Baby Cleo with her mother Lucy Jane.
Cleone Cutler was born October 9, 1917 to Joseph Jonathan Cutler and Lucy Jane Stokes. The eighth child in a family of eleven. She was born in a three-room farmhouse on the family dry farm located between Tremonton and Snowville in Box Elder county Utah. This farm produced grain and was dependent on the rain a it had no source for irrigation – hence the name, dry farm. The farmhouse had two bedrooms and a big kitchen. She lived in this house until she was almost six years old.
As a child she would go with her mother to a spring about a mile away to help carry the buckets of water back up the hill to the house where they lived. Grandpa Jonathan Corkins Cutler lived near the spring and owned a herd of big red razorback pigs that were penned nearby. They were mean pigs and would grunt at Cleo and her mother, scaring the little girl very badly. She didn’t like to go there, yet she did not want her mother to go alone either. Normally the water from the spring was tapped up to the house, but when the spring got too low it couldn’t make it through the system.
Just before Cleo turned six her father bought another farm called the Torgason place, located near the Snowville school. It was August or September of 1923, the year that she would start school and she was so excited to help her mother clean house and get it ready to move into. Her mother, sensing Cleo’s eagerness to help, yet knowing the limitations of her young age, asked her to clean behind the stove. This was very hard for Cleo to understand. She felt that more responsible tasks were in order. This new home seemed like a palace because the family did not have to carry water anymore.
Ferguys Family History 