I - Icecream Vendor

Thomas Morrison was born in Wellington in 1846. His father, Daniel, was a sea captain and died from injuries sustained in a shipwreck when Thomas was 12. His mother, Elizabeth Cooper,  was a younger sister of my great great graandfather. Thomas was the eldest child with five younger siblings. His mother remarried the following year and had another six or seven children before she and her husband relocated to the West Coast of the South Island.

Thomas' sister married in Kaikoura in 1870, but it is unclear where Thomas lived as a young man. In 1880 he appears on the electoral in Christchurch, living in Montreal Street and working as a fish hawker. By this time he was also married, although there doesn't seem to be a record of a marriage, with two young daughters.

On 28 March 1882, he and his family sailed from Auckland on the City of Sydney, part of a group of Mormons making their way to Utah. They arrived in San Francisco about three weeks later and made their way over land to Salt Lake City. Shortly after arriving their youngest daughter died aged 19 months.

Eighteen months later, Thomas married a second time, two months before his first son was born. He went on to have nine more children with Emily and four with Susanna. Thomas started a business in 1883 selling hot pies from a box cart with hot coals in Temple Square. This business, Morrison's Meat Pies, was taken over by his sons and operated for over 100 years. He also had an icecream cart business which he operated with his sons.

One of his sons, George, got into a skirmish with a customer, a disagreement over change tendered for icecream in July 1901. The customer threw an apple at his head and threatened him with a whip, the boy drew gun, loaded with blanks and fired it. Was the business so prone to those type of encounters that a 16 year old boy was compelled to carry a gun ? Maybe it was the heat of midsummer and the late hour of the day. 

I wonder what Thomas thought when he was told his son had been arrested and conveyed to the Police Station. 

Deseret News, Salt Lake City, 8 July 1901, Page 2