A Landscape Gardener - a man who made things grow.

He was my grandmother's father, and is the tragic figure of our family history. When my grandmother was three years old, he hanged himself from a cherry tree. His youngest child was just a year old. For three generations, that final act has been almost all we have known about him. My grandmother, in her own history, wrote, "I know I can remember his bringing me home a sack of candy. That is all I do remember of him."

But today I stumbled across a series of news articles that tell at least part of the sad story of the last decade of his life:
In the 1880s and 1890s he was several times arrested on the city streets and incarcerated, investigated and committed to the Territorial Insane Asylum. From the perspective of our current understanding of mental illness, it is clear that he was suffering from periodic psychotic episodes.

Here is a small portion of one of the interviews as reported in the newspaper:
"Do you sleep?" was asked of Stay.
"Never," he replied. "A man who is avenging a wrong never sleeps."
"Do you dream?"
"Don't you know that the man who never sleeps, never dreams."
"You have impressions?"
"I have revelations - I can hear sweet voices talking to me, telling me what to do."
"Do you act on it?"
"Yes, sir."
"Did they impress you to attack the man yesterday?"
"No, sir, but I knew he had no business on the street."
The examination closed, Stay was adjudged insane and ordered committed.

He was committed to the asylum at least three times in a ten year period. Between episodes, he was able to return to work: he wrote to the editor with suggestions for when and how to prune trees and shrubs, was listed as a judge in the county fair, and was elected as a delegate to the State Horticultural Convention. But he couldn't control what we now know to be an organic illness. In the end, the illness beat him. Here is the last news article:

Manti Messenger Newspaper 30 April 1898:
Joseph Stay of Mill Creek, a landscape gardener, committed suicide by hanging on Friday last. Stay was recently released from the state insane asylum. He became despondent and planned the hanging bee in which he figured as the principal character.

Father of nine children: Joseph Charles, Dott, Rebecca, Aden, Ruth, Rose, Jesse, Catherine, and Val.