FLASHBACK 1992: Ron Yengich pens a tribute to Ada Duhigg, the "Angel of Bingham Canyon" 

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In commemoration of City Weekly's 40th anniversary, we are digging into our archives to celebrate. Each week, we FLASHBACK to a story or column from our past in honor of four decades of local alt-journalism. Whether the names and issues are familiar or new, we are grateful to have this unique newspaper to contain them all.

Title: Goodbye, Miss Duhigg
Author: Ron Yengich
Date: July 29, 1992

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They came in halting steps to the white framed Methodist Church in Copperton on Sunday, July 19. The years had withered the strength of their muscles, and many walked on arthritic knees. Most had taken their first teetering steps as children towards another Methodist House of Hope in the precarious upper reaches of that same canyon, a small mining camp known to its inhabitants as Highland Boy. They came to pay their last respects, knowing that the woman they came to honor would live with them until they themselves could no longer sing the old spirituals and gospel hymns that they would sing in her honor during the hour-long service.

The people who used to live in Highland Boy and were touched by the Reverend Miss Ada Duhigg, had returned to honor her last Sunday. Miss Duhigg died on Monday, June 22, 1992, at the Frasier Meadow Manor Health Care Center in Boulder, Colorado. She was 87.

She had been born in the great American plains in the state of Iowa. She came to the steep-walled canyon's Community House from other ministries in the plains of South Dakota and Missouri in 1932, as a 28-year-old deaconess. She arrived at the mining camp just two weeks before the inferno that ravaged Highland Boy on September 9, 1932. She stayed until, like many, she was driven down the canyon by the expansion of the copper mine. Her loving spirit, however, will always be with the people who were blessed to know her.

The fire, which raged through the timber-hewn houses of the canyon in the Fall of 1932, left over 300 people homeless, and beyond the incalculable loss in personal terms was the damage estimated at over $1 million in real money. The homeless turned to the Community House for help, and they were clothed and nourished without question or expectation of remuneration. Ironically, the fire had started in the old Princess Theatre, and as an elderly Bingham resident claimed, "We lost one princess and got another with the arrival of Miss Duhigg at the Community House."

Bingham Canyon was a true melting pot for the sons and daughters of transplanted ethnics—Greeks, Mexicans, Japanese, French, and many more—as was Highland Boy, home to Croats, Serbians, Italians, and Basques. These communities brewed national ethnics into a delightful stew.

The Community House was first established in 1927 by the Women's Missionary Society of the Methodist Church, and later, under the guidance of Miss Duhigg, served the laborers and their families for three decades. Miss Duhigg's ministry concerned itself with much more than ecclesiastics, although that was the meat in the stew. She provided balm for the hearts of the families torn by labor strife and snowslides, the black hacking of "miner's con," and death—an all-too-common occurrence during the Depression and war years. Racial, ethnic, and religious divisions were unknown in the "ecumenical house of joy." The doors were open to everyone—"the tired, the poor, the huddled masses," as in Emma Lazarus' injunction—symbolic of the souls of the people inside.

I spent the years of three to six in the kindergarten at the Community House. I knew Miss Duhigg only from the perspective of a small boy, but she, along with Miss Mildred May, the charming big-hearted deaconess from Kentucky, taught me my first real lessons outside the home. Like many much older than I who came to sing a fond farewell to Miss Duhigg, the lessons only sometimes still hit home, but the spirit, like the sight of the waste dumps across the valley when we look to the west, never leaves us.

After the gray and gold rock hole of Kennecott Copper Corporation drove her away, she traveled the country, preaching and giving the salve of her love of the gospel in its purest form to sinners in Central and Southern Utah, and Colorado. She preached, as Janie Montoya who spoke Sunday in the white framed Methodist Church told us, about joy and the joy of living. Her message was not Calvinistic in tone, and to the miners and their families who eked out a hard-scrabble existence, she sometimes provided the hope for a better life; not just pie in the sky, but on this earthly crust.

She referred to the children of the miners as "her children," and so they were. And as many of them in their late 60's and 70's struggled down the steps of that little church, after once again singing the hymns of their youth—"The Old Rugged Cross," "Wonderful Words of Love," "Leaning on Everlasting Arms," and "Amazing Grace"—you could see them glance to the west toward Sunshine Peak and that house of joy of their youth; no longer a physical reality, but still real enough to them after these many decades. And with that glance, you could see their step lighten with the spring of love, as they remembered the youthful lessons of a caring deaconess from the plains of Iowa.