Early settlers in Eden faced hard conditions as families made clothing from wool they sheared, spun, and wove, lived in log homes built from mountain timber hauled by ox teams, and survived on dairy work, barter, gleaned grain, wild plants, and improvised footwear during times of poverty and disease. John Fuller recalled carrying butter with his mother to Huntsville for groceries, going barefoot in summer, wrapping his feet in rags in winter, eating sego lily bulbs and cow cabbage, and seeing his brother Enoch lose three children to diphtheria. Fuller also remembered Eden as a place of abundant game and fish, with deer, antelope, elk, wolves, foxes, coyotes, bears, bobcats, cougars, mountain lions, migrating flocks of sandhill cranes, and spring wildflowers, though overgrazing greatly reduced native grouse. Some households gained signs of prosperity, including the first piano in Eden and the valley’s first stationary metal bathtub owned by Alexander and Elizabeth Jane McBride Ririe. Music and dancing became a major part of community life, and in 1891 Elisha Wilbur built a store with an upstairs dance hall where people came from miles away to waltz, dance schottisches, square dances, polkas, and the Vesuvian while musicians played organ, fiddle, violin, and banjo, and families arrived in handmade bobsleighs with ox teams and put their babies to sleep backstage during winter dances. Sarah Jane Burnett, born in 1868, remembered roaming the hills barefoot among wildflowers and treasured the community’s Christmas festivities, July celebrations, and dances. Schooling began in 1866 in a one-room log building taught first by Johanna Teeples and then by Edmund Burke Fuller, with 83 students enrolled in the early years, and in 1868 Richard Ballantyne organized the Eden School District, which was first supported by tuition. In 1884 a larger frame schoolhouse with a bell replaced the log school, serving not only students but also church meetings and public gatherings until a yellow brick schoolhouse was dedicated in 1919, and the bell marked school hours, called people together in emergencies, and warned farm workers if danger threatened women and children near the town square. Farming and livestock work depended first on oxen and crude plows, while families raised hay, grain, potatoes, and gardens in fertile soil, but a grasshopper plague beginning in 1866 lasted seven years and destroyed most crops, nearly bringing starvation. Grain was cut with a cradle, threshed with a flail or by oxen, and winnowed by breeze, and boys like Fuller herded cows, learned to drive and shoe oxen, and worked long days clearing sagebrush from new land.