In 1897 President Layton's health declined and on January 27, 1898, he
was released from his spiritual office, to which was appointed Andrew
Kimball, this with a letter from President Wilford Woodruff, expressing
the highest appreciation of Layton's labors. Christopher Layton left
Arizona June 13, 1898, for his old home in Kaysville, Utah, where he died
August 7. At a reunion, about six years ago, of the Layton descendants
and their families, were present 594 individuals.
Andrew Kimball, successor to the presidency of St. Joseph Stake, had
formal installation January 30, 1898, at the hands of Apostles John Henry
Smith and John W. Taylor, at the same time there being general
reorganization of the Church subdivision. President Kimball, who still
most actively is in office, is a son of the noted Apostle Heber C.
Kimball, First Counselor to President Brigham Young. President Kimball
from the very first showed keen enthusiasm in the work of upbuilding his
community. In October of the year of his installation he returned to
Utah, like the spies returned from the land of Canaan, bringing equally
large stories of the fertility of the new land. Instead of bearing a huge
bunch of grapes, he had to take with him photographs, in order to secure
reception of his stories of corn that was sixteen feet tall, Johnson
grass eight feet high, a sweet potato that weighed 36 pounds, of peaches
too big to go into the mouth of a preserving jar, sunflower stalks that
were used for fence poles, weeds that had to be cut with an ax and sugar
cane that grew four years from one planting. On the strength of his
enthusiasm, very material additions were made to the population of the
Gila Valley, and the President even yet keeps busy in missionary work,
not only of his Church, but work calculated to assist in the upbuilding
of the Southwest along irrigated agricultural lines.