Ruth Lowry June 1992

The Old Homestead

Immediately after their wedding in June 1910, Robert and Agnes Marchant decided to homestead in the Uintah basin. For twenty-five years, they spent their time and resources trying to improve on the homestead before selling it in 1935. Now there are some pieces of board giving indication that something was once there and the grave of the still born daughter born in 1922.
Linnie, Lydia, and Emily at Baby's grave in Ioka May 1, 1992.
The marker on the grave so everyone would clearly know it was a gravesite.
I don't know who these people are but because they are at the gravesite, I'm sure they are family.

Looking out across fields where crops once grew on the hill in Ioka.

This is a different occasion with the four sisters (Lydia, Emily, Ruth, Linnie, and an unidentified cousin) at the homestead.
Pieces of wood marking where the cellar was.

Lydia and Porter Merrell

Willis died of leukemia August 24, 1983. Willis's boss, Lee Barton, was Lydia's bishop. He suggested that Lydia go on a mission. It was great therapy for her because she had something to look forward to instead of just looking back and focusing on her loneliness. She served in the Tampa Florida mission.

After Lydia returned, Lydia was living in Manti, Utah where she and Willis had moved in 1963. Her youngest sister Linnie was living in Ephraim, Utah. Ross and Linne had moved to Ephraim sometime in the early 50's. Ross and Linnie were taking a trip out to the Uintah basin to see Emily, Lydia and Linnie's sister. They invited Lydia to go along.

While there, they stopped in Duchesne to visit Porter Merrell who had recently lost his wife. Lydia wrote about Porter, "Once before when I was with them (Ross and Linnie), they had stopped to see him. When our parents had lived in Bluebell, they had been friends with his parents. Porter had been a pupil of Papa's in school. As an adult, he had been our ditch rider. I must have seen him occasionally then, as I knew he had red hair, but I cannot recall a single incident concerning him."

Not long after, Porter called Lydia up and asked to come and visit her. He was 87 years old and she was 76. It was fall and, when Porter went to church in Manti, he was asked if he were in town because he was deer hunting. He said, "Yes, I'm dear hunting."

They were married Nov 27, 1987. Porter was very good to us as a step-father. His children, though, had a hard time accepting that their Dad had remarried. Mostly this was pretty underground but occasionally it would surface. Porter had a daughter who was a widow at the time of Porter and Lydia's marriage. She told Lydia that she would never remarry, intimating that it would be a betrayal to the memory of her first spouse. The irony of it was that she did remarry later.

Lydia's sister Ruth was also widowed by this time. I think Ruth was a little envious that Lydia had gotten to Porter before she did. Ruth was more of a flirt than Lydia and I suspect she thought that maybe she could have turned Porter's head. Sometime after Porter and Lydia got married, Ruth asked me if it bothered me to think of my mother having sex with a man who was not my father. As the mother of five children and totally straight faced, I answered, "I don't think my mother's ever had sex with any man." A child of any age just has a hard time envisioning that of one's parent.

Porter and Lydia were called to be ordinance workers in the Provo Temple. At 92 years of age Porter was driving two hours from Duchesne to Provo to fulfill this call. They would stay over-night and drive home the next day. One day when Porter was 96, he had a stroke and heart attack while in the temple. He surprisingly recovered very well from both. The only impairment he suffered was the inability to close his thumb and index finger on one hand.

Porter always planted a bounteous garden which he mostly gave away during the years I knew him.


In 1999, I learned that Porter was ill. I called my mother to see what was up with him. She said that they had taken him to a funeral and now he wanted one. At another time she said, "He's had too many birthdays." Porter died on Christmas day 1999. We said he had gone home for Christmas and didn't find it upsetting to associate his death with the holiday. He was three weeks shy of his 100 birthday. Lydia died the following fall at 89 years of age.

We were grateful for the companionship they shared late in their lives for twelve years. Although Lydia had found her marriage to Willis rewarding, Willis had never shared her interest in the gospel but she was able to share that with Porter. They were both active and relatively independent up to the end.

Lydia and Willis 1977

The occasion is Barbara's wedding, October 7, 1977.

Four Sisters 1990

Here are the four sisters in 1990 in age order, Lydia, Emily, Ruth, and Emily. The picture was taken after the funeral of David Morrillen Wilkerson, Emily's husband May 2, 1990.

Agnes Taylor

Agnes Taylor is John Taylor's younger sister by eleven years. She was married four times. It appears she divorced her first husband, John Rich, as his death date is recorded as being after she had remarried. She bore four children to him. She married her second husband John Benbow in Nauvoo. It appears they were also divorced as he didn't die until 1874 and there is only a year between the time she married him and the time she married her third husband, Abraham Hoagland, our ancestor. Agnes was 23 years younger than Abraham. I don't know if it was the age difference, polygamy, or personality problems which led to the divorce. Divorce seemed to be what she did. She bore five children to Abraham., the youngest of which is our ancestor Sarah Hoagland born in 1855. The fourth child, a boy, died in infancy. In 1862 Agnes married her fourth husband, Wilhelm Schwartz. She bore two children by him one of whom died as an infant and the other is the Mary Schwartz who married Joseph F. Smith who later became the prophet of the church. According to the censuses, Agnes lived with her daughter Mary until her death in 1911. The censuses say that Agnes was widowed but our data shows that her husband did not die until after she did and he was in Arizona. However, I have not found him the census records of 1900 or 1911 nor have I found a death record of him in Arizona so I don't know what is correct. The census record also says she was the mother of eleven children. We have them all accounted for. Sarah Hoagland's children, Agnes and John, after they were orphaned show up on the census in 1900 at the home of Mary and Joseph F. Smith. Agnes Taylor Schwartz was still alive when my mother was born in 1911 but she died six months later. My mother used to say that Agnes Taylor didn't want to be sealed to any of her husbands.

John Taylor

Our perhaps most illustrious ancestor was John Taylor who became the third prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Later-day Saints.