James & Rebecca Nielsen

Wedding Day
May 7, 1903 

REBECCA AMELIA PACE NIELSEN

Life Story

I was born on the ninth of April, 1886, at Spanish Fork, Utah County, Utah, to William Franklin Pace and Louisa Mary Phillips Pace.  My birth was a dugout located at 100 West and about 250 South.  It was really a chicken coup, which nowadays would be called a basement or cellar.  Mrs. Mary Baxter was the Midwife who delivered me into the world.

When I was yet a small child, my parents bought a building lot from Pat McGee, located at the corner of Second South and and First West.  (The SE corner, Lot 3, block eleven.)  At the time of purchase, the lot had a little blue adobe house standing on it which was torn down.  My parents built a real nice two story frame house on the lot.  We moved from the dugout into this lovely new home.  We moved all over God’s creation while I was a child, but this house remained our permanent home.

Our neighbors were William and Sally Creer, Wellie Wood, Jim Warner, George D. Snell, Al Andrews, Andrus (Ben) Argyle, Hubbard Tuttle.  My childhood playmates were Minnie Warner Christensen, and Abbie Wood Whiteman.

Min, Abbie and I for entertainment as kids used to make a store between the chutes of the granary.  We used to put boards across the chutes and covered the boards with strips of cloth.  That was our dry goods department.  We would use dirt for sugar.  We also had a milliner store  where we made hats out of burdock leaves and trimmed them with apple blossoms, mustard and anything else we could find that had a flower on it.  Wellie Wood, our neighbor, used to haul the corn from up in the bottoms down to his lot in town and then Morris Wood would get us to shuck the corn.  If we did a good job, he would put on a show for us.  He would hang up an old carpet with a hole in it.  He’d get his mother to kill a chicken.  Morris would put a chicken leg through the hole and from behind the rug he would pull the cord of the leg and this would open and shut the foot of the chicken.  He was always putting on some kind of play.  Sometimes he would dress up like some kind of nigger or clown and put on these shows for all the kids in the neighborhood.

One time when a friend, Will Chambers, came to see my sister Jane, my brother Phil crawled up above the porch into a hole that was to be used for a stairway to the upstairs.  As Mr. Chambers stood on the porch to knock on the door, Phil dropped a pan of wood chips on his head.

We used to go around to houses--quite often to Jane Jarvis’ home--when they would be cleaning in the spring and they would take the carpet up to clean.  We’d have a dance on the bare floor.  Beatnee Johnson would play the accordion for us to dance.  The tune would always be, Have you ever seen a Lassie Go This Way and That Way.  The words were, “Won’t you please buy a broom, buy a broom, buy a broom.  Buy a big one for the lady and a little one for the baby, won’t you please buy a broom, buy a broom, buy a broom."

For two to three summers my Father, Mother, Sister Maggie, Jimmie Dolley and I spent the summer at the Jim Boyack Ranch up Spanish Fork Canyon.  Later owned by Levangers, and Ted Johnson.  (Robert Redford, the movie star, owns it now.)  Father ran his sheep north of this ranch and worked for Jim Boyack at the ranch.  During my childhood I tended the sheep so they would not get bloated and herded them while they fed.  While at this ranch our home was a combination sheep camp, bowery, and tent.   In the bowery there was a stove, cupboard, dishes, table and chairs.   We wet the floor with water to make it solid and not so dusty.  The tent was on one side of the bowery and the sheep camp on the other side.  

Dad, Mother and I slept in the sheep wagon on a bed made on the floor.  Mr. Dolley slept in the tent.  We packed our water from the creek.  If we wanted a good cold drink of water for refreshment, we would ride the horses down to the rock quarry.  There was a railroad track there where they got the rock out.  This rock was red and it was shipped out for building of houses and etc.

