The Jacob Hamblin home is an excellent representation of nineteenth century pioneer construction. It was built of local materials by pioneer craftsmen in 1862-63, and served as a home for Jacob Hamblin's family for seven years. While living in Santa Clara, Hamblin was serving The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, popularly known as the Mormon Church, as a missionary to the Indians. He is widely known for that work and as a frontiersman and explorer.
Hamblin was born in Ohio in 1819, and moved with his family to Wisconsin, where he helped his father open new land for agriculture. In 1839, when Jacob was twenty, he married Lucinda Taylor in Wisconsin. As a young man of twenty-two he accepted Mormonism and soon joined in the westward trek of the Latter-day Saint pioneers. Jacob's wife, Lucinda remained in the midwest when he migrated to Utah. Lucinda died in Kansas in 1858.
Jacob assumed custody of their four children and before coming to Utah in 1850, he met and married Rachel Judd, a widow with two children of her own. In Utah, they lived first in Tooele Valley, southwest of Salt Lake City. Experiences with Indians there convinced Jacob Hamblin that bloodshed and conflict could be avoided through honest negotiation. He vowed never to kill an Indian and thus began his long career as a peacemaker on the frontier.
In 1854, President Brigham Young called Hamblin and several others as missionaries to the Piute Indians of southern Utah. The Latter-day Saints feel a special obligation to teach their religion to the American Indians. They believe that the Book of Mormon contains an ancient record of God's dealings with some of the ancestors of the Indians on this continent, and that it contains the fullness of the gospel of Jesus Christ and important promises for these people.
After the missionary work was underway, Jacob Hamblin's family joined him. They lived temporarily at other nearby locations until a rock fort and corral could be constructed near the present site of Santa Clara. The family lived in the Santa Clara Fort and in summer homes in the cool mountain valleys of Pine Valley and Mountain Meadows until this home was constructed.
It was the destruction of the fort by a flash flood that finally prompted the Hamblins to build a more secure home, back away from the stream. The flood hit without warning following torrential rains early in 1862. Families living in the area lost their homes, orchards, school, and most of their books and personal effects. They escaped only with some of their clothing, bedding and utensils.
Before building this home, Jacob Hamblin had married Priscilla Leavitt (in 1857) as a plural wife. The home was designed for both wives, and at times housed more than a dozen children. To accommodate his two families, Jacob provided identical bedrooms for Rachel (on the east) and Priscilla (on the west) and a large children's bedroom upstairs.
The Latter-day Saints believe in a strong family life and in living their religion day by day. The table is set in pioneer style. It has the plates upside down and the chairs turned with their backs to the table. All is in readiness for family prayer, which preceded the evening meal. After Jacob lad led the family in prayer, they would sit up to the table and then one of the children would ask a blessing on the food.
When Jacob Hamblin was absent on his extended missionary journeys to the Indians of southern Utah and northern Arizona, Rachel took over the supervision of the growing family and the work of weaving. Priscilla supervised the cooking. Each wife had an Indian girl to help with household responsibilities. The descendants of Jacob Hamblin donated much of the authentic furniture for the restoration of the home, and a copy of the famous Fort Defiance Navajo Indian treaty.
Jacob Hamblin was known throughout this community for his fine herds of cattle and sheep and for his productive fruit orchard, The family also raised its own grain and vegetables. The older boys, including an adopted Indian son, helped manage the herds, while the women and younger children tended the gardens and dried fruit on the sloping upstairs porch.
In the back rooms are cool storage areas built into the hillside. One of them served as a pantry for food storage. Here could be found Jacob's popular dried York peaches and sweet-pit apricots. Also stored were potatoes, turnips, and other vegetables and grains such as wheat, corn and buckwheat.
At their summer home, the Hamblins prepared dried herbs and dried meat, butter, tallow and candles, which they brought to this home with them in the fall of the year.
Also displayed in the storage rooms are various tools from the period. This is where rock work for the walls of the home was quarried. Jacob hired men from Cedar City, sixty miles north of here to help lay up the stone walls and used Ponderosa pine for the woodwork and for the handmade shingles.
