In my experience, that’s when the Big Table concept really takes hold and isn’t a burden–when that’s genuinely what everyone wants. When you’re compelled to do it, it simply doesn’t work because your heart isn’t in it.

PS- Welcome back, Ardis. Hope everything’s ok.

Funny, to those in a United Order community, the hymn “Again We Meet Around the Board” must have had a pejorative double meaning!

Amy, I have some pretty amazing pictures of the climb up out of Lee’s Ferry over Lee’s Backbone, which was no picnic either. Wilford Woodruff described it in his journal some years later as the most difficult ascent and descent he had ever encountered.

The Kingston United Order began with individual family kitchens and dining rooms, but as soon as they could finish a large enough building they began eating at a big table. Within a few months, though, the kinds of troubles that Amy cites for Sunset had appeared at Kingston. Unwilling to completely abolish the big table, they still ate as a community but at five smaller tables, each presided over by a community leader, to preserve more of a family feeling. “There is no misstake but it is the better way at least experience has taught that lesson.”

Even so, the problems of status and inequality and hurt feelings and cold suppers persisted. One particular problem was that they had American, English, Swiss, and Danish members who were used to different methods of preparing food and who could not learn to enjoy other methods of cooking. They tried to work them out — “The principles of union were held up in favor of the big table” — but eventually they decided that it would work best for each family to prepare its own meals and eat separately from the community. “There was an order meeting held this evening wherein the people voted to discontinue the big table for the present … The milk was to be divided according to numbers & the Hall dishes were to be distributed according to necessity.”

An English journalist who visited the Order and interviewed its residents and and was generally quite sympathetic (although you might doubt that from the following quotation) reported, “When they ate at a common table, the living, it is said, was even more frugal than it is now, and there was hardly a piece of crockery among them all, the ‘family’ eating and drinking out of tin vessels. The women, either from mismanagement among themselves, or want of order among the men, were unable to bear the burden of ceaseless cooking, and the common table was thereupon abandoned by a unanimous vote.”

I think it quite interesting to note that memoirs written late in life by people who were children during the Kingston United Order days remember the big table very fondly, much more fondly, evidently, than their elders who had tried to make it work. Somewhere in my files, too, I have memoirs of a couple of Order members who talk about the prayers given before meals, and how they dreaded when it was the turn of one man who droned on and on and on, guaranteeing that the food would be cold. Another hazard of a Mormon big table!

One of the most difficult parts of the journey for the early settlers was the crossing of the Colorado River at Lee’s Ferry. When Daniel Wells traveled to Arizona in 1876, his group also included Lorenzo Hatch and Lorenzo Roundy. Roundy was drowned during the crossing and Hatch was swept down into the rapids, clinging to the top of a carriage, but his life was saved.

This sort of reminds me of the stories about how President Kimball would bring a box of chocolates to meetings with the FP and 12, and how they got to choose by seniority. The newest members always got the crappy chocolates.