301 West 2nd Street and Bingham/Stone Farm
301 West 2nd Street
Thirty acres of the farm placed in a conservation easement for perpetuity.
Chauncey and Edna Stone Home and Bingham/Stone Farm
This 1920s house was built in the southwest corner of the former Bingham Fort and on the frontage of the old Bingham Farm. This spot yielded simple artifacts like a rocks and adobes that brought back stories of the past that had slipped into the corners of most minds. In 1923 as Chauncey dug with horses and scrapers to begin the foundation, he uncovered the 1850s rock foundation and many adobe bricks of the old Bingham Fort tithing house. His find stirred up public interest, and the Standard Examiner wrote an article about it titled Lost Fort Discovery. Chauncey used the rocks of the tithing house in the foundation of his new bungalow.
Another surprise on the farm was the discovery of arrowheads. As Chauncey plowed the fields of the pioneer Bingham Farm from 1913 to the 1960s, he found dozens of arrowheads, the artifacts of the Shoshone and other ancient tribes.
Chauncey and Edna discovered more artifacts in the Lynne Ditch that runs behind the house: china chips. When the fort was built in 1853, the Lynne Ditch was diverted to run inside the fort on the south side. Women of the fort threw their broken china dishes and glass into the ditch to keep the silt down. The tradition of throwing china and glass into the ditch continued for fifty years or more, and china chips can be found in the West 2nd Street section of the Lynne ditch today.
Chauncey and Edna were married in 1908 and lived 100 feet west of this house in the Old Bingham Cabin for fifteen years where their three children were born.
In 1913 Chauncey and his brother John purchased the Bingham cabin and the sixty-acre Bingham Farm and combined it with their 1871 Stone Farm which was on the north side of West 2nd Street. In the early Twentieth Century, Chauncey plowed the old Bingham Farm with horses, often using three horses and a triple tree because the plow was so hard to pull. When plowing with horses, it was easy to spot an arrowhead. With years of practice, Chauncey could later spot arrowheads from a tractor. Over the years, he and his son, Harvey Stone, filled a shoe box with arrowheads.
In addition to grain and hay, Chauncey started a dairy farm. In the beginning of the dairy, Edna drove about the Five Points neighborhood in a horse and wagon selling her cheese and sweet cream butter. Later they sold milk to Weber Central Dairy. During thrashing and haying time, Edna rose up at dawn to bake bread and cook meals for the workers on a majestic stove.
Rainfall, surpluses, and national markets prices made farming difficult and vulnerable. Chauncey took classes in electricity and worked for Bell Telephone for a few years, installing some of the first telephones in Weber County in the 1920s and enabling him to build the new brick house. The new house had electricity and running water and was completed in December 1925 just in time for Christmas.
During the 1920s and 1930s Chauncey built two barns, a milk house, a garage, a tractor garage, several chicken coops and a workshop. Chauncey could have had other jobs, but he believed that the farm was the best place to raise children - that farm work kept them all strong and healthy physically and gave them strong minds as well. He also liked being his own boss. [1] Chauncey and Edna lived on their farm through two decades of agriculture abundance, the Great Depression and two world wars.
During the Depression the Stones had little cash but plenty of food. Tug Anderson said that the Stones raised six other boys besides their own during this time; young men in the neighborhood worked on Stone Farm in exchange for meals and food to take home. The farm was a busy place characterized by lots of hard work and lots of fun. Mrs. Anderson said it saved her sons’ lives to have milk to drink each day during their growing teen years. [2]
In 1935 Chauncey had forty dairy cows, fifty chickens, five horses and two wells. By the 1930s most of the farm work was done by machines although horses were still used for some jobs.
Events during World War 11:
It was difficult to hire farm labor, and Italian prisoners of war were hired by Chauncey’s niece’s husband, Clyde Montgomery, to work on the farm. The prisoners worked here gladly in a relaxed atmosphere with lunch served in front of the granary.
Hemp was grown on the farm for the government; its strong industrial fibers were used to produce rope and other materials for the armed services.
Neighbor Taki was taken to Topaz Internment Camp near Delta, Utah. Chauncey, Clyde and others took care of his farm while he was gone. Every third- or fourth-day Chauncey would drive on the tractor to Taki’s farm to feed the cows and chickens. When speaking to his family about this injustice to Taki, Chauncey’s eyes would fill with tears.
The Chamber of Commerce and the federal government confiscated a total of 1,679 acres of choice local farmland on West 2nd Street to build the Utah General Depot. Chauncey lost 36 acres and another 40 acres that he co-owned with his brother John. This was a big loss to Chauncey and John’s 200-acre farm. For diverse reasons, nationally and locally, World War ll was the beginning of the end of the era of family farming.
By the 1950s Chauncey’s son, Harvey Stone, took over the farm; Harvey also served the agriculture community for 26 years as the Lynne Irrigation President and Ditch Master.
This farm was claimed in 1851 by Erastus Bingham. It has been a working farm from 1851 to the present and is among the oldest farms in Utah. For its first 60 years it was known as Bingham Farm; for the next 90 years it was known as Stone Farm. In 1998 the names were combined to Bingham/Stone Farm.
In 2004, the National Register of Historic Places accepted the forty-acre farm, this house, Clyde’s house, and ten farm buildings on their list under the title of Stone Farm, Ogden, Utah, typifying the Golden Age of the Family Farm from the 1920s to 1950. Also in 2004, thirty acres of the farm were placed in a conservation easement with the State of Utah for perpetuity.
In 2021, the Stone House at 301 W 2nd Street was listed on the Ogden Register of Historic Places. Also in 2021, the Weber County Heritage Foundation held a public event on the Bingham/Stone farm called Meet the Shoshone, to memorialize the ancient Native American presence on the farm and along 2nd Street.
[1] - Interview Tug Anderson 1999.
[2] - Ibid.