I attended First and Second grades in a little white school house that stood on the corner of center and main streets where the Thurber School now stands.  My first grade teacher was Jane Rowe.  Another teacher was Liz Chisum Tuttle.  For third grade I attended the Dahle School, located at fourth north and main.  Fourth and fifth grades were held at the Ideal school, and George Dubois was my teacher there.  For sixth grade I went to the Central School.  Rose Brimhall was my teacher for part of the year and Lars W. Nielsen was my last teacher in sixth grade.  Billy James was the music teacher for the town and taught during these years. 

During my earliest years I attended church at the Central Meeting House, located on Main Street and Second North.  The whole town attended meetings in this building.  When it got too hot inside, they built a bowery out of tree branches.  On the fourth of July and other special occasions they held meetings in the bowery.

The town was then divided into four parts.  Henry Gardner was the first Bishop of the First Ward.  George D. Snell was Bishop of the Second Ward.  Marinus Larsen was Bishop of the Third Ward, and Andrew Eklund Nelson, father of Judge Joseph E. Nelson, was Bishop of the Fourth Ward.  Each ward at the time had a little one room meeting house.

Our family belonged to the Second Ward.  Our church house was a small white brick building, which in later years was used as the Second Ward Relief Society meeting place.  It was located just west of the present Second Ward Church and Stake House.  I attended primary in the little white school house where the Thurber School now stands.  Emmie Jane McKell Brockbank was the teacher.  Jane Brockbank was another teacher.  My Sunday School teachers were Joe Brockbank, Sam Brockbank, Sara Jane Brockbank and May James.  Mutual was held in the one-room Second Ward Church house.  I enjoyed Mutual very much and attended all of the time.  We used to have stories read to us.  It was more a program type of meeting than lessons.

Clara Evans Boberg was the leader of a play we put on.  The name of the play was “Old Mother Goose.”  I was Little Bo-Peep and Archie Brockbank and Wells Brockbank were my two sheep.  Min Warner was Little-Boy-Blue, Clara was Old Mother Goose.  One part went as follows:

       I greet you dear friends,

       I’m called Mother Goose.

       A queer, homely name, but fear it’s no use

       to quarrel about it, and then do you see

       the children all like it, and that pleases me.

       There’s Old Mother Hubbard and Bo-Peep too,

       And the Little Old Lady who lived in the shoe.

I was about eleven years old when we moved to the Fuller Farm.  Dad bought the farm just as it stood, with chickens, milk cows and all other stock.  We lived at this farm for the next five summers.  My older sister Maggie and I went to the farm first with Father to clean the house and prepare it for Mother to join us.  As we were cleaning, we found a little broken mustard mug and a match jar.  She was the oldest and we thought she would get married first so she took the match jar and I took the mustard mug.  We thought the match jar would be of more use to her.  However, Maggie died at 17 years of age of typhoid fever.

On this trip we had forgotten to take a comb.  Maggie was just about fourteen, and just getting interested in boys.  She was afraid some boys would come and see her without her hair combed, so we went out in the trees and bushes and found an old comb with  four or five teeth left in it.  With this we combed each others hair.  Maggie got homesick and when we drove around the river bridge and she saw what the farm looked like, she started to cry.  I will never forget this first day we went the the Fuller Farm as long as I live.

The house at the farm was made of logs.  It had two rooms with a small hallway between them.  It had a dirt roof with weeds growing on it.  This home was kept spotlessly clean by my mother.  For furniture there was a cupboard, stove and a couple of beds.  We hung our clothes on the wall with a sheet hung over them to keep the dust off.  Mother always had a flower garden where ever she lived.  Here she had a hop vine growing up over the window.  She used the hops to make yeast.  She also grew bachelor buttons and four-o-clocks.

The floors were bare and we used to keep them scrubbed clean.  If we did have a carpet it was made out of old rags and woven on an old fashioned loom.  The curtains were made out of white flour sacks.

We used to have bad floods at the Fuller Farm.  The floods would come down Wanroads and wash the bridge out and then we couldn’t get over to the garden which was up on the hill.  Father raised red and white currents, cabbage, potatoes, grain and alfalfa.  We also had sheep, milk cows, ducks, chickens and pigs.  Mother sold butter while they were building West Portal at Strawberry Dam.  We had a beautiful cellar where we kept our cream, butter, milk and eggs.  There was a spring by the cellar.  It had a frame built around it, and we pulled the water up with a rope on a pulley and a bucket.

