SPANISH FORK, Utah — A thunderstorm threatened to wash out a scheduled ceremony here at which President Gordon B. Hinckley was to re-dedicate the Icelandic Memorial Monument and the President of Iceland was to speak. Showers fell on thousands of spectators as the program began, even as the sun seemed to be shining upon them. Then the skies cleared and dry weather prevailed for the rest of the occasion.
"For us in Iceland, that is no big surprise," said President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson to the audience, "because the Almighty is every day putting on such a display of the elements for our benefit, and sometimes to our regret. And therefore, those who came here 150 years ago, they would really have felt at home on this occasion."
President Grimsson referred to the early Latter-day Saint emigrants from Iceland who arrived in the Salt Lake Valley between 1855 and 1860, eventually answering Brigham Young's call to settle in Spanish Fork, located about an hour's drive south of Salt Lake City, where a sizeable contingent of their descendants live today.
Sponsored by the Icelandic Association of Utah, the program on June 25 commemorated the sesquicentennial of the immigrants' arrival with the rededication of the monument, which is shaped like a lighthouse topped by a Viking ship and was originally installed by the community in the 1930s to honor those first 16 settlers. Added to the site for the re-dedication was a tablet with the names of those who immigrated prior to 1914, and a rock taken from the shore of the Westmann Islands, where the early Church members in Iceland lived and where early converts were baptized in a tide pool near the shore. A similar monument to the new one in Spanish Fork was placed in 2000 near that tide pool by a contingent of Icelandic descendants from Utah.
"These people who came from the Westmann Islands were very poor, really," President Hinckley recounted in remarks before his dedicatory prayer. "They'd lived largely on fish and potatoes and earned very, very little money. They came here, they dug dugouts, they lived in them for a season. But before long, they had farms with cows and pigs and chickens and vegetables and fruits and beautiful flowers to gladden the heart. They could make good money shearing sheep. It was a better life than they had ever known."
He gave unbounded praise to the labors of early missionaries in that country, noting that the immigration of converts began as early as 1854, with the first three arriving in September 1855. "Think of it! It took them ten long months to get here from Iceland to these valleys in the mountains. From that time until 1914, when war broke out in Europe, it's estimated that more than 400 came here."
Missionary work there ceased after the outbreak of war and did not resume until 1975, President Hinckley said. "Byron and Melva Geslison were called to go to Iceland. Their two sons, David and Daniel, who'd completed missions in Japan and Korea were then called on second missions." He recognized Geslison family members in the audience.
"They found a different atmosphere when they went there," he said. "Converts were few, but the attitude toward the Church was one of respect that resulted in official recognition when the government recognized that we were there to stay."
He expressed appreciation to the descendants of the early immigrants, those with "the blood of the Vikings" in their veins who "are a credit to this nation as they honor the land of their forebears. I know of no other group in the Church which has kept as you have done the association of your homeland fathers with the land in which this generation now lives."
To President Grimsson, who hosted the Church president three years ago in his office in the capital city Reykjavik, President Hinckley said: "I'd like to certify that these Icelandic people in this Utah community are good people who carry in their hearts a love for their forebears in your land."
In his remarks to the audience, President Grimsson spoke of the Mormon emigrants from Iceland, asking the audience to reflect on their faith. "They came from a country which for centuries had been the poorest country in Europe," he said. "They were fishermen and farmers who had never seen a city, who didn't know anyone, were not familiar with any foreign language, had never left their homes. But all the same, they decided to cross the ocean, first to Britain and then to the East Coast of the United States, facing uncertainty without hesitation, then entering on the long journey all the way here to Utah.
"With all due respect to Utah, 150 years ago this was a dismal place. It was a desert with hardly any housing. And what kind of living were these people to have in their new home? They came equipped only with their faith, with their beliefs, with their character and their willpower. But all of these enabled them to succeed."
The Iceland president said it was fittingly symbolic that the monument being celebrated that day has a sister monument on the Westmann Islands, which, he said, "are a remarkable place in Iceland, a collection of islands where the creation of the world is still going on, where the forces of nature created an enormous volcanic eruption only 30 years ago." It is there, he said, that the first settlers in Iceland came and where one of the first Christian churches in Iceland was built more than 1,000 years ago. At the time of the placement of the monument there by the Utah visitors, the country was celebrating 1,000 years of Christianity and 2,000 years since the birth of Jesus.
"And maybe there is a message in the coincidence that the people who came here came from the Westmann Islands, that this place in my country brings us together in this way," President Grimsson said. "We can now visit the Westmann Islands in Iceland and look out at the ocean and also come here and read the names of the people who settled in Utah a long time ago."
Other visitors from Iceland for the occasion included the Iceland Festival Choir, which performed a free concert in nearby Provo that evening.
E-mail to: rscott@desnews.com
