Alunite Branch records, 1917-1920

The records of the LDS branch at Alunite, Utah are of particular interest for the light they shed on the functioning of an LDSc congregation in a mining town. This is especially true since Alunite, just south of Marysvale, is a ghost town today. Alunite flourished during the First World War only to be subsequently abandoned. The branch records cover the period 1917-1920, the heyday of the town.

The congregation was a branch of the Marysvale Ward, four-and-a-half miles away. Hial B. Hales was the presiding elder. Alunite was a company town, and the lives of the Saints, like the lives of everyone else, depended on the vagaries of the company and the volatile mining industry. The branch met in the town's schoolhouse by permission of the mining company, Mineral Products Corporation. When the mill temporarily shut down for much of 1919, the branch stopped meeting.