One year Father tried to raise sugar beets on the Boyack Ranch but the climate was too cold to raise them and it was not too successful.  He hired a group of girls to go up to work in the beets.  One of these girls was Ada Evans Coppin.  They put a big kettle of beans on to cook and as the beans cooked and the girls worked in the beets they made up poetry:

       Maggie in the bean bowl, Janie in the pot.

       Ada takes the peppers out, and Philly eats them hot.

       We have to hurry from the beets and across the Boyack folks lot,

       and if we’ve not hot bread prepared, We hear from Uncle Doc. 
            (Grandpa Pace)

       The water on our bed that night made us rather hot,

       and if we catch Boyack’s smart boy, We’ll put him in the pot. 
            (Alec Boyack)

The summer after our family left the farm I was married and my husband took it over and run it for one summer.  In the fall he borrowed a team and a double bedded wagon from Bishop Frank Bringhurst of Springville and hauled the grain down the canyon.  He sold the grain to Mrs. Oran Lewis and received $150 for it.

During the next year Jim worked at the Consolidated Machine Company at Spanish Fork during the winter and during the summer he worked at the farm with my Father.  Jim furnished the seed and planted it.  Father watered and took care of it.  Father later gave the ranch to my sister Jane Pace Stewart.  She rented it to Mose Beckstead and it was then called the Beckstead Ranch.  She later sold it to Palmyra Stake of the LDS Church.  They are the present owners of it.

We were attending a picnic at the Fuller Farm in later years when a flood came down the river.  After my experiences of floods there I called for every one to run for the hill.  They all laughed and thought it was funny, but some of them lost their possessions in it such as a nice roaster, dishes and etc.

I met my husband James Nielsen, I called him Jim, at a dance in the building known as Hubbard Tuttle’s dance hall.  It stood where Duke Page’s Bowling Alley now stands.  I went to the dance with a boy from Payson.  During the dance Jim asked me for a dance.  Before the dance, while my brother Phil was shaving, I said to him, “When you see that Nielsen fellow tell him to come take me to the dance.”  Before the boyfriend got there for me, Jim came to take me to the dance, but I went with my date.  We went on a double date with Min Warner and her boyfriend.  Our boyfriends got on a bender and left us, so I went home with Jim and Min went with Dave Malcolm.

One night Jim took me to Springville in a cutter, to see my sister Jane.  The cutter tipped over and we rolled out in the snow.  Our courtship lasted for eight or ten months.  We were married on the 7th day of May, 1903.  Our wedding was held in Tuttle’s Hall.  There were between three and four hundred people invited.  We served sandwiches, wine and wedding cake.  It was the real old fashioned fruit cake, not the kind they serve now-a-days.


We were married at my home by Bishop George D. Snell of the Second Ward.  William C. Beckstrom and Millie Curtis stood with us.  Our wedding supper was held at home before we went down to the hall.  Both families and a few close friends attended the dinner.  The music was furnished by Morgan’s Orchestra.  I still have one of the gifts I received at our wedding, a little pickle dish.

We didn’t go on a honeymoon.  Jim was working at the Consolidated Machine Co. and had just graduated from the LDS Business College on the 29th day of May, 1902.

We lived with my Mother and Father for a year after we were married.  Then he quit his job at the Consolidated and went to Helper and got a job in a storehouse that sold all the things for the railroad, such as soap, grease, oils and etc.  I went to Helper with him and we lived there for three or four months in the back part of a tailor shop owned by a woman named Mrs. Crowley.  Our apartment had one room with a bed in one corner, a two lid stove and a little cupboard on the wall, and Jim’s big trunk.  My dishes were premiums out of the mush.  They were trimmed with a little wreath, one leaf went down and one went up.  The colors were green and blue.  I gave these to my mother when I didn’t use them any more.