Most of the pine woodwork now in the home is original. Some of the furniture is also handmade of pine from the 1860's. The lumber for the home was obtained from the area's first sawmill, located in the Pine Valley Mountains, 35 miles from here.
The bedrooms of the two wives have matching fireplaces which provided warmth for the home during the mild winters and doubled as kitchen "stoves" for cooking. The bedrooms are also similar in that each one has a stairway leading up to the weaving room and children's bedroom.
The west bedroom belonged to Priscilla, who was the youngest sister of Dudley Leavitt, another prominent Mormon missionary to the southern Utah Indians. She and Rachel raised their families as one, in peace and harmony. Each was typical of Latter-day Saint women, dedicated in her role as a mother, and also contributing to the betterment of her community. Besides her busy life at home, Rachel served the town of Santa Clara as the first school teacher, and was on call when needed as a nurse and midwife. Priscilla was known locally as "the Herb Doctor".
Following Rachel's early death in 1864, Jacob Hamblin married Louisa Bonelli. She was the 22 year old daughter of a handcart pioneer who lived as a neighbor to the Hamblins. Louisa moved into Rachel's room and graciously assisted Priscilla with the responsibilities of the home and family. One of those responsibilities was providing clothing for eleven children of their own, plus three Indian children they had adopted.
This large upstairs room served many purposes. The family called it the loom room, but it doubled as a social hall and conference room. Jacob Hamblin and his wives had lived in much smaller homes and in the cramped quarters of the old Santa Clara fort. Therefore, they were pleased at the prospects of a home large enough to entertain Church leaders from Salt Lake City and big enough for local entertainments. The children had their own imaginative uses for the room. They loved to stage home theatricals, especially comedies, and made their own dough-faced masks to use in acting out their stories. But the principal activity of this room is suggested by the spinning wheels and the loom. During her lifetime, Rachel supervised the operation, which saw the transformation of the raw product into shirts, pants, dresses, and blankets.
The small spinning wheel with the foot peddle was for wool and cotton. The larger and older wheel was used for spinning flax into linen cloth. The family's Indian girls were especially talented in the art of weaving, but the entire family contributed to this home industry. The Mormon couch was a prominent feature of many pioneer homes, and doubled as a bed at night.
The large Navajo rug on the floor of this room was made for the Latter-day Saint temple at Mesa, Arizona, in 1927, and is on temporary exhibit here.
During Jacob Hamblin's lifetime the Navajos were a warring tribe who caused much trouble as they raided emigrant trains between here and Las Vegas.
Besides his missionary work among the Piutes of this area, Jacob Hamblin spent time trying to pacify the Navajos. One of his best known accomplishments was the Treaty of Fort Defiance, signed at the New Mexico army fort in November 1870.
Beginning in 1855 he also attempted to establish a Mormon mission among the Hopi Indians in northern Arizona. He made eight visits to the Moqui villages, and eventually moved south to be closer to them. On these excursions across the Colorado River, he reopened the ancient Ute Crossing (or Crossing of the Fathers), which had been used by Spanish explorers, and pioneered the crossing later known as Lee's Ferry. During the year this home was built (1862-63), his missionary party traveled completely around the Grand Canyon.
Hamblin was called by church leaders to help establish a settlement 75 miles from here at Kanab, Utah, in 1869. He wanted his family close to him, so he sold his home and moved them to the Kanab fort that fall.
Priscilla, especially, was reluctant to leave this home. It would not be her last move. Nine years later they moved again, this time to northern Arizona, to begin pioneering all over again. on the Little Colorado River. Jacob Hamblin continued his work as peacemaker, explorer, and missionary after leaving Santa Clara. In 1882 he moved to Pleasanton, New Mexico, where he died in August 1886. Priscilla lived until 1927 and Louisa died in 1931.
This lean-to at the rear of the upstairs floor was added on as a dormitory when the size of the family increased. During his lifetime, Jacob Hamblin had 24 children, but with the older ones getting married, and the younger ones born after the family left Santa Clara, only about half of them lived here at any on time.
After the Hamblin's moved, the home changed hands several times before it was repurchased by his descendants. In 1959 the property was deeded to the State of Utah for restoration as a historic site. The LDS Church obtained the property in 1974.
