An Unfocused Vision of Zion | Lavina Fielding Anderson, ed., Chesterfield: Mormon Outpost in Idaho

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“I felt the beginnings of a gnawing wish that somewhere we could find a little village to preserve” (p. 1). 

After a century of fledgling survival, Chesterfield, a quiet, remote hamlet in southeastern Idaho, has suddenly become the subject of unprecedented attention. This hamlet is curiously without any of the trappings of the contemporary landscape — fast food restaurants, gasoline stations or residential subdivisions. The Chesterfield Foundation, established in 1979, aims to preserve Chesterfield’s largely unaltered nineteenth-century image. This book of essays is a valuable resource from the first phase of the foundation’s preservation plan, and received a special citation from the Mormon History Association in 1983. Reading between the lines from essay to essay, one gleans that Chesterfield is not a typical nineteenth-century Mormon village either. This interesting discovery could have made an excellent theme with which to unite the otherwise disparate essays into a cohesive statement about Chesterfield. To the reader’s and the book’s misfortune, it was not. 

Nevertheless, the book is a commend able effort. Using a multidisciplinary approach, it incorporates eight separately authored essays (two of which are photographic) on diverse aspects of Chester field’s history. Davis Bitton’s study, “Play and a Lot of Hard Work: Group Life in Chesterfield” and Lawrence G. Coates’s thorough “Chesterfield and her Indian Neighbors” are indicative of the original research that the book required. F. Ross Peterson’s “Chesterfield: A Picture from the Past” and Leonard J. Arrington and Richard L. Jensen’s “Making a Living: Economic Life of Chesterfield” are particularly successful at conveying Chester field’s uniqueness as a Mormon Village. Their findings are enhanced by the decidedly tasteful and readable format of the book. 

Chesterfield remains important today as an area for future study not because of its typicalities but because of its oddities. An LDS community, it was not settled in typical LDS fashion. It was a speculative venture by LDS ranchers whose linear settlement pattern so appalled visiting Church authorities that it was subsequently platted according to standard Mormon design. Even then, the town departed from the ideal square mile arrangement to a rectangular grid of three-fourths of a square mile. Also, many Saints never moved from their original homesteads to the city blocks, perpetuating a decentralized version of Zion. Chesterfielders also paid no heed to official Church orders to proselytize nearby reservation Indians. They were not, however, unfriendly with them. Coates, in fact, reveals that some second generation Chesterfield Mormons tried to claim free land from the federal government by virtue of having some Indian blood. 

Impermanence was another odd characteristic of Chesterfield. The harsh environment and abysmal annual incomes from husbandry discouraged many Saints from farming. According to Peterson, “Young men, fathers, mothers, and anyone else would try to find wage work wherever they could” (p. 15). 

The issue of preserving Chesterfield is not discussed beyond a sentence or two. One might hope to have read of the restoration plans or adopted strategy of the Foundation. Instead, the architectural analysis tacked on the end seems so scanty that one wonders why it was included. While some of the essays are captivating in themselves, they lack a unifying thread. The result is an ambitious and laudable attempt which fails to excite the reader due to its lack of focus. 

Chesterfield: Mormon Outpost in Idaho, edited by Lavina Fielding Anderson (Ban croft, Idaho: Chesterfield Foundation, Inc., 1982), 91 pp., price unknown.