Things in Heaven and Earth: The Life and Times of Wilford Woodruff

Things in Heaven and Earth

The Life and Times of

Wilford Woodruff, a Mormon Prophet

by

Thomas G. Alexander

Signature Books, Salt Lake City, 1993

Cover design by Richard Firmage

Quotations from documents in the archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are used with permission.

Cloth bound printing  1991; paper bound printing  1993 by Signature Books, Inc. All rights reserved. Signature Books is a registered trademark of Signature Books, Inc.

www.signaturebooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alexander, Thomas G., Things in Heaven and Earth : the Life and Times of Wilford Woodruff, a Mormon Prophet / Thomas G. Alexander. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Cloth bound ISBN: 0-941214-72-9

Paper bound ISBN: 1-56085-045-0

1. Woodruff, Wilford, 1807-1898. 2. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—Presidents—Biography. 3. Mormon Church—Presidents—Biography. I. Title.

BX8695.W55A44 1991

289.3’32’092—dc20 91-21223

[B] CIP

for

Ted and Jim

To every thing there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven: …

—ECCLESIASTES 3:1

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dremt of in your philosophy. … God willing, shall not lack. … The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!

—SHAKESPEARE

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Thus saith the Lord, Keep ye judgment, and do justice: for my salvation is near to come, and my righteousness to be revealed.

—ISAIAH 56:1

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Prologue

1. Out of the Wilderness

2. Scenes from a Spiritual Youth

3. Israel Must Be Gathered

4. United Brethren

5. Laying the Business of the Church upon the Hands of the Twelve

6. To the Valleys of the Mountains

7. In the East

8. Salt Lake City in the 1850s

9. Trial and Transformation in the Kingdom

10. Economic, Family, and Religious Change

11. Turbulence and Challenge

Photo Section

12. The Mormon Revolution

13. Temple, Church, and Home

14. The Final Years

Acknowledgments

In writing a biography or any scholarly work, I have always relied on a great many people. Let me thank a few of them.

First, I appreciate the help of a group of talented research assistants who worked on this project. They include Ian Barber, Harvard Heath, Jennie Lund, Rick Fish, Bryan Taylor, Gertrud Steifler, Marcello Gigena, and David Hall. Secretaries at the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies have helped me in numerous ways. They are Irene Fuja and Kris Nelson. Kris Nelson also helped prepare the index and proofread. Leo Lyman and Scott Kenney provided sources otherwise unavailable to me. James Allen, Lavina Fielding Anderson, Gary Bergera, Howard Christy, Ron Priddis, Susan Staker, Jessie Embry, and Tracy Alexander all read the entire manuscript and helped me avoid pitfalls into which I might otherwise have stumbled. Paul Peterson, Jean Bickmore White, and others have provided suggestions on portions of the manuscript. D. Michael Quinn prompted me on Woodruff’s family relationships. Jan Shipps, Stephen Stein, Maureen Ursenbach Beecher, Marie Cornwall, and Leonard Arrington provided comments as well. I appreciate the financial assistance of the Brigham Young University College of Family, Home and Social Sciences; the BYU History Department; and the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies.

A number of libraries and depositories and their staffs have been extremely helpful in supplying manuscript and other sources. These include: the Library and Archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (especially Stephen Sorensen, Ronald Barney, and Bill Slaughter); the Lee Library at Brigham Young University (especially the Archives and Manuscripts Department—Dennis Rowley, David Whittaker, and Harvard Heath; Photo Archives—Billy Plunkett and Melva Richey; and Special Collections—Chad Flake); the Marriott Library at the University of Utah (particularly the Western Americana Collection and Photo Archives under Greg Thompson, Roy West, Nancy Young, and Drew Ross); the Library of the Utah State Historical Society (especially Jay Haymond, Linda Thatcher, Gary Topping, and Susan Whetstone); the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery (Peter Blodgett and Martin Ridge); the Beinecke and Sterling Libraries at Yale University; The Simsbury Connecticut Historical Society (especially Mary Nason); The Connecticut Historical Society; Connecticut State Library; The Avon Connecticut Historical Society; the Farmington Connecticut Historical Society; and Farmington, Connecticut Town.

Portions of this study have been published previously in the Journal of Mormon History, the Utah Historical Quarterly, and Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. I appreciate the suggestions of their editors Lavina Fielding Anderson, Stanford J. Layton, and F. Ross and Kay Peterson.

The Wilford Woodruff family association, most particularly several of his descendants, provided considerable assistance. Richard N. W. Lambert, W. Bruce Woodruff, and Wilford E. Woodruff each read the entire manuscript and offered valuable suggestions. Carolyn Woodruff Owen opened her home and manuscript collection to me.

When I expressed some dissatisfaction with a title I had previously chosen, one of the readers suggested the present title after he read the quotation I had selected from Hamlet given above. It struck me immediately as summing up the life of a man I had come to admire.

