Historic DUP Headquarters Missing Stolen AC Unit

By Vernon Robison

Moapa Valley Progress

Overton resident Joyce Leavitt, who is president of the local chapter of Daughters of the Utah Pioneers (DUP), had an unpleasant surprise earlier this month. She stopped by the historic Overton building on Virginia Street, which serves as the local DUP headquarters, to get the building ready for an upcoming DUP meeting. She flipped the switch to turn on the air conditioning for the building and nothing happened.

“I hadn’t been in the building much during the summer since we don’t have regular summer meetings,” Leavitt said.

She had dropped by once or twice during the summer to conduct tours of the old building which, decades ago, served as a make-shift medical facility for the Moapa Valley community. At that time, Leavitt had noticed that the air conditioning wasn’t working properly.

“I told myself then that I needed to call someone in to check it out and see what needed to be fixed,” Leavitt said. “But then I forgot about it and I didn’t ever get around to it until the other day.”

Now that summer is over and the DUP will be starting its regular monthly meetings, Leavitt was reminded that she needed to call in an air conditioning expert to check into it.

It didn’t take long to diagnose the problem. The building’s heat pump AC unit had been stolen. All the connections to the unit had been cut and it had been hauled away from the premises, Leavitt said.

Interestingly, this incident was not news to the local police. Local Metro officer Allen Johnson said that police had arrested a man in Overton, a couple of months ago, who was suspected of stealing four or five AC units which were being stored in an L.D.S Church facilities lot that is adjacent to the DUP property. Further details about the man arrested were not made available by police.

“We caught the guy with the units broken down and ready to be scrapped,” said Johnson. “I can almost guarantee that the (DUP) unit was stolen at the same time with those units.”

Johnson said that he didn’t know for sure if the DUP unit had been one of those recovered. But all the units recovered had been returned to the LDS Church Physical Facilities Department, he said.

Sure enough, after making some calls, Leavitt found out that the DUP unit had been stored by the Church after its recovery. No one is sure yet whether the unit is still operational or if it is even able to be repaired and put back into use.

Either way the DUP organization would have a tough time putting the money together to get the old unit installed and up and running; much less purchasing a whole new unit, Leavitt said.

The old hospital building was in rough shape several years ago before a shoestring effort was made to restore it, Leavitt recalled.

“A few years ago, Dr. Larry Moses and Lynn Bowler donated their time and helped get a state grant to restore this building which was the old hospital and, before that, was the first Church office building in Moapa Valley,” Leavitt said. “We scraped the old paint off the walls, tore up the old floor, did everything we could, age permitting, to renovate this historic building as an appropriate place where we could hold DUP meetings and preserve history and many antique heirlooms from the community.”

But now, without air conditioning; or heating in the upcoming winter months; Leavitt fears that the DUP will be unable to use the building as its headquarters.

Preliminary estimates to replace the AC unit with a new one have come in at around $2,000, Leavitt said. But that seems an insurmountable sum for the small budget of the local DUP.

“Do you know how many bake sales it would take to raise this amount of money?” Leavitt said. “This is about the only way we would have to raise money. Half of us could be dead by the time that amount is raised that way.”

The ladies of the DUP would welcome help from members of the community who might be able to assist in this dilemma by volunteering time, expertise, equipment and supplies to the cause. Anyone who might know of a way to help can call Joyce Leavitt at 397-2351.