Bessie Morgan Rex Part 2

Today the Assembly Hall on Temple Square is nestled beneath the rising City Creek skyscraper south of it in Salt Lake City, Utah. Bessie Morgan’s graduation exercises were held here when she graduated from the eighth grade [about 1906]. J. Spencer Cornwall played the organ for their march. He was just a fourteen-year-old boy playing the pipe organ and she was always so impressed.

In 1906, when Bessie was 15-years old, the Y.L. M. I. A officers and teachers remembered her at Christmas time. And Bryan Avenue was still York Street.

The R. K. Polk Directories for Salt Lake City list Bessie as follows.

1907 bds 359 York, student U of U
1908 bds 359 Bryan Ave, student U of U
1909 b 359 Bryan Ave, Stenog Warm Springs Foundary
1910 b 359 Bryan Ave, Steno State Dairy and Food Commr
1911 b 359 Bryan Ave, Stenog W V Tel Co
1912 b 359 Bryan Ave, Steno MST & T Co

Bessie became a stenographer. She told her children she worked in Governor William Spry’s office [republican governor 1909-1916].

During the summer of 1910 Bessie’s brother, John [Jack] Hamilton Morgan and cousin Glenn Smith [John Henry and Josephine Groesbeck Smith’s son] worked for the Rex Brothers in their Randolph, Utah hay fields. In 1911 brothers, Percy Harold and John Oseland Rex, visited their friend Jack Morgan in Salt Lake City while attending the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Say Saints’ June Conference at the Tabernacle. During their visit Bessie met Percy. She always called him Perce. On their first date they went to Saltaire where they had supper, bowled, and danced.

After Percy returned to Randolph he and Bessie corresponded. That fall he invited her to Randolph for a visit. She traveled by train to Evanston, Wyoming and Percy met her at the station with his horse and buggy. They spent the night in separate hotel rooms in Evanston. And the next day he returned to Randolph with Bessie, in his horse drawn buggy. They must have enjoyed her 8-10 day stay. He and his brother Oseland came to Salt Lake City to attend the LDS High School that fall and boarded for a time with Bessie’s mother, Sister Morgan.

Bessie and Percy were married in the Salt Lake Temple on June 12, 1912. The newlyweds lived first on the Ranch [Uncle Sam Rex’s] twelve miles north of Randolph. As remote as Randolph might appear, Bessie’s cousin Elizabeth [Bess] Smith [John Henry and Josephine Groesbeck Smith’s daughter] was already living in Randolph. She had married Percy’s older brother Samuel earlier that same year

I took the picture of the Assembly Hall this week. Bessie Morgan postcards from Helen Rex Frazier collection. R. K. Polk Directories, Utah State Historical Society. History, Descendants, and Ancestry of William Rex & Mary Elizabeth Brough of Randolph, Utah, compiled by Ronald D. Rex, 1999, pgs. 221, 266, 267, picture of horse & buggy p. 113.