There's no place like home

SPRINGVILLE — When she was a girl, Mary Elen Shenk had a recurring nightmare. She was being chased by bears and she ran into the upstairs closet in her family home. She slammed the closet door. Then she was safe. Today, she lives in that same home, the oldest house in Springville. It was built in 1856 by her great-great-grandparents, William and Ann (Dilworth) Bringhurst.

The upstairs closet is still there. The family always called it "the long closet." When Shenk was a child, the top cupboards in the long closet were for stuff no one looked at any more and the lower cupboards were where the family games were kept.

She knows who built the cupboards in that huge old closet.

Shenk's neighbor, who recently moved back to Springville after her husband retired from the military, is the granddaughter of the carpenter who made the cupboards. Shenk talks happily about this connection with her home's history. Of course when you live in a house that has been in your family for nearly 150 years, the history of place and the history of family are one in the same.

Shenk knows that Brigham Young slept in the south bedroom, next to the upstairs parlor. That bedroom was her sister's when they were girls. The upstairs parlor has long since become a bedroom, and when Shenk was a girl that was where her grandmother slept.

When she stands at the kitchen sink, Shenk remembers her mother or her grandmother standing at the kitchen sink. When she hears the doorbell, she remembers how her mother used to know the exact number of steps it took to walk from the kitchen to the front of the house. Sometime in the 1960s, Shenk's mother made a little sign, hand-lettered, to save herself the trip.

The sign hung on the front door, and it told visitors to come around to the side door. Shenk has kept her mother's sign. It's near the kitchen sink, where she can see it every day. "I was very close to my parents," she says.

Mary Elen and her husband, Warren, moved into the home in 1992 to take care of Mary Elen's folks after her mother had a stroke. They were following the family's tradition: children taking care of their parents in the family home, then growing old themselves and being taken care of by their children in the same house.

William Bringhurst was a legislator in the Territorial Legislature, a businessman in Provo, and a member of the Brigham Young Academy board of trustees. He was sent by Brigham Young to start a settlement in what is now Las Vegas. Brigham Young himself, was a frequent visitor to the home in Springville, according to family lore. Legend also has it that William Bringhurst kept a diary, but he wrote about something his wife didn't want remembered so she burned his diaries after he died.