156 2nd Street
James Harvey Gardner was born in Seneca County New York in 1830. At age 22 he met Mary A. Gates as they traveled in the same wagon train across the plains, arriving in Weber County in the fall of 1852. In November 1852 they were married; James was 22 and Mary was 20.
Bingham Fort began in August 1853. Isaac Newton Goodale helped James “team-up” his cabin into the fort, meaning they placed the cabin on skids and pulled it with a team of horses into the fort, locating it by the cabin of his father-in-law, Sam Gates. The cabins of Jim Gardner, Sam Gates and I. Newton Goodale are identified in a row on the Bingham Fort map.
When James Gardner was near 40 years old, he assisted his father-in-law with the Sam Gates Adobe Mill. Dissatisfied with the durability of adobe bricks, James devised a kiln to fire the sun-baked adobes into a more reliable brick called a burnt brick or a baked brick; hence the adobe mill expanded to include a brickyard. [1] Today’s location of the James Gardner kiln is the 300 block of W North Street opposite today’s house located at 370 West North Street. This location was close to Stone’s Pond and the “2nd Street Swamps”. Gordon Jones, author of Pioneer Forts in Ogden, Utah, visited this site in 2001 and remarked that the best bricks of the
nineteenth-century were made from the mud beneath bulrushes of swampy land. [2]
James and Mary had fourteen children; six lived to adults. In the 1870s James Gardner built a house for his family with his own baked bricks at 156 2nd Street. The house had two doors on the long side. Mary used the south “parlor” door as an entrance to a little store that she kept in their home. By this time Mary was in her forties, but she and James held the respect of the young men of Lynne Community, and her store became “a gathering place for the boys in the evenings” and was often open till midnight. [3]
In 1889 the Gardners were approaching their fifties, and they sold their house to neighbor Ianthus Richards and moved to Pocatello, Idaho, to be near some of their children. In 1944 the George Stokes family purchased the house, and in the 1970s, 100 years after the
house was built, George’s grandson, David Collins, built the rear addition. In 2021 the house has been owned by the Stokes/Collins family for 77 years.
[1] - William Terry, Weber County History Is Worth Knowing, abt.1988, p.120-122.
[2] - Interview Chauncey Stone, 1972; interview Clara Stone, December 1999. NOTE: In the years that followed the closing of the Gates Adobe-Brick Mill, another brickyard began a few miles to the north in Harrisville; this business continued to harvest marsh mud from the wetlands on 2nd Street for many years; Interpace Brick was located at 736 W. Harrisville Road.
[3] - Mary Melling Stone Crane, autobiography, manuscript, 1922, p. 8.