Thomas Carter

       Video Link for his presentation

Thomas Carter, PhD. Professor Emeritus, College of Architecture and Planning, University of Utah. Dr. Carter traveled to the Sanpete Valley in the late 1970s to write a dissertation on early Mormon architecture. One of the critical questions in this work was whether Scandinavian converts continued to build and furnish houses in the traditional manner, or dropped old world customs in favor of a rapid assimilation into the dominant American culture. Answering this question was not as easy as it first appeared. Carter's talk will retrace his journey from Utah back to Denmark, Sweden, and Norway and describe how a particular house type, the three-room parstuga, helped solve the problem of Scandinavian identity in the Mormon West.

Carter will discuss his book Building Zion: The Material World of Mormon Settlement, which tells the story of how Sanpete Valley towns were designed and built in the years before 1890.