The Tower House and the Morgan bedroom furniture.

Continued from here.

Mellie and her younger children resided in this home at 1857 South 4th East for a time after 1900. They called it the “Tower House.” It is still standing today.

Chapter five from Nicholas’ biography, The Man Who Moved City Hall, is titled “The Crucible of Poverty.” It says,

“It wasn’t all crude living. Along with the salt pork, the rock-pocked beans, was the high dreaming, the religion-inspired assurance of eternal bliss to come. There was laughter at the dinner table, and a comradeship welded partly by the spirit of we’re-in-this-together stoicism. There were the scores of friends made at the old Farmers Ward, where Henry F. Burton was bishop.”

It was probably akin to moving to a new town when Mellie left downtown Salt Lake and moved to the Farmers Ward area at 1700 South and 3-4th East. Between 1897 and 1930 she lived there in the three homes I’ve shown in these last posts. Her beautiful furniture could be used in these roomy homes.

While visiting the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Museum in Salt Lake City in 2008 I took pictures of John and Mellie’s bedroom set there. They no longer permit picture taking in the museum, I’m happy to have taken these when I did. Following the museum’s resent renovation they repositioned the John Morgan bedroom set. Now it’s easier to see the Victorian walnut bed, the marble top wash stand, and the beautiful dresser and mirror.

From Nicholas Groesbeck Morgan; The Man Who Moved City Hall, by Jean R. Paulson, copyright 1979 by Marjorie Morgan Gray, pg. 54.