Castle Dale in 1880: Fifty Houses, 264 People, and a Whole Lot of Trouble Brewing

The Man With the Pencil

It’s June 11, 1880. A man named L. D. Ensign climbs into a buckboard in Castle Dale, Utah Territory, with a stack of blank forms, a sharp pencil, and seven days to find every single person in town.

Castle Dale is one year old. Most of the houses still smell like fresh-sawn lumber. The town sits in a valley of red rock and sagebrush about a hundred miles south of Provo and a hundred years from anything resembling modern America. There is no railroad. There is no telegraph. There is no school building yet. When Ensign knocks on a door, whoever opens it will answer his questions by lamplight or in the open doorway, squinting up at him.

Ensign is a federal census enumerator. His job is to count America every ten years. This week, he counts Castle Dale.

By the time he writes Here Ends Castle Dale at the bottom of his last page, he’ll have met a divorced Englishman raising six kids by himself, a young Iowa-born woman with tuberculosis, two living brothers both named James, a sixteen-year-old mom with a one-year-old son, and a baby born in Utah whose mother had just finished the longest trip of her life.

This is their story.

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A Town That Barely Existed Yet

If you walked into Castle Dale in June 1880, you’d notice three things in the first minute.

First: construction everywhere. Two Scottish stonemasons named Andrew Boyle and George McKmillan were laying sandstone blocks. Families were still pitching in on each other’s houses. A few families hadn’t finished theirs yet.

Second: no modern anything. No train whistle. No telegraph poles. The nearest courthouse was a log meetinghouse that doubled as the LDS church, the schoolroom, and the county government. If you wanted to mail a letter, it could be a week or more before anyone carried it out of town.

Third: people everywhere, because the town was almost entirely outdoors. Kids ran the streets. Farmers worked the fields. Wives hauled water. Everyone knew everyone.

Here’s the strange part. One year earlier, this town didn’t exist. In 1879, the first families had pitched tents on the creek bank. In February 1880, the Utah Legislature named Castle Dale the seat of the brand-new Emery County. That made it an official government town.

One year from nothing to a county seat. That’s how fast things moved on the Utah frontier. Staying built was another question.

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Who Lived Here?

Ensign’s final count for Castle Dale Precinct: 264 people in 50 houses.

Where were they from?

• 37 people born in Denmark. The largest single group. Mormon missionaries had been active in Denmark since the 1850s; Danish converts migrated to Utah by the thousands.
• 13 English, 5 Swedes, 5 Scots, 1 Welshwoman. British and Scandinavian immigrants outnumbered everyone else.
• 7 Americans born in the South. From Mississippi (the Gibson family), North Carolina (the Smiths), Texas (the O’Fallons), Virginia, and Louisiana — all unusual routes into Mormon Utah.
• One little girl born in Arizona Territory (Louisa Anderson) and one little boy born in Nevada (John V. Burdick), both evidence that their parents had tried one frontier before settling on Castle Dale.
• Dozens born in Utah Territory. The first truly American-born generation of Mormon settlers.

And the trades? Mostly farmers. But also:

• Two stone masons (both Scottish)
• A blacksmith named Joseph Boulden
• A carpenter named John K. Reid — Scottish-born, Irish parents, married to an English woman; the family a true international mix
• A harness maker named Aldrin Burdick — whose Nevada-born son is one of the hints that this family had tried the frontier before
• A Swedish servant named Hannah Lawson
• A rancher named Thomas Farrer, who was divorced, which almost nobody in Utah was in 1880

And one whose job nobody can read. L. D. Ensign wrote something that looks like Stoneman next to Samuel Stowe’s name. Or possibly Horner. Or Stovemaker. Historians are still squinting at it.

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”What in the World?” — Seven Castle Dale Mysteries

Every family in town had something you’d notice. Some of it was ordinary — the new baby, the plot of potatoes, the Sunday clothes drying on the line. Some of it was not. Some of it makes you look at L. D. Ensign’s handwriting and ask: what in the world was going on?

Here are seven of Castle Dale’s best mysteries.

1. The House That Wasn’t There

L. D. Ensign went door to door, in order, and numbered each house as he went. House 1, Morley. House 2, Petersen. House 3, Sims. House 4, two single young farmers named Snelgrove and Fowler sharing a roof. House 5, Petersen again, different family. House 6. House 7. Then — watch the page closely — he jumps to house 9.

There is no dwelling 8. Not on page 4. Not anywhere in the Castle Dale census. It simply doesn’t exist.

Did he miscount? Was he tired? Was house 8 a log cabin somebody had just moved out of? Was there a family living there that saw him coming up the road and didn’t answer the door? The census doesn’t say. We may never know.

2. Two Boys Named James

Flip to page 9. The O’Fallon family, dwelling 50 — the last family in town. James O’Fallon is the dad, age 30, born in Texas to Irish parents. His wife is Hannah, 27. Their kids, in order: James (11). Jacob (8). James E. (5). Louis (3).

That’s right. The O’Fallons had four sons, and two of them were named James.

Both of them alive. Both sitting at the dinner table when Mom called for help with the dishes. What on earth were their parents thinking?

Here’s a clue: in the 1800s, when a baby died young, some families gave the next baby the same name to honor the one they’d buried. Look at the gap between James (b. 1869) and James E. (b. 1875) — six years. Six years with only one baby (Jacob) in the middle. That’s a lot of time for a little James born around 1872 to be born, live a while, and be lost.

Maybe. The tombstones, if any exist, would tell us.

3. Where Did Grett Burnett’s Wife Go?

Dwelling 38. Grett Burnett, age 68, head of household. Born in New York. Marital status: married. In the very next row: his son Joseph, 26, born in Utah, unmarried.