It seems a cliché—but true nevertheless—that I alone am responsible for the judgments in the biography.

Introduction

In some respects, Wilford Woodruff’s life mirrors the lives of other nineteenth-century Christians; in some ways it contrasts radically. Having broken with traditional Christianity like many other Americans, Woodruff sought to live according to biblical teachings.¹

Unlike most who chose to follow the primitive Christian pattern, however, Woodruff found in Mormonism a world view that unified the temporal and spiritual realms in God’s kingdom and in the lives of church members. In accepting Latter-day Saint baptism, Woodruff embraced the belief that God had planted his kingdom both in heaven and on earth, that he guided it through prophecy and revelation, and that those committed to building his kingdom must do so in social, economic, and political life as well as in traditionally religious service and belief.

Readily accepting this holistic conception of the temporal and spiritual arenas, Woodruff stood with one foot planted firmly in each arena.² Committing himself to Jesus Christ’s service, Woodruff accepted calls to missionary proselytizing, business enterprise, frequent migration, church administration, political office, compassionate service, and even plural marriage.

This last subject—plural marriage—became the principal strain in the relationship between Mormons and other Americans. Other practices such as political control, economic domination, and social exclusiveness contributed to the rift, but polygamy was undoubtedly the main irritant.

Possibly as early as 1831 and at least by 1841, Joseph Smith and other early Mormon leaders had begun clandestinely to enter polygyny or polygamy, as it was generally called.³ Officially acknowledging plural marriage in 1852, most church leaders considered its practice a divinely-sanctioned responsibility for securing the highest blessings of heaven.

Because of opposition by the federal government, more than 1,000 male priesthood holders including several of the twelve apostles and Woodruff’s first counselor suffered imprisonment. Others like Woodruff hid out in desperate attempts to avoid arrest and prosecution. They refused to abandon the celestial principle, and when the hand of the law grasped them, territorial judges sent them to jail as they did a number of plural wives who declined to testify against their husbands.

On September 24, 1890, when he issued the Manifesto ostensibly ending polygamy, Woodruff did more than change practice and doctrine. He turned a psychic corner, completing a process begun some years before of dividing the previously holistic kingdom and separating the temporal and spiritual. At the same time, he led his people from fellowship in a small and despised sect to membership in one of the largest and most respected churches in the United States and one of the fastest growing religious traditions in the world. Although sorting the various pieces of the holistic kingdom into temporal and spiritual baskets wrenched the Latter-day Saint community, it left individual church members with greater latitude to pursue personal initiatives in the economic, political, and social arenas.

Ironically, although Woodruff loosened the bonds that held the temporal and spiritual realms together, he, himself, was both a leader of change and a transitional figure who rejected neither the basic concept of the holistic kingdom nor the divinity of plural marriage.

His practice of plural marriage is an example. Woodruff married Phebe W. Carter in 1837, and he added three other wives in 1846. During the 1850s he found four more wives, and in 1870 he was sealed to a ninth. Four of his marriages ended in divorce. By 1890, two of his wives, including Phebe, had died. Still he had three living wives: Emma Smith and Sarah Brown, whom he had married on the same day in March 1853, and Sarah Delight Stocking, whom he married in 1857 during the Mormon Reformation. He continued to live with all of them until his death in 1898.⁴

Nevertheless, as indicated, Woodruff was a transitional figure. The Manifesto and subsequent changes in policy that further fractured the Mormon kingdom resulted from a physical, psychic, and spiritual odyssey that ended shortly after Woodruff’s return from California in 1890. In the process Woodruff’s world view changed from apocalyptic enthusiasm to cautious cooperation as he and Mormons traded their records as religious outsiders and sectarians for membership in an important new religious tradition within Christianity.⁵

Although the immediate events culminating in Woodruff’s manifesto began in the early 1880s, in a real sense Woodruff spent his entire life in an odyssey in search of God’s errand. On that journey he followed various paths. A man of talent and capacity, he sought the right season and time to learn God’s changing instructions and to embrace and follow them. Like Hamlet he felt deeply the burden that God had laid on him. He was not always happy about the decisions he had to make and the actions he had to take, but proceeded nevertheless for what he perceived as the welfare of God’s kingdom and the good of the Latter-day Saint people.

This is the story of Wilford Woodruff’s odyssey.

1. For a general discussion of this topic of Christian Primitivism, see Richard T. Hughes, ed., The American Quest for the Primitive Church (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

2. I appreciate the suggestions of Richard Lambert and Jan Shipps on this concept.

3. For a general study of plural marriage, see Richard S. Van Wagoner, Mormon Polygamy: A History (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1986).

4. For a discussion of the reformation, see Paul H. Peterson, The Mormon Reformation, Ph.D. diss., Brigham Young University, 1981.

5. For a discussion of Mormons as outsiders, see R. Laurence Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of Americans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). For a discussion of Mormonism as a new religious tradition, see Jan Shipps, Mormonism: The Story of New Religious Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985).

