18 Jan 1903 – 4 Aug 1984
Great-Granddaughter of Philip Cardon and Martha Marie Tourn
Granddaughter of Charles Guild and Marie Madeline Cardon
Daughter of William Oliver Guild and Nettie Heiner
Autobiography of Katie Heiner Guild
My father William Guild was born the 29 May 1873 at Piedmont Wyo. My grandfather was Charles Guild and his father was James Guild, my great-great grandfather Charles Guild of Dundee, Scotland. My grandfather and his brother John came to America about 1854. John Guild settled in Lawrence, Mass., and Grandfather crossed the plains and came to Utah where he met my Grandmother Marie Madeleine Cardon, who with her parents had settled at Logan, Cache, Utah. They were married the 19th of February 1855 in the old Endowment House in Salt Lake City, Utah. They lived in Ogden and Lehi for several years. They had seven children when they moved to Piedmont Wyo. and took up a homestead on the Muddy Creek. When the railroad was built through Piedmont, there was a roundhouse, also five charcoal kilns, which made employment for about a hundred men. My grandparents ran a large hotel, store and post office. When the Altamont tunnel was built and the railroad was moved, the charcoal kilns were abandoned. There wasn’t much doing at Piedmont except ranching and sheepherding. The town of Piedmont was moved and all the old houses are gone and Piedmont is no more. My father went to Brigham Young University, later he went to work for his brother John in his store at Lyman. He joined the church and was baptized when he was about 22. He was called on a mission the 8th of August 1896 by Wilford Woodruff to Switzerland and Germany. After he returned he and mother were married the 6th of March 1901 in the Salt Lake Endowment House. My older brother Kenneth was born 7th of January 1902 and I was born the 18th Jan. 1903 in a three room frame house. I had three sisters and six brothers. Kenneth died the 30th of Sept. 1911 of an heart ailment. He was buried in the family cemetery at Piedmont. Mother had his endowments completed on the 21st of Nov. 1919. My father clerked in Uncle John’s store, and he taught school for a while. He also started the first creamery in Lyman in 1903, about 1919 we move to Urie, Wyoming. President Mc Kenley commissioned my father, William 0. Guild, postmaster at Lyman the 14 Dec 1901. It was known as Bench Wyoming before that time.
Olive was born the 9th of March 1914. Father ran the store at Urie, also the post office. We went to school at Urie and later a Sunday School and Primary were organized there. Father’s health got so bad he left the store and moved to Piedmont and took up a homestead about 1915. Here Roger, the youngest, was born the 23rd of May 1917. Father taught school the first winter on the homestead. Six of us went to school. We were snowed in most of the winter. Father went out on horseback and with a packhorse to get groceries about eight miles to Piedmont. We moved to Piedmont one winter to a one room school. The next year we moved to Springvalley, a railroad station, for school. Father was a guard and rode the pipline along the railroad from Springvalley to LeRoy. This was during the first world war. He died the 16th of November 1918 of the flu, and was buried in the Family Cemetery at the ranch. I was going to high school in Morgan and stayed with my grandfather Heiner. I had the flu and could not come home for the funeral. The next year mother moved to Milbume to put the children in school.
Mother proved up on the homestead and then we moved to Lyman where they had just built a high school and I took my Junior year there. In the summer I worked for Mrs. Welch, cooking for the hay men out at Burntfork, Wyo. Then I worked at the Central Office until I married Melvin Warren on the 1st of November 1923 at Price, Utah, by Bishop Wm. E. Stokker.
My husband worked in the coal mines at Kenelworth. We lived with his folks a few months then we moved to a four room house. I just got two rooms calsomined and cleaned up, when he moved out on a construction job building 16 miles of railroad for the Great Western Coal Mine about ten miles up the canyon. We lived in an army tent and I helped his mother cook for the men who worked on the road . We cooked for about 25 men. Weston was born the 9 August 1924 in that tent.. The Company had a Dr. Cindergard with them.
