Hubert DeForest Page is my great-grandfather. He was born in 1865, three miles from the shores of Lake Ontario, in Richland, Oswego County, New York. By age five, he had moved with his family to La Crosse, Wisconsin, where he attended school. After high school, he started working in the office of county surveyor H. I. Bliss. This was to be the start of his career as a noted surveyor, map maker, and civil engineer.
Hubert married my great-grandmother, Emma Kaiser, in Box Elder County, Utah, in 1890. My great-grandmother was a seamstress, making her wedding dress and most of her other clothing. She made a lovely dress for a dance she was going to attend and this is where she first met Hubert.
Returning from an 1892 survey for the government in the Blue and La Sal mountains of southeastern Utah, Hubert said, “he is deeply impressed by the future possibilities in the La Sals and predicts great mining activity in that section.” An 1896 newspaper article from Salt Lake City notes the return of the family from California, “where they have been living for the past few months.” Another article notes that H.D. Page was running the field crew in 1896, surveying a route for the Salt Lake and Pacific railroad into Deep Creek territory in western Utah, along the Nevada border. This was a short spur route going into the gold fields surrounding Gold Hill.
In 1899, Hubert Page and James Lentz were subdividing the southeasterly most township in Utah. While completing the survey in the area of the Four Corners, they discovered the original Chandler Robbin’s monument for the corner was broken and disturbed. Page and Lentz marked and set a new stone in the original location of Robbin’s marker.
By 1902, the family had moved to Salt Lake City, where Hubert was listed in several city directories as a civil, hydraulic, and mining engineer. He went to San Francisco in April to submit a bid for the grading of the Ogden-Lucin railroad cut-off west of the Great Salt Lake. The work was expected to cost $350,000. Later, in 1902, Hubert was surveying various mining claims in the Deep Creek region, where he had been involved in developing the spur railroad line. He describes a find of a high-grade lead-silver deposit in the region of Dutch Mountain.
By 1906, Hubert was involved in a very large project called the Payette-Boise Irrigation Project. This included building the New York Canal. Hundreds of men and some women were employed on the project. Total costs for the project were expected to exceed $7,800,000. Funding for this project had always been problematic. The original private developers ran out of money, and the federal government did not pay their bills in a timely manner. My great-grandfather had to get some of his payment through a special congressional bill shepherded through Congress by his senator.
A frustrated and worn-out Hubert died on his final trip to Washington on the 21st of June 1913 with my great-grandmother, Emma, by his side. He was 47 years old. Hubert was a 32nd-degree Mason. My great-grandmother enlisted the assistance of the Masons in procuring transportation by train back home to Idaho, where he was laid to rest in the Morris Hill Cemetery in Boise.
I used dozens of newspaper articles to flesh out the details of Hubert's life. Hubert became a true Westerner. He rode by horseback to many of his assignments and camped under the stars while he worked. He would be gone for many days, even months, while he pursued his work, leaving Emma at home alone to raise their children.
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