How We Came to Live in Cedar City

My great-grandfather, John Rowley as a young man, crossed the Rocky Ridge in Wyoming that cold October night in 1856 with his mother, Ann Jewell Rowley and his brothers as part of the Willie Handcart Company. Most of the Rowleys ended up settling in Parowan, but John spent some time in Nephi working a gypsum mine there. Nephi City still has a piece of water pipe made from plaster of Paris that John made and installed to give that city a water distribution system.

Eventually, John and his family headed for Mexico where he died after an accident while he was building a flour mill. His son, Lorenzo Jewell Rowley migrated northward to southern Arizona after being expelled from Mexico by Pancho Villa. He homesteaded land in the town of Thatcher and it was  there that my father, and later I, was born.

I came north to Utah to get a college degree and met my wife, Glenda, who grew up in Sandy. On our honeymoon, we drove through Santa Clara and commented that it would be a nice place to live someday. It offered Glenda the opportunity to live in Utah, but offered me the snow-free climate that I was accustomed to. When our children became school-age, we bid farewell to California and moved to Santa Clara where we lived for 18 years.

I was teaching 7th-grade pre-algebra at Lava Ridge Intermediate School in Santa Clara when Glenda finally determined that she just couldn't take the heat anymore!

To solve that problem, she would come to Cedar City and by using a little map she'd drawn, she'd drive up and down the streets looking for the perfect home. One day in February, ten years ago, she found it. It was on 700 West, south of the university. It had belonged to Wilford and Gwen Clark, and was across the street from the Rymal Williams home and the Royden Braithwaite home. We bought it and made it into a rental and began to fix it up.

Finally, the day came that our youngest son graduated from high school and we were free to move to Cedar. I applied for a job with Iron County School District and made the stipulation that the lowest grade I'd be able to teach would be 5th grade. Principal Ray Whittier at Fiddler's Elementary called me and offered me a job teaching 2ND GRADE! (With a promise that 5th would come the year after.) I took took a deep breath, gulped a couple of times, and agreed to do it.

When we announced to our Dixie friends that we were moving, each and every one of them made this bold announcement: "But.....it SNOWS up there!" Yes it does. And for each of the six years we've been here, we've enjoyed the four distinct seasons that Cedar has to offer. It is our home.