Prologue

On September 21, 1890, Wilford Woodruff, eighty-three-year-old prophet, seer, revelator, and fourth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, arrived in Salt Lake City from an excursion to northern California. While in San Francisco Woodruff and his associates had met with influential political, business, and media leaders.¹ After returning to Salt Lake City, Woodruff caught up with his regular office chores on September 22 and 23.²

During the next two days, Woodruff broke with his usual routine and proposed a policy that would inaugurate sweeping changes in Mormon doctrine and practice. Completing his regular duties on September 24, he met with Marriner W. Merrill, Franklin D. Richards, and Moses Thatcher of the Council of the Twelve Apostles, George Reynolds of the First Council of the Seventy, and his counselors in the First Presidency, George Q. Cannon and Joseph F. Smith. These seven men discussed what Woodruff would call—cryptically it seems to me—an important Subject.³

The next day Woodruff broached the subject with the others in the Council of the Twelve who were available. He confided to his diary that he had arived at a point in the History of my life as the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints whare I am under the necessity of acting for the Temporal Salvation of the Church. The United State Governmet has taken a Stand & passed Laws to destroy the Latter day Saints upon the Subjet of poligamy or Patriarchal order of Marriage. And after Praying to the Lord & feeling inspired by his spirit I have issued … [a] Proclamation which is sustained by my Councillors and the 12 Apostles.⁴

Woodruff labeled the proclamation, since called the Manifesto, an Official Declaration and addressed it To whom it may Concern. In the document, which Woodruff wrote but which George Q. Cannon, George Reynolds, Charles W. Penrose, and John R. Winder helped to edit, Woodruff denied that the LDS church had continued to solemnize plural marriages.⁵ Since the United States Supreme Court had upheld laws forbidding polygamy, he wrote, he intended to submit to those laws and to use … [his] influence with the members of the Church … to have them do likewise. He denied that the church encouraged members to enter polygamy and insisted that church leaders had promptly reproved those elders who had done so.

In issuing this declaration, Woodruff and his colleagues changed basic church doctrines and practices and the aging president and his people reached a milestone on an odyssey begun sixty years before.

1. Wilford Woodruff, Wilford Woodruff’s Journal, 1833-1898, Typescript, 9 vols., ed. Scott G. Kenney (Midvale, UT: Signature Books, 1983-85), 9:109-12 (3-21 Sept. 1890).

2. Ibid., 112 (22-23 Sept. 1890).

3. Franklin D. Richards Journal, 24 Sept. 1890, typescript, Richards Family Collection, archives, Historical Department, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah (hereinafter LDS archives). The typescript I used was made by Edith Romney and is catalogued in her collection at LDS archives as MS 2737.

4. In the meeting on the 25th were apostles Lorenzo Snow, Franklin D. Richards, Moses Thatcher, Francis M. Lyman, John Henry Smith, Heber J. Grant, John W. Taylor, and Abraham H. Cannon. Marriner W. Merrill had approved Woodruff’s proclamation the previous day; Brigham Young, Jr., was serving as European Mission president; George Teasdale was in Mexico; and Anthon H. Lund was not present. Richards Journal, 25 Sept. 1890.

5. For the editorial process, see D. Michael Quinn, LDS Church Authority and New Plural Marriages, 1890-1904, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 18 (Spring 1985): 44-45.

1. Out of the Wilderness

In the 1640s a group of lower middle-class, respectable men and women from Hartford, Connecticut, moved west across notches in the low mountains separating the Connecticut River Valley from its major tributary to the west, the Tunxis or Farmington River. Born mostly in East Anglia, the majority of these pioneers had migrated to Hartford by way of Boston, Newtown, and Roxbury, Massachusetts. Husbandmen, artisans, yeomen, and thrifty goodwives, the settlers sought new lands and home sites away from the already crowded Hartford plantations.¹

The settlers were taking a chance. Unlike the Connecticut River, the much smaller Farmington could not carry the boats necessary to support water-borne trade with outside areas. As a result, settlers on the Farmington River depended on subsistence-farming, the processing of locally produced agricultural and forest products, and small-scale overland trade.

Conditions such as high rainfall and the geography of the Farmington River Valley produced a landscape ideal for small farms and water-powered manufacturing. Originating from tributaries heading in southwestern Massachusetts, the Farmington River flowed southeasterly, dropping rapidly through hills at New Hartford and Collinsville into plains near Farmington. There the river’s slower movement and the influx of smaller streams such as the Pequabuck had laid down a four-mile wide plain of fertile farm and pasture land ideally suited for the small family farms characterizing seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England. After reaching Farmington Township, the river continued southeastward until it pushed against the foothills of the Talcott Range, which bent it northward through Avon and on to Simsbury and East Granby. Having outflanked the mountains, it again ambled southeasterly through Windsor into the Connecticut River.

