LIFE OF MARY ELIZABETH CLARK ROBINSON

By Maurine Porter

Mary Elizabeth Clark was the third child and only daughter of Ezra T. and Mary Stevenson Clark. She was one of two children born while a small colon of about twenty-five families dwelt in beautiful East Canyon above Bountiful. The other child, born a few months earlier than she, but in the same year, to Joseph Lee and Maria Wood Robinson became the father of her children. His birthday was February 2nd and hers November 25, 1849. They grew up together under the primitive conditions of early pioneer life.

At this time the entire region from Chase Lane on the south to Weber Canyon on the north, was known as North Cottonwood, and was considered a suburb of Salt Lake City, where the families first attended Church services. During the summer of 1849 Ezra T. Clark and others had started to cultivate land they had explored in the fertile valley, which later was the town of Farmington. In the. spring of 1850 he moved his family there, planting ten acres of land with five bushels 0r wheat, out of which he realized a harvest of five (500) hundred bushels. Here a separate Ward was established, with Joseph Lee Robinson as the first Bishop. Immediately the group set to work to build a schoolhouse and chapel, having met in private homes for Sunday services until the little edifice of logs hauled from Weber Canyon and plastered with mud was ready for occupancy. Later new and more adequate buildings were constructed, including what became the Academy. As early as 1854 the first County Court House to be completed in Utah was in business, with Ezra T. Clark as Treasurer. The exhilarating bustle and stir of rapid developments, reaching out for everything that was good and would improve their general circumstances, from unique varieties of plants to books and newspaper publications, was in the air as the two first-born citizens of Davis County mingled in the interesting life of their peaceful community.

It was at the North Cottonwood Ward that Farmington Ward Records commenced and where the records of the first families are found, including the blessings of Mary Elizabeth Clark and Joseph Elijah Robinson, one day apart, both by John Bair, he on March 5th, and she on March 6, 1852. Evidently the rites occurred in a series of two-day meetings, the equivalent of the old stake conferences.

Curly-haired, Full-bosomed and slender, gifted with dramatic ability, Mary E. was the "apple of her parents' and adoring

brothers' eyes, and may have been somewhat "spoiled" despite hardships and incessant toil; but if so, the defect was soon and thoroughly eradicated. She and Joseph E. Robinson, musically inclined and with outstanding leadership qualities, must have looked well together in plays and at dances in which they participated. It was, one understands, a foregone conclusion that these two would wed when an ominous shadow intervened, which, in the dim light of the few facts that have come down to us, cannot be fully explained.