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Ezra T. Clark always kept open house for his family and for strangers as well. Church authorities were often at his house. I remember as a little boy getting up one morning during an east wind, and seeing barrels of molasses, grindstones and large boulders hanging by ropes over the house to keep the east wind from blowing the roof off. At that time George A. Smith, Councillor to Brigham Young was staying at the house. as the family increased, father needed more room and so built a rock addition to the west end of the house. Later he added a rock wing on the east.
In the meantime he built a large barn with a basement underneath for the protection of his horses and cows. The barn was built of large square timbers – some sawed square from timbers obtained up in the canyon where saw mills had been built, while others were hewn by hand. The barn was so built that a team and a wagon could be driven into it. Thus part of the barn often proved a blessing to people coming to conference where they had to find protection from the storms. Thus too, the barn was so built as to furnish a threshing floor for flaying and treading out grain. This of course was before threshing machines were brought into this part of the country. As a little boy I can see the barn filled over head with grain to be threshed out by horses treading on it.
I was one of a large family of boys, ten in number, with only one girl in the home. But just across the street lived Aunt Susan, father's second wife. She had four girls, Annie, Sarah, Alice and Laura and five boys, Seymour, Eugene, Nathan, John and Horace. We all worked together on the farm. Seymour, the oldest, had a fall from the ceiling of an old house and hurt his head. It seemed to effect his mentality. Though a good boy and bright, as he grew older his mind seemed effected and grew worse and worse. Later he became unmanageable and had to be taken to the mental hospital, where he died. The other boys were good workers.