When the first settlers from Hartford arrived, they found rich soil and abundant water. The land supported a heavy growth of oak, chestnut, walnut, maple, and yellow pine, which they used for construction and heating. The main river and its tributary brooks provided ample power to run flour and lumber mills and carding machines.

On the higher land northeast of the river’s bend the settlers established their first town, which they called Farmington.² In time Farmington became a mother-town for Southington, Berlin, Bristol, and Plainville to the south and Burlington and Avon to the west and north.³

As the original settlement began to grow, newcomers and the children of old settlers spread outward. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the families of John, Stephen, and Thomas Hart, Thomas North, and Joseph Woodford had moved north along Nod Path (which approximates current Highway 10) running on the high ground between the river and the mountains from Farmington center. Some settled east of the river; others moved onto the fertile lowlands which stretched north toward Simsbury from a range of low hills currently separating Avon and Farmington townships. By the mid-1700s families of Bishops, Dickinsons, Holtens, Marshalls, Millers, Orvises, Parkses, Pratts, Thomsons (or Thompsons), Tillotsons, Wilcoxes, and Woodruffs had joined the first settlers of Harts, Norths, and Woodfords in northern Farmington.⁴

As a sign of growing independence from the community at Farmington center, these settlers petitioned for a second meetinghouse district or ecclesiastical society, which the Connecticut General Assembly established in May 1750 as Northington, the name that Avon bore until 1830.⁵ In 1751 the congregation called Reverend Ebenezer Booge, a Yale graduate from East Haddham and one of the original signatories of the church covenant, and his wife Damaris Cook Booge, originally of Cheshire, to minister to their spiritual needs. Booge remained until his death in 1767.

After an interim of two years, members of the Northington society called Reverend Rufus Hawley to succeed Booge. A native of Farmington and Yale graduate of 1767, Hawley settled with his wife Rachel Froward Hawley and remained as pastor until 1820.⁶

After calling Booge, the Northington society decided to build a meetinghouse. On a site east of the river near the junction of present Old Farms Road and Highway 10, the settlers erected a building for the Northington Church of Christ (or the Farmington Second Ecclesiastical Society). A plain clapboard structure, local citizens called the building, with mixed affection and sarcasm, the Lord’s Barn.⁷

Passing through the area after 1800, Benjamin Silliman of Yale described the well-worn church a miserable ruinous house, situated in the midst of a forest. … The house was almost imbowered in ancient forest trees; it was smaller than many private dwelling houses—was much dilapidated by time, which had furrowed the gray unpainted shingles and clapboards with many waterworn channels, and it seemed as if it would soon fall.⁸

Independent, contentious, and localistic, members of the Northington Ecclesiastical Society had divided into three geographic factions by the early nineteenth century. As the community grew and new farms, businesses, and transportation routes developed, the centers of population moved north and west away from the Lord’s Barn. One group established itself on the Talcott Mountain Turnpike in what is now the center of Avon Town. A second was located in the Old Farms area stretching from present-day Country Club Road and the area around Stony Corners south and east toward the Farmington River and the Avon-Farmington town line. A third established itself around the corner of present Highway 167 and Country Club Road, west of the site of the present West Avon Congregational Church.⁹ A fourth center— called Lovelytown after Chief Waguaheag’s (Cherry, the settlers called him) lovely daughters—was situated along what is now Highway 177 in western Avon township near the intersection of present Country Club Road. However, Lovelytown lay outside the ecclesiastical society and at first did not enter into consideration.

By early 1808 the town had a population of more than 1,000, and although church membership was relatively low, the Northington Ecclesiastical Society determined that the ramshackle Lord’s Barn no longer satisfied their needs. At a meeting of the society held on February 29, 1808, two-thirds of those present voted to ask the Hartford County Court to appoint a committee to plant a stake designating a place for the new church. The county court chose a site in the Old Farms section near Reverend Hawley’s home by the corner of present Country Club Road and Stony Corners.¹⁰

The two factions of the Northington Ecclesiastical Society shunned by the court refused to support the decision, and through a series of meetings, church members tried at first to effect a compromise. The West Avon faction favored a site near the school house, which was located on the lot currently occupied by the West Avon Congregational Church. The Turnpike faction wanted the church built near the location of the current Avon Congregational Church in the town center. The Old Farms faction liked the locale selected by the county court. In an effort to resolve the dispute, members of the ecclesiastical society voted on December 5, 1809, to allow each faction to open a building-fund subscription. Under this agreement, the first of the three blocs to collect the most money over $3,000 could select the site for the meetinghouse, provided the county court approved.¹¹

In spite of this solution, year after year the factions continued to disagree on a location until the society’s center of gravity shifted west. In May 1816 Lot Hawley and his neighbors living in Lovelytown petitioned the General Assembly to allow them to join the Northington Society. Opposing the petition at first, the assembly thought that such annexation is unreasonable in itself & will have a tendency to increase the unhappy division that now exists in the Society without adding to the wealth thereof.¹² In December 1816, however, the society voted to support Hawley’s application.¹³

