The 1850 census  counted almost 100 youth in the settlement of Kay’s Ward. This Utah Territorial Census in the Kay’s Ward settlement of Davis County did not complete enumeration of all citizens until 1851. A decade later their numbers had risen, but for many their circumstances remained unchanged. Although most formal histories focus on adults, the children and teens in the early years worked alongside adults to establish a community. As the dugouts and cabins were replaced with adobe houses, the settlement evolved first into a town and then into a city. While the social structure grew, the youth continued to contribute to positive changes.

This 1850 Utah Territorial Census in the Kay’s Ward settlement of Davis County did not complete enumeration of all citizens until 1851.

During early pioneer times, the children suffered the “grim realities of a pioneer existence (1).” When an old woman, Emily Stewart Barnes, recorded scraps of paper the memories of her childhood and girlhood days. Emily had emigrated from England, and like her parents, had to learn how to survive in a desert climate, gaining skills they had not developed in their prior lives. Children and adults grubbed the sagebrush to make room to plant crops. They shivered under leaking roofs and tended cattle with bare feet. Few had time or resources to have a photograph taken so their youthful images remain elusive and today we must exercise imagination to see the child in the photograph of the old man.

In time schoolhouses and churches were built, but in the earliest times children

Sources:

1. Barnes, Claude T. The Grim Years or The Life of Emily Stewart Barnes. Inland Printing Company: Kaysville, Utah; 1964.

2. Census Enumeration of Kay’s Ward section of Davis County, Utah Territory. Unmarried and under twenty years old.

3. Photographs courtesy of FamilySearch.org Memories.