Tyler
Nerdin.

Twenty acres. A new way to farm.

My Bushman ancestors crossed the plains in 1851. Martin and Elizabeth settled in Lehi with their children, including Elias Albert, who was just a year old on the journey. That line comes down to me through my grandmother Margaret.

The family account describes a Lehi of about thirty families. Martin traded for twenty acres, and the family learned to farm by irrigation. They hauled building timber from the canyons and took in newly arrived immigrants while they got settled.

Water belongs in this family story long before I picked up a pipe wrench. For them, getting it to the land meant being able to make a home here.

Grandma Margaret’s Lehi.

My grandmother Margaret Ann Bushman Russon spent her life in Lehi. She graduated from Lehi High as salutatorian in 1954, earned her elementary education degree at BYU and married my grandfather Lisle Russon.

After raising their children, she returned to teaching at Sego Lily Elementary in 1982. Retirement didn’t end that work: she tutored readers at the Lehi Literacy Center and earned national recognition for her service.

When I talk about family roots in Lehi, I mean people like her—people who spent their lives there, teaching its kids and helping their neighbors.

Steel, flour and fixing things.

My grandparents Paul Nerdin and LaVerne Armitstead married in 1957. Grandpa spent thirty years at Geneva Steel and also worked at Lehi Roller Mills and Alpine School District.

His family obituary remembers the things he made and repaired: children’s bikes, homes, farm projects and woodwork. There were plenty of hands building and fixing things in this family before mine.

Still a Kearns Cougar.

I grew up in Kearns and graduated from Kearns High. That’s my hometown. I live in Sandy now, and Mountain Man’s office is here too.

Lehi is where those older family stories come from. Kearns is where my own started. Sandy is where I’ve made my home and run my plumbing company.