The addition of Lovelytown shifted the balance of power toward the south and eliminated the Turnpike site from consideration. At a meeting on June 20, 1817, the society agreed to construct a building at the site favored by the West Avon faction, provided they could secure the approval of the Connecticut General Assembly to override the county court’s recommendation. The assembly appointed a committee of twelve to represent the different factions.¹⁴

Finally in late December 1817, someone—possibly a disgruntled parishioner—forced a resolution of the meetinghouse dispute by setting fire to the already dilapidated Lord’s Barn, burning it to the ground. At a meeting on December 31, 1817, the society offered a reward for apprehending the arsonist. In the meantime religious services were held alternately at Rufus Hawley’s home and at the Center School House (the current site of the West Avon Congregational Church).¹⁵

The fire forced the church society to construct a new meetinghouse, and the West Avon faction won the site dispute. In 1818 and 1819 parishioners built their new chapel 1,000 feet from the site of the present building on Country Club Road across from the Avon Public Library. Builder-architect David Hoadley designed the church on plans proposed by pattern-book author Asher Benjamin, who based his ideas on a modified Greek-revival style introduced by Benjamin Latrobe.¹⁶

During the late stages of the meetinghouse dispute, a further rift developed between the congregation and Reverend Hawley. By then more than seventy-five years old and increasingly unable to bear the burdens of his ministry, Hawley came under pressure to resign. Eventually agreeing to accept an assistant pastor, he retired and the congregation settled on the Reverend Ludovicus Robbins in 1820.¹⁷

As communicants in the Northington Ecclesiastical Society, the Woodruff family participated in these events along with their neighbors. Descended from Matthew Woodruff, one of the original Farmington proprietors, Woodruff family members had settled in Northington near the site later selected for the West Avon meetinghouse. In the late eighteenth century, Josiah Woodruff, Wilford Woodruff’s great-grandfather, served on the school board representing West Avon. During Josiah’s tenure, the Northington society constructed a school house on property he owned at the site of the West Avon Congregational meeting house.¹⁸

Josiah’s son Eldad and Eldad’s wife, the former Dinah Woodford, owned farm property in West Avon, part of which they sold to the church for the West Avon cemetery, presumably the one in which they were both later buried.¹⁹ A lieutenant in a local unit of the Connecticut militia, Eldad served during the late eighteenth century as the congregation’s agent to collect Hawley’s salary and firewood, as a member of the school prudential committee, and as a school overseer and committeeman.²⁰

Wilford’s father Aphek became a pillar both of community and church. Born in Farmington on November 11, 1778, he married Bulah Thompson (born April 22, 1782), daughter of Lot and Anna Hart Thompson on November 25, 1801.²¹ Reverend Hawley performed the service, and seven months after the marriage, he and others from the congregation gathered to help Aphek raise a barn. He ministered to the family and their children, including baptizing three-month-old Wilford on June 7, 1807.²² During January and February 1806, as illness struck Eldad, Dinah, Aphek, and his brother Ozem, Hawley made numerous visits to comfort and pray with them.²³ In addition he and Rachel visited socially with the Woodruff families.²⁴

What promised to be a happy marriage between these two children of prominent Northington families ended in tragedy. Between 1802 and 1807 Bulah bore three sons, Azmon (November 29, 1802), Ozem Thompson (called Thompson—December 22, 1804), and Wilford (or Willford—March 1, 1807). By 1806 spotted fever had invaded the Farmington River Valley, and by March 1808 it had reached epidemic proportions. Accompanied by pain, nausea, vomiting, skin spots, diminished eyesight, delirium, congestion, and eventual systemic collapse, the disease seemed to contemporaries unfamiliar with microorganisms to enter the body through inhaling impure air or overtaxing the nervous system.²⁵ Both Eldad and Bulah contracted the disease and died—Wilford’s grandfather in December 1806 and his mother in June 1808.²⁶

Arguing that God’s judgments had descended upon his disobedient children, Reverend Noah Porter, a Harvard graduate of 1803 and minister of the Farmington First Congregational Church, spoke insensitively about the epidemic and deaths. According to Porter, faithlessness had caused the devastation of the disease. God had, he said, rebuked our hardness of heart, by terrible dispensations. He had repeatedly commissioned a dreadful epidemic to enter our houses, and people our grave-yards. Praising the revival of Calvinistic religion in Farmington during 1820-21, Porter called the spotted fever epidemic of 1808-1809 God’s judgment sent to punish the irreligious.²⁷

Seventeen months after the death of his wife, Aphek married Azubah Hart, daughter of Asahel Hart, Sr., and Anna Kilborn, originally of New Britain, a cousin of Bulah and a descendant of one of Farmington’s first settlers, Deacon Stephen Hart. Wilford’s brother Azmon and his uncle Ozem also later married two of Azubah’s sisters, in his uncle’s case as a second wife. Aphek and Azubah had six children; all but two (Asahel born in 1814 and Eunice in 1820) died before reaching adulthood.²⁸

