Welcome to Fountain Green!

"Transitioning from living in a town directly between New York City and Boston to a town between Nephi and Moroni was a significant change for all of us."

Image credit: Beck Seamons

Two years ago, my family and I moved from Connecticut to Utah when I got a job as a history professor at Snow College. We bought the only house with enough land for a horse that we could afford—the horse was my wife’s prerequisite for moving the family across the country into the American West. We found the house in Fountain Green, a rural town nestled against the Sanpitch Mountains about forty-five minutes south of Spanish Fork. The town was founded in 1859 by Mormon pioneers and became a hub for the sheep industry at the beginning of the twentieth century until it flagged rapidly during the Great Depression. With a population of slightly over 1,000 people and the nearest town miles away, Fountain Green is in the center of rural Utah.

Transitioning from living in a town directly between New York City and Boston to a town between Nephi and Moroni was a significant change for all of us. We are not members of the predominant faith in Utah, although my wife and I grew up Mormon. I am originally from Orem; she lived in southern France until she came to the United States for college, but we stopped believing and attending church services a while ago. We were nevertheless excited to move to Utah and start a new chapter of our lives.

The move took its toll on us. The house we bought was in bad shape. The previous owner ran a small-scale trucking business, hauling livestock across the West. By the time we moved in, he had broken all the fences around the house while trying to fit multiple semi-trucks into the half-acre lot. He had also ran over the water lines and sprinkler pipes. He’d shut off all the water to the back of the house to fix the water problem and left 100 of his worn-out truck tires in the yard, each of which weighed around 80 pounds. Some of the livestock that he shipped must have died in his trucks because there were carcasses of sheep, chickens, and goats strewn across the ground.

It was even worse inside the house. A hole in the floorboards was covered by a piece of particle board. There was no running cold water, only hot water from the hot water heater placed atop the particle board. Live wires were dangling in multiple places throughout the house. The dishwasher was a prop, with no holes in the cabinets behind the washer to plug in electricity or the drainage system. There was blood all over the freezer. The walls and floors were half-finished. He left us a non-functioning wood-burning stove that was not connected to a chimney. The house's interior was painted in a color that I’d describe as somewhere between dark peach and light diarrhea. The house’s exterior was just as bad; there were cracks in the bricks, the mortar between the bricks was crumbling, and paint was chipping everywhere. One side of the house was painted a different color—light pink instead of cream.

Because of this, we have become DIY experts over the past two years. We build walls, repair floors, repoint bricks, install drywall, landscape, pour cement, apply lacquer, stain baseboards, build horse shelters, construct sheds, lay sod, spread gravel, make shudders, build fences, plant trees, install toilets, and build irrigation systems with the best of them!

The physical work my wife and I—and, to a lesser extent, our children—have been doing has worn us out. But most of the people in our town are DIYers too, and our extensive and continual remodeling has attracted attention in the community. Everyone tells us how much they love what we have done with the house, but all they can see is our work on the outside! Our newly found DIY abilities have earned us some social clout.

Another thing that helps our family fit in Fountain Green is that we have animals. We have a horse, two goats, two dogs, two bunnies, and thirty-ish chickens. We do not, however, have any sheep. Fountain Green thrived during the early 1900s because of the booming sheep industry. Many of the established families from the town continue to herd sheep, even though it is tough and far from lucrative. One day, our dog Raven escaped from the backyard. I was in the house, but my wife and two daughters chased Raven down the street. Raven chased after a cat in the front yard of one of the traditional sheepherding families, who keeps a few of their lambs in their back yard. After my wife grabbed our dog, a woman emerging from the house—one of the counselors in the local ward’s Young Women presidency—started yelling at my wife in front of our two daughters, threatening that she would shoot our dog if it got near her lambs. The woman threatening our dog with gun violence was taken aback when my wife replied to her, as would anyone who lived in New England for almost a decade: “GO F— YOURSELF!” Welcome to Fountain Green!

