The records of the LDS branch at Alunite, Utah are of particular interest for the light they shed on the functioning of a Mormon congregation in a mining town. This is especially true since Alunite just south of Marysvale, is a ghost town today. Alunite flourished during the First World War only to be subsequently abandoned. The branch records cover the period 1917-1920, the heyday of the town.
The congregation was a branch of the Marysvale ward, four and a half miles away. Hial B. Hales was he presiding elder. Alunite was a company town and the lives of the Saints, like the lives of everyone else, depended on the vagaries of he company and the volatile mining industry. The branch met in the town's school house by permission of the mining company, Mineral Products Corporation. When the mill temporarily shut down for much of 1919 the branch stopped meeting.
From the guide to the Alunite LDS Branch Records, 1917-1920, (Utah State University. Special Collections and Archives)
