Henry John Platt Sr.

Henry John Platt Sr.

was born on March 15, 1828, in Longport, Staffordshire, England. Longport was a center of the British pottery industry, characterized by industrial kilns, clay production, and dense worker housing. Converting to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a young man, Henry chose to leave the industrial landscape of England for the American West, joining the large wave of British converts who provided skilled craftsmanship and labor for the early settlements.

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After crossing the Atlantic, Henry traveled to Utah, where he met and married Alameda Jane Johnson, a native of Wyoming, New York, who had crossed the plains with her family. The couple raised a family in Utah before answering calls to colonize the southern frontier of Arizona.

Canal Building in the Gila Valley

In the 1880s, the family relocated to the Gila Valley in eastern Arizona, settling first in St. Johns and later in Thatcher. The Gila Valley was a dry, alkaline basin where agriculture was impossible without irrigation. Henry was among the early settlers who organized the canal companies that constructed the first gravity-fed ditches from the Gila River.

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Constructing these canals required intense physical labor, using teams of horses with slip scrapers to dig miles of ditches through rock and clay. The Gila River was notorious for its sudden, violent floods, which regularly washed out the primitive brush-and-rock dams built to divert water into the canals. Despite these setbacks, Henry and his neighbors rebuilt their systems repeatedly, establishing the agricultural basis of Thatcher.

A Legacy of Service

Henry was an active participant in early civic and ward organizations, assisting in the building of the first schools and meetinghouses. Through his son, Dr. William Erastus Platt, Henry's family established a medical legacy that spanned Eastern Arizona, as Dr. Platt became the valley's premier doctor, carrying his medical bag to isolated ranches across the territory.

Henry died in Thatcher on March 27, 1905, at the age of seventy-seven. He was buried in the Thatcher Cemetery. His dedication to canal building and agricultural development laid the physical foundation for the Gila Valley communities that supported the family for decades.