The photo of the Huntington Band was shot in 1895. In 1947, The Salt Lake Tribune asked readers to send in historic photos to celebrate the centennial of the Mormon pioneers’ arrival in the Salt Lake Valley.
Ruby Morgan, of Kenilworth, did just that, and in a letter, asked that it be returned to her. “All are dead except two. … I would like the picture back, because my father is one of them. His name is Ulysses W. Grange, and it means a great deal to me.”
It didn’t happen, and Ruby is gone now. The photo remained in The Tribune’s archives for 65 years. So last week, the director of photography, Jeremy Harmon, set out to make it right. After a little sleuthing , he found Ulysses’ great-granddaughter, Colleen Loveless, in Price.
On Thursday, Harmon and I drove south and gave Loveless the photo and letter, written with a fountain pen, signed “Mrs. Gerald O. Morgan” and mailed with a 3-cent stamp.
“That is just amazing,” Loveless said. “This is way, way cool for me.”
The musicians in the photograph were coal miners and farmers, many of them from England — as were the Granges — and Wales, Scotland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece and many other countries.
Those in the photo lived in Huntington and Orangeville and the photo was taken in Scofield, a mining town with a Welsh tradition of musical and poetic competitions. The bands and choirs took it seriously, given that it took five days to get over the mountain from, say, Huntington to Scofield.
“This was a competition that went on quite regularly,” Loveless said. “Apparently Milas Johnson started up this band, and I guess they won all the contests. It’s so exciting to actually see the picture.”
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Published Feb 22, 2012 07:52:02PM
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Ulysses Grange, a handsome man with a mustache, played the euphonium; there were trombones, trumpets, drums and what appears to be a piccolo. The photographer — name unknown — set the players in a tent, capturing in a moment of time their unsmiling faces and natty uniforms.
Besides the contests, the bands played for celebrations such as the Fourth of July and Days of ’47 as well as social gatherings, holidays, weddings and funeral processions. When dance halls started popping up, women got cards and each tried to fill them up, although a lady with a date was expected to dance the first and last numbers with him.
Music remains a staple in coal country life; Loveless sings in a choir that often performs Handel’s “Messiah” and her daughter “sings beautifully,” she said.
Music, she added, “travels down.”
Now Loveless wants to distribute prints of the photo to all her relatives, restoring a bit of history lost.
“Think of how many people would love photos like this,” she says, as well as scraps of family history and letters. “Sometimes it just starts a memory of something else.”
After Price, Harmon and I headed for Huntington to see Ulysses Grange’s headstone — he was born in 1868 and died in 1941 — and on to tiny Kenilworth, where we learned that Ruby Morgan had once been postal clerk.
Harmon had done what he set out to do — make right a 65-year-old wrong. We’re hoping The Tribune can someday return more of those centennial photos to at least some of the families of those who, 65 years ago, trustingly mailed them in.
Peg McEntee is a news columnist. Reach her at pegmcentee@sltrib.com, facebook.com/pegmcentee and Twitter.