Following in their father’s footsteps, Aphek Woodruff and his brothers Eldad Jr. and Ozem served the Northington Ecclesiastical Society in various capacities. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, the society elected them at different times as tithingmen, responsible for collecting taxes for the church and community.²⁹ Eldad Jr. remained active in the West Avon Congregational Church long after Aphek, Azubah, Ozem, Wilford, Azmon, Eunice, and several of Ozem’s children had joined the Latter-day Saints.³⁰

Beyond local disputes over meetinghouse locations and the settlement of a pastor, Northington residents experienced the periodic revivals and other religious convulsions of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Connecticut. Since the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s, Connecticut citizens had seen their religious life visited by divisions and revivals in the established Congregational church, in dissenting churches such as the Baptists and Anglicans, and in smaller sects such as the Quakers and Rogerenes. Methodism did not become a factor in the revivals until the 1790s.³¹

By the 1740s the Great Awakening had revitalized Congregational churches but at the cost of dividing both clergy and laity. Some joined the extreme Calvinistic and revivalistic New Lights; others favored the moderate Old Lights, who feared that the emotional ecstasies of New Light revivals would obscure the need for reason and good works. Extreme New Lights known as Separates or Strict Congregationalists insisted on full Congregational self-government, rejecting the right of the minister to veto actions taken in ecclesiastical society meetings.³²

Following the Great Awakening, Baptist associational polity with its model of adult baptism attracted a number of Separates.³³ By the mid-1750s Separates and Baptists were roughly equal in size and influence. Thereafter, Baptists became the leading party of dissenters in New England Calvinism. These were Calvinist Baptists, however, and with the exception of believing in adult baptism they were—if anything—more strictly Calvinist in doctrine than New Light Congregationalists and definitely more than the Old Lights.³⁴

During the Revolutionary Era, especially the late 1770s and 1780s, in western Massachusetts and various rural communities in northern New England and eastern New York, Freewill Baptists, Universalists, and Shakers attracted converts who broke with Calvinism. Rejecting Calvinist doctrines such as sovereign election, limited atonement, and human depravity, they preached such Arminian tenets as universal redemption, free will, and the possibility of individual perfection.³⁵

In the Farmington River Valley near Northington, Anglicans constituted the eighteenth-century’s principal dissenting, Arminian-based religion. By 1744 Episcopalians had established St. Andrews Parish in Simsbury, immediately north of Northington, and in 1784 Roger Veits, their minister, reported a parish membership of two hundred families.³⁶

By the 1790s New England Congregationalism and Connecticut churches in particular had reached a state of extreme decadence. Paralleling religious trends throughout the United States, Congregational communicants had left in large numbers. Conservative contemporaries blamed conditions associated with the Enlightenment, French atheism, or a conspiracy by the Bavarian Illuminati, but in fact the causes were deeper.³⁷

By the late eighteenth century, New Englanders and others in America became dissatisfied with the restraints of traditional law, religion, and morality. They had begun to reject the concept of a deferential society, which ordered the community into ranks based on position and wealth and which underpinned conventional religion.³⁸ In the limbo between the community-regulated morality of Puritan society and the strict individually ordered morality of Victorian America, traditional moral restraints tended to break down. Moreover, Yankees tended to believe in upward mobility and individual equality, and those who did not share in the wealth resented the prosperity of those who did.³⁹ Many who did not experience prosperity or who suffered reverses in the economic dislocations associated with the Revolution, the Jeffersonian Embargo, the War of 1812, or the post-war depression became disillusioned with the Calvinist God.

For many in Connecticut the changes taking place in society posed a particularly unsettling prospect. As Noah Porter said, devotion to God seemed on the decline, attendance at church decreased, and the morals of society seemed exceptionally loose.⁴⁰ Pre-marital pregnancy rose during the period,⁴¹ and traditionalists resented what they perceived as an emphasis on gayety, vanity, and sinfull amusements.⁴² Efforts to improve society and to reestablish traditional religious and Calvinistic values bolstered the Second Great Awakening, which swept through various Connecticut towns in about four-year intervals and through the Farmington River towns in about seven-year intervals between 1797 and 1830.⁴³ Such revivals were congenial to the American disposition, since in the United States the Enlightenment enjoyed a decidedly religious character absent from its European counterpart.⁴⁴

Patterns in each of the Farmington River revivals were essentially the same. Whether one examines the 1799 revivals, which took place both in Farmington and Northington, the 1813-14 revivals in Simsbury, or the 1820-21 Farmington revivals, people responded in similar ways.

