"So....what more can you tell us about these houses?"

You are correct that my eyes were youthful and untrained, but my dad was quite observant and spent a good amount of time discussing it with me. It piqued his interest, and so it piqued mine. The houses were in Cedar City, Utah (near the SW corner of the state), along one of the main drags in town. They were brick, possibly stone, and now that I know more about architecture I recall they had a kind of watered-down Queen Anne style to them. I recall they all had large front porches. The main front door was the most ornate, and presumably led into a foyer/stairhall. The houses also had side doors as though a window sill were dropped to create a door; however they were usually not adjacent to the front door. The doors looked like additions, or at least slightly less ornate than the main door. I recall my father saying that back in the time of polygamy, the husband would walk into whichever door belonged to whichever wife was to be the "head wife" for the day. Sounds like bs to me, but I was an impressionable kid and was fascinated that any woman would put up with that.

Anyway, I have always been skeptical about my dad's interpretation of those doors because when I was 15, my family moved to upstate New York and bought a Greek Revival with, count 'em, *three* front doors. Oh, and for clarification, I didn't grow up in Utah but had a bunch of Mormon friends. Some of the nicest people I've ever known. And they each had one front door.

Jenn

From: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Wed, June 23, 2010 10:16:46 PM
Subject: Re: [BP] Front door(s)

Jenn,

I have forwarded this question to my brother who lives outside SLC, despite the fact that our family (as the rest of the Pinheads know ad nauseam) are not of the Mormonical Persuasion, nor do we consider ourselves to be gentiles. Nor is he a architect or a architectural historian, although it's likely he could, in the immortal words of Ed Norton, core a apple,

Anyway, his answer made me wonder whether you remember what town(s) these stone houses were in, and also to wonder whether there might be HSRs on them, or on some like them with this seemingly odd detail. Do you remember where these houses were? Was there any sign (to your youthful and presumably untrained eyes) that these multiple doors were the result of a series of additions, or whether these doors were all constructed in one "campaign." It also occurred to me that there ought to be a book on Mormon architecture which might shed light on the architectural manifestations of Plural Marriage (which strikes me as a Peculiar Institution). On the other other hand, maybe the Mormons have been careful to keep knowledge of this sort of thing under tight control, so there are no HSRs and certainly are no coffee table books on Mormon Residential Architecture of the 19th Century..

So....what more can you tell us about these houses?

Ralph

-----Original Message-----
From: Jenn Cappeto [log in to unmask]

Speaking of too many doors, when I was a kid my family used to vacation in Utah where one could find several old masonry houses with multiple front doors. My father told me that old houses that were built for Mormons often had multiple front doors: each door was for a different wife. Sounds apocryphal. Does anyone know if that is true?

From: Ilene R. Tyler <[log in to unmask]>

In our huge old Greek Revival house it can be confusing because we have so many doors.

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