Jim left Helper and went to work as a clerk at Mrs. Oran Lewis’ store.  He received $40 a month in scrip.

On November 4th, 1905, we bought the old Joseph Reese house at 214 North 3rd East.  We lived in the old house for about ten years and then built the new red brick house on the lot.  The home we are still living in.

Our first children were twin boys, James and Thomas, who lived only long enough to receive a name.  Our next child, Lynwood Ray, was born in Mother’s house on First West, September 29, 1905.  Lars Lavar (Bud) was born November 18, 1907;  Rebecca Fay, September 21, 1908; Mark Franklin August 16 1910; and Jessie Lucille, August 22, 1912 were all born in the old Reese house with Mrs. Anna Poulson as the midwife.  Then we moved over to Grandpa Nielsen’s house for six months while the new house was being built.  We moved out of the Reese house on the 21st day of April and moved into the new house on the 21st day of October, just six months to the day.

Mary Louise (Mamie) was born in the new house on the 12th day of December, 1914.  Dr. J.W. Hagan delivered Mamie because Mrs. Poulson had been awful sick.  She said she would come if the weather was good, but if the weather was bad to call Dr. Hagan.  She would tell Dr. Hagan that he might be called.  It was a horrible blizzard on the 12th, so Dr. Hagan delivered the baby.

Norma was born March 25, 1917, on the day her father turned thirty five years old.  Jane was born on the 30th day of June, 1919.  The day Jane was born I was having wash day and had Florence Hales working for me.  Florence Ruth was born on the 25th day of January, 1922.  On this day Mrs. Eric Hansen, Grandma Sophie Nelson and Grandma Nielsen went out to Leora Larson’s in Leland for a quilting.  When they got back they called in to see how I was feeling and I had a new baby girl.

Lois and Lola were born on the 17th day of April, 1924.  They were born in the living room while all the rest of the children waited in the kitchen for the blessed event to take place.  J. Ross was born on the 23rd day of July, 1926.  On this day all the children went to the Gay field to weed beets while the baby was being born.  The next day was the big 24th of July parade.  Grandma Nielsen watched the parade and then came and stayed with me while Fay went to see the parade come down the opposite side of the street.  Mrs. Anne Rowe was the queen.  She was in her early eighties and they said she made a beautiful queen.  

When J. Ross was about four years old he had a pair of high laced shoes with a heavy sole on them.  When guests came to visit he would entertain them by “tap-dancing” on the bare floor between the colonnade.   

Afton Caroline (Cally) was born on the 27th day of April, 1928.  She was born about 3 AM.  She was named after my sister Caroline Angus.  Aunt Cal gave her $5 to start a bank account in appreciation for her name.

Annie Kathleen was born on April 17, 1930.  This was the sixth birthday of Lois and Lola.  On this day J. Ross had spent the day in the fields digging post holes.  When he came home and found a new black-haired baby sister, he immediately stroked her little head and called his little sister “Cattalena”.

Because of illness we were unable to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary in 1953.  In 1954 we joined with a group going to Hawaii and while there we were married in the Hawaiian Temple on June 4, 1954.

(NOTE:  I do not know who compiled this information.  If you know, please let me know so I can give proper credit.)  

Left to Right:  Mamie,  Lucille,  Mark,  Fay,  Bud,  Lynn 

Bottom - Top:  Grandma Nielsen, Fay, ......
Top  Bottom:  Kathleen, Cally, J Ross, Anybody know??

Front Row:  Grandma Nielsen, Lola, Lois, Kathleen, Cally
Back Row:  Fay, Lucille, Mamie, Norma, Jane, Floss

51st Wedding Anniversary

Front:  Lois, Grandpa Nielsen, Grandma Nielsen, Lola Stone

Middle:  Cally Cole, Jane Strong, Lucille Jones, Floss Creer, Kathleen Whitehead

Back:  J Ross Nielsen, Lynn Nielsen, Mamie Johnson, Norma Broadbent, Fay Page, Lavar,  Mark Nielsen

MORE TO COME .......