Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Scoville History from Eric Jarvis


Nauvoo Temple Plate
Plate commissioned by Lucius Scovil
 In July, we traveled to Nauvoo, Illinois, the historic Latter-day Saint city that was a boomtown in the 1840s and now is so small that cell phones and the internet don't even function properly.

Despite the tech troubles, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that a number of family members lived in Nauvoo back in its heyday. One of these was Lucius Nelson Scovil (some descendants later changed the spelling of their family name to Scoville).

Scovil Bakery
Scovil Bakery - OPEN
He built and operated a bakery and supplied Nauvoo residents with bread, jams, jellies, confections, and wedding cakes. The Scovil family converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Kirtland, Ohio, and were baptized by Joseph Smith. A picture of the bakery is attached along with an historic commemorative plate commissioned by Lucius in England.

Our kids enjoyed learning about their heritage, including walking on the grounds of the restored Nauvoo temple and imagining the many hardships of the people who ultimately had to flee the city they had made with their own hands. They also enjoyed sampling the gingerbread cookies in the bakery of their grandfather, and drinking the old fashioned root beer in the general store of the man who baptized him!

I thought you would like to hear this little tidbit of family history.

Love,

Eric

3 comments:

  1. When I was getting a birth certificate for my mother, the name on that certificate was Wyora Scovil. By the time she was getting married, she was writing Wyora Scoville, so the name change must have happened in her generation.

    As well, I have seen that plate for sale in the gift shop on the Salt Lake Temple grounds. In those days the plate cost more than I had in my wallet. Now I have enough money in my wallet for the dish, but not enough room in my cupboards.

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  2. Another day has gone by and I am looking at this post again, looking at the plate I didn't get remembering how much I wanted it, and thinking about the term "old fashioned root beer" as . I drank that as a child -- old fashioned root beer. Mother would buy a bottle of Hires Root Beer Extract, and Doral would mix it with water, sugar and yeast and bottle it.

    Our family had a bottle capper, and using it was an historic event in itself. She would make the root beer 2 weeks before Stampede began. Then at 10 pm at night, we could stand at our kitchen window (or sit at the bench or be propped up on the table), look over the brow of the hill and watch the fireworks while drinking the root beer.

    The root beer had to be cold and from the fridge. It had a yeasty taste in the back of my throat as it slid down. If it had been bottled too long, when Doral or Wyora took off the cap from the bottle, the root beer shot up and hit the ceiling. Wyora would quickly put the bottle inside a pan, hoping to catch the foam, at least that was now running down the side of the bottle and all over the table -- which product someone would have poured into their glass so that we could continue on with the family event of watching the fireworks. Sometimes there was so much foam and product on the ceiling that there would hardly be a cup of root beer left in the bottle.

    The root beer would run out before the 7 days of the Stampede fireworks were over.

    As to the "wanting of the plate commissioned by Lucius Scovil" I think I would pass on it now. It is not large enough to hold all of the root beer bubbles that would spill out of the bottle -- wanting a big cooking pot to hold those bubbles is better.

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  3. Great to the heritage sites that are connected with the family. I am cultural heritage tourism you know!

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