Ready to leave Nephi

Above is a 27 photo online album of some Nephi scenes. Many of them are historic photos that are hanging in the hallway of City Hall. Our camera has a nifty "super macro feature that allows us to take a photo of an old photo and it pretty much looks just like a scanner did it.

We took a tour of the Nephi DUP Museum yesterday afternoon. We learned a couple of great stories and we will tell them pretty quickly as we have to git crackin' here to git ready to go.

So there was this guy named Broadhead who came to the area back in the late 1800's.
Probably the 1880'sa judging from the clothing and equipment in the photo. So he decides to file claim on a ridgeline between Nephi and nearby Levan. He says he's going to dry farm wheat and doesn't need irrigation. Well, the local locos thought he had lost his mind. The authorities actually jailed him for perjury! Somehow, he got out of jail and proceeded to dry farm wheat there and was wildly successful and now everyone dry farms wheat. For many years, locals called his place, "The Perjury farm."

Meanwhile, back in Nephi, Brigham Young told the locals to protect themselves during the 1854 Ute Indian War called "The Walker War." So the Nephites deciddes to wall themselves in. Turns out it wasn' no small wall--it contained NINE CITY BLOCKS! The wall was TWELVE FEET high and six feet thick at the bottom and two feet thick at the top. It one gate on the middle of each side. Supposedly it was 420 rods long on each side. A rod is 16.5 feet so I doubt that accuracy of that claim. In any case, it was HUGE! OK, they finished in late summer 1854 and they liked it so much they lived in it for 5.5 years! Yep, and they enforced a curfew. Everyone had to be inside the wall at 5 pm when the gates closed. They sealed themselfs up! Some guy built a scale model of it for the museum, complete with all of the houses and outbuilding that were inside the wall. Even the trees are to scale. VERY impressive!

Well, we have to run along now. Have a great day and we will see you when we get back to our Idahome.

Hasta, pasta! J&S