Pleasant Green as a name and Identity. Come hear the early history next Saturday, May 17 at Noon and 3:00 p.m. at the Magna library on the historic Pleasant Green Main Street. Youd be amazed and what Ive been able to dig up about Pleasant Green. We were certainly a pioneer town as much as Riverton was. We still deserve that identity. I found an exact date for the establishment of Pleasant Green in the county court archives: July 21, 1874. We were certainly a pioneer settlement for a quarter century before that. In contrast, there isnt a valid date of establishment for Magna. 1906 is when the Magna concentrator was built in Pleasant Green on the hill above the LeCheminant and Adamson farms. The LeCheminants had been there permanently since 1858-59. The company housing (B&G Row and Ragtow) was built directly on top of the LeCheminant farm, in fact I have a photo of the B&G row sitting in the middle of Sarah LeCheminants orchard. I used to think the name Magna had some kind of official change directly related to the post office. Ive learned since that that was only a part of the story. The bigger picture has to do with two separate cultures: the original Pleasant Green pioneers versus the newer Magna-Garfield culture. Pleasant Green was simply overwhelmed by newcomers who didnt share the same identity and heritage. Outsiders (out of laziness and ignorance perhaps) like Tribune reporters around the time of WWI began referring to the entire area as Magna. Magna, on the hill, was a world renowned landmark and industrial accomplishment by then. It was one of the leading concentrator, reduction and milling enterprises of the world. How easy would it be to overlook the identity of Pleasant Green if you hadnt grown up here? How would you refer to this explosion of population in Pleasant Green, Magna, and Garfield in a newspaper? I found many newspaper articles in the Herald (sympathetic to the pioneer culture and heritage) that differentiated between Magna and Pleasant Green up to 1920. Some writers of articles in the Deseret News recognized a difference into the 1930s. It was the generation of the 1930s and 1940s who finally forgot about Pleasant Green and saw Magna as only a mining industry boom town.
Posted on: Fri, 09 May 2014 22:30:39 +0000
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