The 1799 Northington revival seems typical.⁴⁵ On March 8, 1799, a number of young people asked Reverend Hawley to attend a conference the next evening. He found at the meeting a number of parishioners of various ages. They prayed and discussed the truths of the gospel. A second conference took place the following Sabbath, and the next Tuesday a number of ministers from nearby societies came to lecture at the meetinghouse and on the succeeding evening at Hawley’s house. People seemed anxious for God’s word, and attendance at the special meetings and regular church services grew. Convicted of their personal depravity, people confessed their sins publicly, and those who converted professed belief in free grace, the atonement and merits of Jesus Christ, and their happiness at having found religion. Moreover, the external signs by which the Calvinists measured a religiously decrepit society such as balls, merry assemblies, and public diversions declined as people engaged more diligently in religious assemblies and Bible study. Revivals between 1797 and 1800 added about sixty people to the church at Farmington, and membership increased from about 200 in 1818 to more than double that number during the revival of the early 1820s.⁴⁶

The Second Great Awakening benefitted not only established Congregational churches but dissenting churches as well, especially Baptists and Methodists. In 1815 Reverend Pierpont Brockett and some of his associates from the Hartford Baptist clergy held a revival in the Farmington area. Wilford Woodruff visited this revival as he did those conducted by Congregationalists, but while he anxiously sought a religious experience, he remained unconverted. Brockett even held some revival meetings at Aphek’s and Azubah’s house. Wilford’s stepmother and uncle Ozem joined the Baptists, and Azmon and Thompson felt attracted by Brockett’s ministry.⁴⁷

Growth of dissenting churches throughout Connecticut contributed to their political muscle and provided fuel for religious toleration which had not existed before.⁴⁸ Over the century between the early 1700s and 1818, the bands that had tied the Connecticut political and religious establishment weakened and broke. Under pressure from dissenters at home and the British government in London, the Connecticut General Assembly agreed in the early eighteenth century to exempt Anglicans, Quakers, and Baptists who belonged to regularly organized congregations from taxes levied to support the Congregational clergy. Later the legislature enacted tax exemption for Christians provided they furnished a certificate from their minister to the clerk of the religious society to which they belonged.⁴⁹

Complete disestablishment and toleration for believer and non-believer alike did not occur in Connecticut until Jeffersonian Republicans gained power and elected Oliver Wolcott governor in 1817. A new constitution in 1818 disestablished the Congregational church and provided for toleration for all. Citizens could exempt themselves from church taxes by giving notice to the clerk of the local ecclesiastical society.⁵⁰

Disestablishment freed Wilford Woodruff’s father to acknowledge his skepticism and his uncle Ozem and others in the family to assist in establishing dissenting congregations. Eventually disaffected from the Northington Church of Christ, Aphek flirted with Baptists in 1815 and withdrew from the Congregational church in 1818. He continued to move along a path that left him completely antagonistic to Christianity by 1830.⁵¹

Ozem, who had become a Baptist in the revival of 1815, joined with a number of others (among whom were several of Wilford’s relatives from the Hart, Woodruff, and Thompson families) to organize the Union Baptist Society of Northington.⁵² They constructed a church on Talcott Mountain Turnpike near the present center of Avon Town. Calling Reverend Brockett as their minister, they barely maintained themselves during the 1820s, experiencing a spurt of growth during the 1830s and eventually dissolving in 1855.⁵³

Following disestablishment, revivals continued in Connecticut for at least a decade. In 1822 as a teenager living away from home, Wilford visited Congregational revival meetings in Farmington. During this revival, Wilford and his young companions attended enquiring meetings & prayer meetings among the [Congregationalists].⁵⁴ With others he labored & prayed & tried to get religion, but unlike many, there was something in there manner of teaching & exhorting us to give our hearts to God without telling us what to do or pointing out the way so that we could understand it that created in Woodruff darkness & not light,— misary & not happiness. Nevertheless he felt ashamed and emotionally burdened since he could not honestly profess a religious experience as did others among his young friends.⁵⁵

During the Second Great Awakening, the Northington economy continued to change as well. Although the core of Northington’s economy remained predominantly subsistence-farming and small scale processing of agricultural and forestry products, some important economic developments took place throughout the 1790s and first three decades of the nineteenth century.

Among the most important changes were improvements in transportation. The construction of turnpikes and canals linked Northington’s economy more closely with the outside world. The Talcott Mountain Turnpike, completed in 1799, which approximated the route of present Highway 44, passed down the main street of Avon Town and constituted the main thoroughfare between Hartford, Connecticut, and Albany, New York. The turnpike created a ready market for commercial establishments, and stage companies and freighters purchased horses from Northington farmers.⁵⁶ In January 1822, a group of businessmen headed by George Cowles, a Farmington entrepreneur, projected a canal to link New Haven, Connecticut, and Northampton, Massachusetts, through the Farmington River Valley. Completed in 1828 the Farmington Canal improved transportation but was never a financial success.⁵⁷

Turnpikes and canals, however, are two-way streets. While they provided easier access for Farmington Valley products to the outside world, they also allowed outside commodities to compete more easily with local farmers and businessmen. Thus they tended to undermine the local subsistence-economy.

