Jedediah Morgan Grant II & Lucy Fackrell

Jedediah Morgan Grant II & Lucy Fackrell
(Parents of Jedediah Morgan Grant III, Father of Wilson May Grant, Father of Nelada Marie Grant)

Morgan and Lucy Grant were pioneers, even though they were both born in Utah. It was in the spring of 1900, that Morgan was called by President Lorenzo Snow, to take his family and go help colonize the Big Horn Basin.  The Church sent a colony under the direction of Apostle A. O. Woodruff to this new country in the Big Horn Basin.  There were groups of men, many of them young men, a few middle aged, who left Morgan County, Rich County, and some of the other counties nearby, and drove their teams, through canyon defiles, across un-bridged streams, out into a new country in Wyoming. There were about 500 people who went to the Big Horn Basin in 1900 and quite a few more followed the next two years. The Grant family left their home on the 27th of April 1900.  They went as far as Hams Fork, a small river that empties into the Bear River above Cokeville.

            About three and a half weeks later they arrived in the Big Horn Basin on the Byron flats, they were greeted with a barren land, many of the Grant Children describe the place as being just 'sand and salt sage brush. They recall that they could hardly get a meal prepared that wasn't filled with sand.  On very hot days when they saw a heavy cloud gather in the southwest, they sometimes thought maybe they would get a heavy rainstorm, but when it got there it would be just dust and they would quickly put everything away in a food box.  If it was just a whirlwind and they were eating they would cover everything and wait until it passed before they could finish their meal. 

            They worked to build a canal to irrigate the land. They lived in tents or whatever they could make do with. They raised hay to help support the colony. A few years later, the Grant family bought a farm which became their home from that time on.     

            As the need for hay was no longer needed for the colony as they built the canal, Morgan decided to explore other crops to grow.  Morgan was the first man in the Big Horn Basin to raise sugar beets.  In 1905 Morgan and his family began learning how to grow sugar beets.  Because of all the work involved in loading and unloading and hauling the sugar beets to the railroad to be transported to Billings, Morgan decided it would be easier to have a sugar beet factory in Lovell.  But to have a factory you had to have so many acres of sugar beets.  So Morgan turned his whole farm over to sugar beets and he began working on getting other farmers to turn more of their land over to sugar beets.  And finally his dream was fulfilled.  The Great Western Sugar Company built a sugar factory in Lovell in 1916.