The Company went broke and couldn’t pay their help. We were on food rationing for a short while and all they could feed the men were bread and gravy. Keith Guild Warren was born in Consummers, Utah on 30 Apr 1926. My husband was a rather irresponsable employee as well as an irresponsable father. Life got almost imbearable moving from job to job and house to house. I filed for a divorce and my husband’s parents bought me a bus ticket to my mothers in Lyman, Wyoming. I was pregnant with Bruce William Warren who was born 18 Jan. 1928 in Lyman, Wyoming.
Weston Warren Information
When Katie Guild Warren arrived back to her home town in Lyman, Wyoming, she had one child by the hand, one in her arms and another in the hopper. There was no handsome husband to help her begin a new home or share any responsibility.
Nettie Guild, her mother, was a widow with three girls and two of her sons still at home. Employment opportunities were scarce but obligations were nearly overwhelming. Katie worked as a telephone operator as often as she could and sold a line of clothing door to door.
A rug loom occupied one room in the Guild home. Many a rug had been crafted and sold to support the family. The weaving trade was the occupation of her great grandfather Martin Heiner when he and Adelgunda came to Baltimore from Germany. Katie cut and sewed cloth and made rugs as often as they could find a buyer. These were the jobs she had to help provide for her and three little boys for five years.
On the 23rd of February 1934, Amelia Jane Walker past away leaving Levi Walker a widower with nine children at home and a little irrigated farm three miles east of Lyman. The farm was only capable of about feeding the family that occupied it. Needless to say, there was a job opportunity and a rather steady one at that. At the ranch or farm, there was a four bedroom frame house. There was no running water, the lighting was from carbide light which were quite great for that day and age. There was no wallpaper on the walls, hardly any curtains to the windows. Water was bucketed from the well, coal and wood to heat and cook with. There were many mouths to feed and loads of wash to be done.
Next comes the proposal proposition. Katie could see an opportunity to have a temple marriage and have her three boys sealed to a stepfather and their mother. Lee became active in the church and began paying tiths.
On the 26th of June 1935, Levi Orson Walker and Katie Guild were married and the three boys were sealed to them in the Salt Lake Temple. A girl and a boy were born to them, Lorna Lee, the 23rd of Dec. 1937 and Guild Lee, the 26th of April 1940, both born in Lyman, Wyoming
During World War II, six stars hung in the window of Katie and. Lee’s home. They represented Katie’s three boys and three boys of Lee’s. All of them served honorably and returned home safely.
After the war armistice was declared and the servicemen came home, most of their big family married and moved off with their partners. Katie did lots of genealogy on her Guild line and Lee and Katie made regular trips to the temple in Logan to perform ordinance work for nine generations of their kindred dead. Lee served or years as a Seventy on a home mission. Katie served as secretary of the Sunday School for many years. Near all that family, twenty-one children, got their endowments and remained active in the L. D. S. Church.
Levi died, after many bouts of emphysema from his lifetime of sheep shearing and carpentry work, on the 17th of February 1968 in Lyman. Levi and Katie had sold the ranch east of Lyman and built a home on Canal Street in Lyman, Katie continued her genealogy and took trips to the temple as often as a way was available. She took up painting with the Senior Citizens group and many of her paintings adorn the wall of her family and friends.
Katie lived in her home in Lyman until she was eighty years of age. She had suffered a couple of strokes. The Walker family watched out for her and helped her when needed. She finally conceded to move to Orem Utah with her son Bruce. While there she fell and broke her hip. This ordeal brought on another stroke which took her life. She died in the Utah County Hospital on the fourth of August 1984 and was buried in the Lyman Cemetery next to Levi.
Another History of Kaite Heiner Guild Walker by daughter Lorna Walker Maxwell
William Guild was the son of immigrants (mother from Italy and father from Scotland) who came to this country with a strong desire to succeed. They homesteaded a ranch, built a hotel and helped establish a town, Piedmont, Wyoming. It took ambition and hard work, two traits they passed on to William.
Nettie Heiner was born in Morgan, Utah and also came from sturdy pioneer stock. William and his brother started several businesses, but William also had a strong desire to do missionary work, which he did serving several missions in Germany. Nettie was left to run the ranch and store and raise the children. As the oldest child, Mom was expected to help with the other children and the chores. She was fifteen when her father died, leaving Nettie to raise the family alone. Money was tight so Mom went to work cooking for the miners at various mining camps to help out. She worked for Mrs. Warren at one of the camps and married her son, Melvin, who worked in the mines.
