orderville blacksmith. He played hymns on his coronet to call residents to their daily meals. Photo courtesy of FamilySearch.org, St George News This early image of Orderville was taken after the United Order ended but still gives a feel for the early days of this small Long Valley town | Photo by Fred Esplin, St. George News The Orderville United Order produced thousands of feet of woolen fabric in this three-story weaving factory near Hidden Lake in Long Valley | Photo by Fred Esplin, St. George News Those who joined the United Order pledged to abide by these rules and were re-baptized before being allowed to join the community. The rules included a commitment to work for the common good | Photo courtesy LDS Church History Library, St. George News
Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2023, all rights reserved.