Heritage Museum Blog

The image of early pioneers single-handedly blazing trails across the west might be a popular trope in movies, but for early Mormon pioneers moving to Utah it meant relocating as large, extended families and in groups from their English villages. The Edward Phillips and John H. Green families are among those who did just that.

The Phillips and Greens not only lived less than a mile from each other in rural Worcestershire but were related by several marriages, including John Green’s marriage to Edward Phillips’ sister Susannah. They were among a number of locals who joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the early 1840s, immigrating to the United States soon after their baptisms. The two families wintered together near Cottonwood Canyon in 1849, setting out the next spring to find farmland well away from Salt Lake City.

John and Edward made it as far as Davis County’s sand ridge, where crusted snowdrifts forced them to overnight with Samuel O. Holmes, the lone resident along Sandy Creek in what is now Kaysville. Holmes’ praise of the area convinced the pair to settle there, and as soon as the snows melted the Green and Phillips families loaded their wagons and drove back to Sandy Creek, arriving in April 1850. They were joined the next day by the William Kay family. Each family built log cabins and renamed Sand Creek after Edward, whose family was the first to arrive. The Phillips Creek settlement welcomed a handful of other arrivals during the summer, including Levi Roberts, a friend from England, who built his own cabin nearby.

There were enough families scattered throughout the area by January 1851, to support a formal church organization. Brigham Young approached both John Green and Edward Phillips to be bishop, but according to Elizabeth Green Tall, John’s great-granddaughter, neither one of them wanted the job. Eventually, William Kay accepted the call, with Edward Phillips as 1st counselor and John Green as his 2nd counselor. The settlement was renamed Kays Ward out of respect for the new bishop. With the arrival of new settlers, the population of Kays Ward was a respectable 417 by October 1853. Among the ward’s recent additions was another old friend from England, John Weaver, who arrived that year with only 25 cents in his pocket. John Hyrum and Susannah housed the Weaver family until they could make their own living arrangements, an invitation which was repeated often over the years as other immigrants arrived.

The road between Salt Lake City and Ogden soon became Kaysville’s Main Street. The Wells Fargo stagecoach began rumbling through town on this road in 1857, carrying mail and passengers between Montana and Salt Lake City. John Green capitalized on the situation by building stables at the north end of Main Street in the Kays Creek area the same year, contracting to furnish hay and horses for the coach, while Susannah and the children provided passengers with refreshments. John closed his stables when the stage stopped running but continued to reside with his family in his fine brick house on Main Street. He later purchased 24 acres of land along the east side of Main Street where he rented a log building to a company that ran a mercantile store. It was around this nucleus of Main Street stores where a center of commerce developed serving residents of the north part of town, as opposed to the central business district father south in downtown Kaysville. This was the beginning of a split in the communities which would eventually result in the Kays Creek area becoming the separate town of Layton. Meanwhile, Edward Phillips was instrumental in building up the southern part of the settlement, including surveying the area and helping build the first meeting house and protective wall around the growing village. He also constructed the first more permanent home of adobe bricks and held a series of leadership positions in the community until his death in 1896, the oldest and most respected citizen in town.