The generosity and unselfishness of these offers will be apparent when it is mentioned that flour at that time would sell at from $20.00 to $24.00 per hundred pounds.
He had not been living in Bountiful long when he recognized one particular locality as the very spot shown him in vision while sick in Wisconsin where he would build a house and make a home, and pointed it out to his wife. Upon inquiry of the man who owned the ground (two acres in extent, and unimproved) he found he could buy it for the sum of $100.00, and upon learning that he had no funds with which to buy it, the man was willing to give him time in which to pay for it. He bargained for it without hesitation, and after his first harvest paid for it in molasses at $4.00 per gallon.
In the early spring of 1865 he rented a few acres of land and planted the same to onions, beets, carrots, sugar cane and corn; he cultivated the land well, and obtained a good crop. In the meantime he built some sheds to shelter his animals, and a stackyard, and mowed quite a lot of hay on vacant land, and stacked this and his other produce in his yard.
In the early part of the following December, while he and his son Ephraim were away in the canyon after a load of wood, his stable and stackyard and their contents were accidentally burned to the ground. His first impulse on learning of it was to inquire if the family was safe. Being assured on that point, he said all that he had he had dedicated to the Lord, and if the Lord chose to make a burnt offering of it he had nothing to say. He would go on and work for more.
The fire not only had the effect of testing Thomas, but of developing the sympathy and generosity of his neighbors. Some of them gave him hay, others flour, etc., so that his loss by the fire was largely offset.
Soon afterwards Newton Tuttle proposed that Thomas go in partnership with him and buy an abandoned saw mill, in Holbrook canyon, and he did so. His activities during the next two or three years were largely in the line of lumbering, at which he worked very hard and effectively, first as a partner of Brother Tuttle, and later as sole owner of the saw mill.
On the 3rd of April, 1867, their daughter Hannah was born.
On the 23rd of March, 1868, he was elected school trustee, which position he filled for many years.
During that year also, the crops in this region suffered severely from the ravages of grasshoppers, and he, being called to act with two others in devising means and directing the work of destroying the pest, spent a good deal of time for the public good in that line.
In the latter part of that year he was called upon to help supervise the amusements of the young people, and prevent them from drifting into evil.