At Payson’s Peteetneet Museum and Cultural Arts Center, Salt Lake residents Liz Corbett Plumb and her 13-year-old daughter, Grace, take in the antique wooden desks and tidy blackboard of a classroom that once belonged to Liz’s great-grandmother, Irene Corbett. A whip-smart teacher who molded young minds during the dawn of the 20th century, Irene is memorialized in an exhibit at the museum for her inspirational life—underscored by her tragically famous and perhaps even more inspirational death.
Liz Corbett Plumb and her daughter Grace in the Peteetneet Museum in Payson
Pulling a treasured artifact from her purse, Liz holds the postcard up against an enlarged copy displayed prominently on one wall. Dated April 1, 1912, the card bears an illustration of London’s Piccadilly Circus on one side and Irene’s gracefully sloping scrawl on the back with her ill-fated words, “Finish London soon—am going to sail on one of the biggest ships afloat: the Titanic, an American Liner.”