George Alexander Reid

George Alexander Reid was my Great-Grandma Barlow's father. He was born in Salt Lake City in 1862, just a short 15 years after the pioneers arrived in the valley. He grew up in a beautiful home at the corner of 3rd West and North Temple, where BYU Salt Lake and KSL TV are located today. I work only one block west of there and as I walk past that corner daily, I think about the Reids living there in the late 1800's - what life was like for them as Salt Lake was growing around them and where the Salt Lake Temple was being constructed only a couple of blocks away. He grew up knowing Brigham Young for the first 15 years of his life. 

Young George was probably fascinated with trains as he lived only two blocks down from the train station. His father did some carpentry work for the railroad. When George was only seven years old, the trains tracks from the eastern United States met the tracks from the West Coast just north of the Great Salt Lake to form the first transcontinental railroad. George studied and learned all about the railroad and became a train engineer for the Union Pacific Railroad Company.

George met a young lady named Eliza Jane Garrick, whose family benefited from the transcontinental railroad as they arrived by train in Salt Lake City from New York City when she was 15 years old. The Garricks built a house just up the street from the Reids and only a few short years later, George fell in love with the young lady with the east coast accent. More about her next week!

George Alexander Reid and Eliza Jane Garrick

This week I was telling my Mom how much fun I am having being a grandpa and some of the things that I enjoy doing with my grandkids. She then told me how much she enjoyed when her Great-Grandpa Reid would tell her stories and nursery rhymes and then teasingly mix up or alter the ending causing her to giggle and correct him. That is one of my favorite things to do as well!

I loved hearing Mom tell me that about Great-Grandpa Reid. I had never realized before that she knew her Great-Grandpa and Grandma Reid. They are Grandma Barlow's Mom and Dad. Grandpa Reid died in 1947 when my mom was eight years old and Grandma Reid died in 1954. They were both born in the 1860's in Salt Lake City, just a little more than 12 years after the first pioneers came into Utah! It just amazes me that my Mom knew someone that knew Brigham Young! 

I don't know much about Grandpa and Grandma George and Eliza Reid, but fortunately Grandma Barlow wrote a few pages about her parents before she died. Aunt Glenda sent me these writings recently and I will be sharing a little about them in coming weeks.

James and Marie Davidson

Peter Reid and Diana Davidson are my Great-Grandma Barlow's grandparents. Diana's parents, James and Marie Davidson, were expert weavers in Scotland. A little more than ten years after Diana came to America, the Davidsons decided to come across the ocean and settle with the Saints in the Salt Lake Valley. With their expert weaving skills, they quickly found work at the woolen mills at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon. Unfortunately, tragedy struck the Davidson family only a couple of years later.

James and Marie Davidson and their twelve year-old son, Joseph, left Salt Lake and went down to the southwest area of the Territory (currently Nevada) to visit their married daughter, Maggie, and possibly settle there themselves. After the visit, they mounted their horse-driven wagon and started back on the 60 mile trail to St. George. Along the way, their wagon wheel broke and they were quickly getting short on water in the deadly June heat. Possibly knowing they would all not make it with the little water they had left, James and Diana sent their 12 year-old son on horseback with the canteen to fetch some water at the well-known watering well along the trail which was several miles away.

During the night on June 12, 1969, three men were at the watering well when a famished horse came straggling into the camp. One of them back-tracked the horse's trail and found the young boy's body only a scant ½ mile away from the well, so swollen and distorted from the heat that recognition was impossible. The empty canteen by his side bore eloquent testimony as to the cause of his death. Four days later, fearing what they would find, they found the bodies of the boy's parents, lying side by side under a blanket propped up against a desert palm for shade against the deadly summer heat.

This tragic story of Grandma Barlow's great-grandparents was written in the 1915 church magazine, "The Improvement Era". It is also recorded in the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Lessons. All three were buried there in the Nevada desert, and there is now a marble and rock gravesite set up for them there. There is a lot more to this story. You can read about it from these sources:

https://books.google.com/books?id=H3AwAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA513&lpg=PA513&dq=James+Davidson+Nevada+desert&source=bl&ots=MgFVfIHJtq&sig=XEiFORvOVso9Ypg2ejEcanFZTC4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uF6pVIDLFoiuyQStmYCYAw&ved=0CD4Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=James%20Davidson%20Nevada%20desert&f=false

https://dcms.lds.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE3197126

http://www.utahsdixie.info/hs/y02-davidson.html