Searching for Rose II: Safford and Thatcher

On January 14, 2022, we continued our search for Mom's history in Thatcher and Safford, Arizona.  Mom started college in 1925, at the age of 16, at the Gila Academy in Thatcher.  Gila Academy is now the Eastern Arizona College.  After graduating, Mom finished her university education at BYU.  During college, Mom worked for her brother-in-law, Spencer Kimball, at his insurance agency in Safford,  which is located a few miles from Thatcher.  Mom also remembered, as a little girl, riding in a horse-drawn buggy with her mother from Pima to Safford, to visit her sister, Camilla, who was married to Spencer Kimball.   Grandma Eyring took a bottle of applesauce or fresh milk from the family cows to give to Camilla.

The Gila Academy was created in 1888, as part of a system of LDS academies, to make higher education possible for the Church's young people.  When Dave and I visited this building many years ago, there was a list of prominent former students, which included Spencer Kimball and Henry Eyring.

President Henry B. Eyring, son of Henry Eyring, visited Thatcher a few years ago to dedicate this carillon, or clock and bell tower.

Gila Academy has become Eastern Arizona College, and is no longer an LDS school.

The school mascot appears to be a gila monster (a type of lizard).

There are now modern buildings and attractive landscaping at Mom's old alma mater.

We stopped by the home of Andrew and Olive Kimball, Uncle Spencer's parents, in Thatcher.

There was a plaque identifying the building as Uncle Spencer's childhood home.

Andrew Kimball was sent to Southern Arizona from Salt Lake City to be the first president of the stake, just as my ancestor, Sam Bennion, was sent from Salt Lake City to be the first president of the Uintah Stake in Vernal.  I resolved to read the biography of Andrew Kimball that my cousin, Ed Kimball, wrote.

Uncle Spencer is the toddler held on his father's lap.  He looked like his mother, Olive, who died when Uncle Spencer was still a child.  Uncle Spencer and Aunt Camilla named their only daughter Olive Beth, after Uncle Spencer's mother.  "Olly Beth" and my mother were good friends.  I went with them several times as they gave talks about Uncle Spencer at ward Relief Society meetings around Salt Lake City.

Dave and I browsed about downtown Safford, with a main street that still looks the way it did when Mother visited it, from her birth in 1912 through the 1920s and 1930s.

Dave and I decided that this might have been the building in which Uncle Spencer had his insurance office.

And this is Safford in the early 1900s, with Model T's parked on the curbs.  The Eyrings and Kimballs would have visited Safford as the "big city."  When they wanted to go bigger still, they would visit Tucson, or more distant Mesa or Phoenix.

Dave and I went searching for Uncle Spencer's and Aunt Camilla's Safford home, and we finally found it.

Uncle Spencer was an up-and-coming businessman and local leader when he and Aunt Camilla lived in Safford.

After all that family history work, Dave and I treated ourselves to an early supper at Mi Casita, the restaurant recommended to us by the museum curators in Globe.  The food was fresh and delicious, and the waiters and kitchen help spoke Spanish to each other and to most of the guests.

We then attended a temple session at the new Gila Valley Temple.  It was a tender experience to visit the temple which would have seemed like an unattainable dream to my grandparents.