Guest Article by Jim Wetzel, Curator of the Delta Museum
There is no question that Delta’s first house was a log cabin. If you have ever visited the Delta County Museum, you are familiar with the mural which is painted on an exterior wall near the entrance to the museum. The mural depicts this log cabin, and is a reasonably accurate view of what the cabin looked like. The cabin was built by George W. Moody, and was captured on film in 1900 by photographer Francis M. Laycook.
That photograph, shown above, is part of our photo collection in our museum, and was the documentary evidence for the mural. Not too long ago, I was given a copy of a hand-written letter by Ben Laycock, and he had titled it: Retrospect’s by Laycock – The First House in Delta. The letter is not dated, so it is not possible to determine when it was written, but it details his effort to determine the earliest house from testimony from some of our earliest settlers, one of which was Moody, himself.
The cabin was located “just west and north of what is now the West end of the original Second Street.” We always tell the story here in the museum that it stood near the sugar factory silos. Laycock noted that the cabin “was torn down shortly after the sugar factory was built.” The factory was built in 1921, but the silos did not appear until the 1960s, and the factory complex almost surrounded the silos on three sides. Suffice it to say that the cabin stood “near” the factory.
George Moody came in before the area was legally open for settlement. He was single, and “not menacled by any wife or children” according to Laycock. He further states that Moody completed his cabin in late 1881 but abandoned it for the first winter and “sought refuge with the soldiers on the brow of California mesa” by working in their kitchen.
Our museum version reads a little different, for we heard that the soldiers from Fort Crawford had arrested him and put him in their brig until the area was open for settlement (September 3, 1881), after which he returned to his cabin to complete it. I have read other sources which describe a U.S. cavalry encampment on California Mesa, so that part is accurate, but whether Moody was on the mesa or in the fort, or both, is not verified.
There will always be confusion over the spelling of the Laycook / Laycock name. The genealogically derived name is Laycook. At some point in Ben Laycook’s early adult years, he changed his name to Laycock. We have no evidence that this was done legally – through the courts – but he changed it prior to his first marriage. He was married five times. If that isn’t confusing enough, his father, Francis M. Laycook, was married three times, with Benjamin Levi Laycook the offspring of his third wife. Ben was one of twelve siblings of the three marriages (8-1-3). Once Ben changed the spelling of his last name, the change has continued through his lineage.
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