Mom never spoke much about her life with Melvin until one day when she came to visit me and my family when we lived in Price. We went out to the old Consumer Mine and as we walked around she reminisced about her life there. I would like to share a couple of the stories she told me.
Mom and Melvin lived in a tent at the mine where he worked and she cooked for his mother. On the day her first child was born, Melvin and several other miners had gone to town. Mom had told him that she was going to have a baby that day but his mother told him the first one always took a long time so he went off to town and his mother went back to work and left her to have the child alone. Fortunately for Mom, a nearby rancher’s wife had befriended her and she came over to check on Mom and found her in labor. The rancher’s wife took Mom home and helped her deliver Weston.
They later moved to a house in Kennelworth where Melvin worked in another mine. Mom worked hard to furnish the house the best she could. Melvin took her home for a visit with her family once and when he went to pick her up, she asked him of he minded if her sister, Afton, came home with them for a visit. Melvin replied that he didn’t mind and thought she would be good company for Mom. When they got to the house, Mom walked in to find all of the furniture gone. Without saying a word, she unpacked, fixed dinner and found bedding for everyone to sleep with. After the children were asleep, she asked Melvin what had happened to the furniture. He told her that he had lost at gambling and had sold it to get enough money to pay his debt. She asked him why he didn’t say anything to her before she brought Afton with them and he replied that she needed company whether or not she had furniture.
When she became pregnant with her third child, Melvin left. Mom took her two sons (Weston and Keith) and returned to Lyman to stay with her Mother. After Bruce was born, she went back to school to get her high school diploma because she knew education was very important and having it would help her earn a better living. To support herself and her boys, she worked as a switchboard operator at the telephone company and also sold ready-made dresses door to door. Mom made all of her own clothes as well as the boy’s clothes. She also made quilts and rugs, which she sold for extra money.
Then one day a widower named Lee (Levi) Walker asked her to work for him. Lee had recently lost his wife and needed help raising his children. After she had worked for him for a time, he said to her one day, “Katie, you are a good woman and have a family to raise and I have a family to raise too, so why don’t we raise them together. ” What an offer! She knew he was on the brink of bankruptcy, knew he had all those kids to raise, knew he was ornery at times, knew there would be hard times trying to blend the two groups into one family, but she married him anyway. I have often wondered why she agreed. Maybe she sensed that behind that ornery facade, he was a good man and would always work hard to provide a home, food and clothes for all of diem. I’m not sure if there was any love at the start of their marriage, but I know that they loved each other dearly in the end. Together they worked hard paying off the bills and fixing up the house until they finally had a comfortable home and didn’t owe anyone.
As we all know, Dad could be a difficult man at times, but Mom let him know when he had gone far enough. I think in her own way she was as stubborn as he was. I remember one day Mom telling Dad that she wanted a new dining room table. Well, Dad went on and on about what a perfectly good table they had – as most of you remember, it was too big and took up too much of the room. Dad finally told her that she could have a new table as soon as she had the money to buy one. Not one to pass up a challenge like that, Mom started gathering all the material scraps she could find. I helped her cut them and sew them into strips and then we rolled them into balls. She then used them to make rag rugs which she sold and she eventually even sold her loom. All of this was done without Dad’s knowledge. Then one day, as they were getting ready to go to town for the winter supplies, Mom told Dad to be sure and leave room for a table to be brought home. Dad was surprised that she had gotten enough to buy a set of silverware too. She was very proud of both of them and the fact that she had gotten them on her own. And I think Dad was pretty proud of her too.
Mom was a very special person. I wish you all could have known her the way I did. I am proud to be her daughter and I hope I have inherited some of her good qualities. I remember someone at her funeral made the statement that he never heard her say an unkind work about anyone. I don’t think there are many people who could have that said about them.
Histories above are from “The Descendants of Charles Guild and Mary Madaline Cardon” pages 26-30 compiled by Susan Thomas Tippets February, 1996
Lyman City Cemetery, Lyman, Wyoming
Price City Cemetery, Price, Utah>
