Hamblin brought one wife from Tooele but married a second in Santa Clara. Each wife took one bedroom and Hamblin moved between the two. Each bedroom features a small, steep, narrow stairwell that leads upstairs to a broad, impressive common area. Today, the exquisitely restored Hamblin home is open for free guided tours performed by Mormon missionaries. Today, St. George is a veritable paradise in the desert.
Growth is fast, retirees are everywhere, and golf is king.
Each winter weekend thousands of winter-weary escapists from northern Utah, southern Idaho and even southwestern Wyoming come here, to the Mojave Desert, to get reacquainted with the sun and green grass. But today s strips of fast food joints, new hotels and outlet malls hardly suggest the struggle St. George s first residents faced to make a livable place out of this hot redrock desert. Just years after its 1861 settling, the original inhabitants of St. George, sent here by Mormon church leadership in Salt Lake City, were ready to leave. Over a 13-year period, settlers constructed St. George s tabernacle, courthouse and Mormon temple. When Brigham Young himself moved into the James Chesney home in 1869, the community s destiny was sealed.