Notice anything missing from this household?

Grett is married. There is no wife in the house. And the census doesn’t say why.

Is she staying with relatives in Salt Lake? Is she sick somewhere? Did she pass away recently and nobody crossed out “married” on Grett’s record? Is she working as a nurse or a seamstress in another town, taking care of grown kids or grandkids? In 1880, the federal census didn’t ask any of these questions. Grett Burnett’s wife is a ghost on the page.

4. The Baby and the Toddler

Dwelling 14. The Andrew Andersen family, fresh off the boat from Scandinavia. Andrew was born in Sweden. His wife Dyantha was born in Denmark. Their older daughter — also named Dyantha — was born in Denmark, two years earlier.

Then comes baby Christee. Christee Andersen was born in 1880, in Utah Territory. And that’s the story.

Here’s why it matters. The trip from Denmark to Castle Dale in 1880 went something like this: a ship across the North Sea, a bigger ship across the Atlantic, a train from New York to Omaha, and a wagon train from Omaha to Utah. Two to three months, total, minimum — and the Andersens did it with a toddler.

By the time L. D. Ensign knocked on their door in June, the family had already crossed two oceans and a continent with little Dyantha, settled in a town that hadn’t existed the year before, and added another baby to the household. Christee’s first three months of life were Castle Dale in its first spring. It’s one of the toughest stories in the whole census.

5. Louisiana, of All Places

Dwelling 18. The Curtis plural-marriage household. Thirteen children across two wives. Erastus Curtis is the dad. His senior wife, Mary C., was born in Delaware. His plural wife, Joanna, was born in Louisiana.

Louisiana. The state closest to the Gulf of Mexico. Steamy, bayou-filled, mostly Catholic and Baptist in the 1840s. About as un-Mormon as a place could be in 1880.

How on earth did a Southern girl end up as a plural wife on a Utah cattle ranch? Mormon missionaries did travel through the South in the 1840s and 50s, and some Southern families converted and migrated to Utah. But Louisiana was not a common starting point. Joanna’s story — how she got from the bayous to Castle Dale — is one of the most interesting in town.

We don’t have it yet.

6. The Sixteen-Year-Old Mom

Dwelling 21. Mary E. Guymon, 16 years old, married, one-year-old son named William. Her husband James is 29.

Do the math. Mary was 15 when William was born. She was 14 or 15 when she got married.

In 1880, this was legal. Utah’s minimum marriage age for girls was fourteen, and most other states were similar. But even in 1880, fifteen was young. Mary’s teens and twenties were going to look very different from most readers’ teens and twenties. What we can’t tell from the census is what she would make of them.

Check back.

7. The One Word in the Health Column

Dwelling 42. Charles Swasey, 27, California-born rancher. His wife Cena, 22, Iowa-born, parents from Denmark.

In the health column — a column the enumerator usually left blank — L. D. Ensign wrote one word next to Cena’s name: Consumption.

Consumption was what the nineteenth century called tuberculosis. It was the most feared disease in America in 1880.

Cena was 22. She was keeping house for her rancher husband on the Utah frontier. L. D. Ensign wrote the word, and then he moved on to dwelling 43.

The census doesn’t tell us what came next. The later records might.

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Cliffhangers: What We Want to Find Out

Here’s what’s coming up in future research.

How many of these 264 people will still be in Castle Dale in 1900? The 1890 federal census burned in a fire in Washington, D.C., in 1921. So we jump from 1880 to 1900 — a twenty-year gap with a lot to happen.

What happens to plural marriage in Castle Dale? Two of these 50 households were openly polygamous — the Curtises, with thirteen children across two wives, and the Bagleys, with nine children across two wives living one dwelling apart on the same street. The 1890 Manifesto banned new plural marriages. What about the existing ones? Did Erastus Curtis’s household break up? Did Emanuel Bagley’s? Or did people quietly keep doing what they’d always done?

Do the teenagers leave? Castle Dale in 1880 had about forty kids ages 12 to 18. When they grew up, did they stay in Emery County? Did they head to Salt Lake? Did they go back to Europe? Did any of them end up in California? This is actually one of the big questions in frontier history — whether the founders’ kids stay put.

Who dies young? Some of these people were gone by 1890 — some of the babies, certainly. Tracking deaths is slow detective work. We do it anyway.

Who arrives after 1880? Between 1880 and 1900, Castle Dale more than doubled in size. Where did the new families come from? Did the Danes keep coming? The Welsh? Someone entirely new?

Among the families we’ll be following longest: the Seeleys (dwelling 15), about to become a Castle Dale dynasty as Justus W. Seeley’s brothers make the move from Sanpete County; the Andersens of dwelling 13 (Frederick and Hannah, Danish immigrants, Utah-born kids), whose line runs four generations forward to one of the people working on this encyclopedia; the Wilsons of dwelling 40, the largest household in town; and the Biddlecomes of dwelling 31, whose middle child has a name unusual enough we’re still trying to figure out whether it’s a misspelling.

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Here Ends Castle Dale

One morning in June 1880, a man named L. D. Ensign closed his census book and wrote three small words at the bottom of his last page:

Here Ends Castle Dale.

As far as he was concerned, he was finished. The town had been counted.

But the town was just getting started.

Keep reading.

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This article is the entry point to Chapter 18 (Castle Dale) of the Encyclopedia of Emery County. Follow-up articles will cover: the 1890 Manifesto’s local impact, the Seeley family dynasty through 1920, the Andersen line across four generations, out-migration of the 1880 youth cohort, and the fate of Charles and Cena Swasey. Every person and household named above is in the full Castle Dale 1880 dataset — sortable, filterable, and fully cited.