Living history: Born to learn, Martha Ross Stewart soon chose her very own path

In July 1915, Martha Ross Stewart was born in Salt Lake City with a built-in penchant for learning that would influence her life and those of others for more than 90 years.

The middle child of Utah calligrapher Milton Ross and his wife Harriet, she questioned everything without pause. During the dog days of summer in 1918, her mother hadn't the energy to keep up with her. Pregnant and exhausted by the dry summer heat, Ross handed the 3-year-old "The Book of Knowledge," and the precocious child was soon reading.

"The book was a source of entertainment and cultural shaping," her daughter Heather Stewart Dorrell said. "It was probably her first gleaning of a much larger world outside her immediate value system."

When Martha was 14 and attending LDS High School, a private school run by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, she took theology classes and decided — to the lifelong consternation of her father — she was not of the faith.

That summer, while vacationing at the family's cabin in Lamb's Canyon, she also met Justin Stewart.

In the 1890s, the brothers Scott and John Stewart surveyed land in Provo Canyon for the U.S. government to issue homestead claims, and decided to make "the exquisite wilderness" a home of their own. In 1969, more than 5,000 acres of land called Stewart Flat were sold to Robert Redford and dedicated to environmental conservation and the Sundance Resort.

"John's son, my father, was a young employee of the Forest Service who rode fence lines for the county," Dorrell said. "Yodeling up and down the canyon, mother saw him on his horse and was a goner. Dad became the lodestar of everyday people and the love of her life."

Graduating from high school, 15-year-old Martha enrolled at the University of Utah, studied literature and the arts and left with high honors at age 19. During the depths of the Depression in 1935 she taught at a local high school and then traveled east to marry her beloved on New Year's Eve in New York City.

The couple maintained a long distance relationship until he completed graduate school at Columbia University. Returning to Salt Lake City, they lived in the Avenues, raised three children and, as humanists, joined the Unitarian Church.

"Father worked with the Office of Price Administration during WWII," Dorrell said. "He set up farm cooperatives throughout Utah, and then became a lawyer."

Augmenting the family's income, Martha became a librarian. She worked at the Salt Lake City Library and Utah State Library for the Blind. When she became an expert researcher for the Utah State Historical Society, reporters from The Salt Lake Tribune in need of information were known to call the historical society and shout, "Get me Martha!"

Martha Ross Stewart was a fine artist in oils and watercolors. She illustrated children's books, made linoleum block prints, clipped paper cutouts, and designed exquisite stained glass windows.

From age 17, she wrote poetry cached in a binder. Some of the verses are wry, light, sharp with puns; others are autobiographical and discerning.

"We search each other's shining eyes in amorous inspections

"And you don't know and I don't know we're finding small reflections."

Said her son, Peter: "Mother adopted a [way] to appear like a round peg fitting in to attain her goals of husband, family, home, and community of friends while providing an outlet for her restless intellect."

For 25 years Stewart hosted bi-monthly brunches at home to explore the veracity of life and ethics. A humanist salon comprised of free thinkers, it included a Who's Who of Utah intellectuals, politicians, religious liberals, activists, newsmakers, historians, journalists, professors, psychologists and librarians.

Until her death at 93, Stewart wrote and discovered herself with no-holds-barred candor.

"Baring your Id, you state as fact

"Will help you find your Isness.

"And how I keep my soul intact

"Is none of your goddam business."

Eileen Hallet Stone, author of "Hidden History of Utah," a compilation of her Salt Lake Tribune columns, may be reached at ehswriter@aol.com. Thanks to siblings Heather and Peter Stewart for their insights and use of Stewart's poems.