Before Utah, our house was next door to the Kholer Environmental Center, part of the boarding school campus where we lived in Connecticut. Our neighbors were two environmental scientists, an expert in environmental literature, an artist, and their families. All but one of them were Jewish but were non-believing and non-practicing. The other was a Unitarian who, with his wife, drank a beer (or a glass of wine) at 5 pm every day. Our entire little neighborhood and our dogs would regularly hang out together during beer time, especially during the spring and summer months. Growing up in this environment, my oldest daughter has become an animal rights activist, interested in various religions, and associated adults drinking beer with family fun. Now, she attends middle school in Moroni, a town seven miles south of Fountain Green that was founded on the turkey farming and processing industry, which is also mostly Mormon, and considers the consumption of alcohol a sin.

Bustin’ for Cash [photo courtesy of Erik Freeman]

My younger daughter has always had close friends. Since moving to Fountain Green, she has grown close to two girls in her elementary school class. One of her best friend’s mother and father, who never finished high school, are going through a divorce. They live in poverty, and my daughter’s friend hints at possible domestic violence in her household. My daughter’s other best friend moved to Fountain Green a year ago because her father died by suicide, and her mother’s new boyfriend lives in Fountain Green. Nora has been immersed in the social problems rampant in rural America. But Nora loves her friends and the freedom of living in a small town, with school only a block away. 

I have also made a friend in the community. He is a retired truck driver in his seventies. When he is not busy raising his goats, cows, and sheep, he is occupied fixing farming machinery or mowing his lawn. He once sarcastically claimed to be an outsider to Fountain Green like me. He explained that he was an imposter because he was born and raised in Wales, a town six miles southwest. He and his wife are “preppers.” They stockpile much of what they farm; they don’t have smartphones, so “the government can’t track them.” They have told us that the government will soon shut down the national electric grid, so we better get a wood-burning stove that works. My friend’s wife told me one of her favorite pastimes is gathering with all her siblings and discussing the “end of times.” They might be eccentric from our point of view, but they are very nice people.

They have given us raspberry transplants from their garden, advice on growing vegetables in Fountain Green’s climate, and numerous tips on how we might best raise goats. He has taken me on tours of his extended family’s property and showed me the best places to find elderberries and choke cherries in the surrounding mountains. They even brought us three frozen packages of lamb for Christmas, something they do not regularly share. He is a good friend to have in a town like ours.

Last week, my wife and youngest daughter walked to a small pasture down the street that belongs to our neighbor, an elderly single woman. She allows our horse, Bustin’ for Cash, to use her pasture for grazing in the spring. They put Bustin’ and another neighbor’s horse in the pasture to let them ruminate for the afternoon. At the very moment the horses were untied, a strong wind came through the pasture and spooked both of them. Bustin’ quickly lifted his head and accidentally hit my daughter in the face. Blood started squirting from her mouth. As she was screaming and bleeding, the horses escaped from the pasture. After my wife called me on the phone, I ran as fast as possible to the pasture. By the time I got there, my daughter was crying with blood all over her, and the horses were galloping down the street. I tended to my daughter, and my wife chased after the horses. Within two minutes, a Fountain Greener who had just graduated with a nursing degree passed by to help me with my daughter, and about a dozen little kids in our rural neighborhood rallied around my wife to help her chase down the horses. I was at the doctor's office with my daughter within ten minutes. With the help of the neighborhood kids playing outside, my wife quickly brought the horses back to the pasture. She met us at the doctor’s office. My daughter bit only partially through her tongue, which took less than a week to heal. The kind of quick help we got would have been unimaginable elsewhere.

After writing up and compilig these selected snippets of our lives over the past two years, I realize that this story doesn’t have a moral. Of course, it’s not finished yet either. However, I think our experiences in Fountain Green hint at what is real, scary, and beautiful about life in rural Utah.