George Freestone

George found himself, as a fifteen year-old, driving four yoke of oxen on a heavy freight wagon to the Utah Territory. His younger brother, James, later wrote that he had driven sheep 1,000 miles barefooted across the Plains. “In Alpine,” George wrote, “between 1855 and 1856, I spent about half of my time building forts to fight against the Indians and half my time killing crickets.” The family struggled against these odds to make a living. Then in 1858, they lost their father when he was killed by Indians.


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Excerpt from Pioneer Story

George found himself, as a fifteen year-old, driving four yoke of oxen on a heavy freight wagon to the Utah Territory. His younger brother, James, later wrote that he had driven sheep 1,000 miles barefooted across the Plains. “In Alpine,” George wrote, “between 1855 and 1856, I spent about half of my time building forts to fight against the Indians and half my time killing crickets.” The family struggled against these odds to make a living. Then in 1858, they lost their father when he was killed by Indians.




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Full Pioneer Story

GEORGE FREESTONE, FRONTIERSMAN
Submitted By: Angus H. Belliston (more stories by this author)

GEORGE FREESTONE, FRONTIERSMAN
By Angus H. Belliston

My mother had a special love for her Freestone grandparents and longed to see her
grandfather, George, who lived so far away in the Uintah Basin of Utah. In her journal she mentioned his name with reverence, and wished she could see “that tender hearted, soft-spoken, very kind man” again.

George Freestone was the eldest of nine children born to Thomas and Ann Fall Freestone.
George came into the world on Prince Edward Island near beautiful Nova Scotia on 13 August, 1838. His parents had been farming there, but when George was two years old they pulled up stakes and moved to Ohio in the United States. In about 1850, the family joined the Church and prepared, in 1853, to join the Saints heading for the West. They struggled through the fall to reach Mt. Pisgah, then on in the spring to Winter Quarters, where they immediately joined a company leaving for the Salt Lake Valley.

George found himself, as a fifteen year-old, driving four yoke of oxen on a heavy freight wagon to the Utah Territory. His younger brother, James, later wrote that he had driven sheep 1,000 miles barefooted across the Plains. “In Alpine,” George wrote, “between 1855 and 1856, I spent about half of my time building forts to fight against the Indians and half my time killing crickets.” The family struggled against these odds to make a living. Then in 1858, they lost their father when he was killed by Indians.

In 1861, George was employed hauling stone for the Salt Lake Temple. On Christmas Eve that year, twenty-three year-old George married Alice Carlisle, a twenty-six year-old divorcee. Alice had been born in England in 1835, had come to America and married a Mr. Wilkins in polygamy while crossing the Plains. Wilkins was a faithful member of the Church and had two other wives. He and Alice had three children together. But then he went away to California with his first wife and apparently left the others on their own. He may have been excommunicated, and Alice divorced him.

During the seven years after their marriage, four little girls were born to George Freestone and Alice. My grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Freestone, was the second of these. One week after the last child was born, near the seventh anniversary of their marriage, Alice died. She was only thirty-three years old, but had borne seven children. This was in the day when babies were born at home and the need for sanitation was not always met. Alice’s death left George alone with the four little girls and Alice’s three slightly older children. Somehow he provided for them for the next four years, apparently with a great deal of help from relatives and friends.

In 1872, George married a Danish girl, Jennie Lind, only seventeen years old and not yet able to speak English. Jennie Lind and Jennie’s mother moved with George to Franklin Meadows, an almost uninhabited area about six miles north and west of where Preston now sits, near the Idaho border. Of their seven children, they apparently took with them only eight year old Mary Elizabeth.

George loved this virgin land and the hunting and fishing that abounded. But it must have become too crowded for him. Seven years later, George and Jennie, George’s third daughter, Rhoda, and two small children now born to Jenny Lind, moved to Ashley Valley, in Utah’s Uintah Basin, which was in the earliest stages of settlement. My grandmother, Mary, now age fifteen, stayed behind in Alpine, to live for a year with her Aunt Rhoda.

The first year in Ashley Valley, all but one of the cattle froze to death. The family was very happy when one surviving cow showed up with her calf, and provided them with a source of milk. They subsisted on flour they had brought with them and wild game that George shot. They lived in the community fort in a one room log house with a sod roof and a dirt floor and no windows. That winter diphtheria struck. All the children were sick, but none died. A new baby was also born in this primitive situation. The next year the crops were good. The third year George raised 3,000 bushels of grain. It was a tough pioneer life, but they overcame the wilderness and made their way.

Although a frontiersman by nature, George was progressive. According to his own
account, he was the first farmer in that valley to fence his farm, and to build a frame house. He brought the first stand of bees and the first twine binder into the area. He also established a nursery which supplied shade and fruit trees for other settlers for years.

In 1887, George became bishop of the Vernal Ward and served for eleven years. When released, at age sixty, he left for a two-year mission to the British Isles. The following delightful account is taken from his diary: "Feb. 28, 1894. A beautiful morning. I walked to Flixton, the old Freestone homestead, about three miles from cousin James' place, where Father and his brothers and cousins were born. There is a little church there built of flint stones and gravel cemented together. It stands upon a hill and belongs to the Church of England. It has a tower and a spire on which stands a rooster. In the churchyard lie my grandfather and grandmother, but no tombstones mark their graves. Just below the hill stood the house where they once lived and died, but it is gone now and another takes its place. The country around is very beautiful, being
covered with many groves of trees. I returned the way I came, and many curious thoughts filled my mind."

Counting his first four children by Alice Carlisle, George eventually had fifteen children “born to me.” He died in Vernal on 26 August 1920 at age eighty-two.



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Sources:
Elsie Elizabeth Maughan Belliston biography, 2005; Various family records and personal accounts.

Virtues: Courage, Hardship, Difficulty, Trials, Leadership