During the 1790s and the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the Woodruff family continued to acquire and manage property in Northington. In 1796 Wilford’s grandfather, Eldad, purchased a well- established mill site from the Judd family. Lying in the Old Farms section of town, the mill was powered by water captured in Beaver Pond located on Old Farms Brook.⁵⁸ Eldad’s will left the mill to Aphek and Ozem, and the two operated it with some help from Azmon and Wilford.⁵⁹ The operation consisted of a gristmill, sawmill, carding machine, mill yard, and kiln for drying corn, in addition to a forty-acre farm, home, and outbuildings.⁶⁰

From about 1806 to March 1816, Aphek and Ozem continued to operate the mill, and Aphek acquired other property in Northington.⁶¹ In March 1816 Ozem sold his interest in the mill to Aphek, and Aphek mortgaged the mill and surrounding property to Phineas Lewis of Farmington, apparently in order to purchase additional farmland owned by his mother, Ozem, and Erastus Gay.⁶² The next year, unable to repay the mortgage and having co-signed notes for others who defaulted, Aphek sold the mill and moved to Farmington.⁶³ He and Ozem continued to own some property in the area, and as late as 1827 the two of them sold twenty-five acres, a cider mill, and a quarry to Abraham Hosford of Canton.⁶⁴

In losing the mill property, Aphek skidded inexorably down a slide which carried him from Northington’s upper class to Farmington’s middle class. In 1808 Aphek sat in the upper 10 percent of Northington property owners with property valued at $247.60. Family luxuries entered on tax rolls included a wooden clock and two fireplaces.⁶⁵ By 1826 after the loss of the mill and the move to Farmington, Aphek descended to the mid-range of property owners.⁶⁶

Aphek’s political position in the community also declined with his economic stature. As with other towns in Connecticut, Farmington government functioned through the town meeting system with several assemblies of eligible adult men a year and annual elections of unsalaried functionaries who viewed fences, collected taxes, and planned roads and bridges. Between 1800 and 1816 the town elected Aphek and Ozem to a number of offices including tithingmen, surveyor of highways, tax lister, and grand juror. In 1816 they chose Ozem as selectman, perhaps the highest honor the community could bestow on a citizen, with the possible exception of town meeting moderator. After 1816 Aphek’s neighbors seem to have left him out of office until 1830, though Ozem served on a special committee to inspect bridges in 1822.⁶⁷

After moving his family to Farmington in 1818, Aphek managed the Farmington flour mill for Cowles, Deming, and Company. Constructed on a mill-site originally occupied in 1650 by Azubah’s ancestor, Deacon Stephen Hart, it was the oldest flour mill in Farmington. Located at the foot of Mill Lane on the Farmington River, the mill became a prominent community landmark. Renovated mill buildings housing specialty shops still stand. With some exceptions Aphek managed the mill until 1846 when he resigned to move to the Salt Lake Valley.⁶⁸

As with other middle- and upper-class Connecticut families, the Woodruffs expected education to improve their children’s condition. Aphek and Azubah supported their children in getting the best education the local community could offer, and Ozem served on a number of occasions as a member of the Farmington school committee.⁶⁹

To supplement local taxation Connecticut towns supported common education through an endowment created by selling townships in the state and land from the Western Reserve in present-day eastern Ohio.⁷⁰ Closely associated with the religious establishment, school societies functioned as adjuncts of local Congregational religious societies operating common schools. Under these circumstances, the Congregational minister often served as one of the overseers.⁷¹ On several occasions between 1799 and 1808, school trustees appropriated money from the Farmington school fund to support the Congregational ministry. In addition to grammar, spelling, reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography, students studied the Bible.⁷²

Because of his and his family’s interests, Wilford enjoyed an educational experience uncommon in early nineteenth-century America. Beginning school in Northington, Wilford moved with his family to Farmington, where he continued in common school until age fourteen. This would have taken him through the eighth grade. Thereafter Wilford moved into George Cowles’s home, since the businessman agreed to send the youth to school during the winter in return for work on the farm during the summer. Scion of one of the wealthiest families in Farmington, Cowles had merchandising interests in Farmington, served in the Connecticut General Assembly, and promoted the Farmington Canal. For at least part of the time, Wilford attended the Farmington Academy, as did his siblings Thompson, Philo, and Eunice.⁷³

An institution supported by a private endowment and tuition, the Farmington Academy provided advanced education for selected children from Farmington and surrounding communities. The academy offered instruction in subjects such as chemistry, mineralogy, algebra, geometry, natural philosophy, rhetoric, history, surveying, Latin, and Greek. At its establishment in 1815, Ozem Woodruff signed as one of the incorporators together with Connecticut governor John Treadwell, Solomon Cowles (George’s father), Timothy Pitkin (a Connecticut Congressman), Joseph Dutton, Asa Wilcox, Erastus Washburn, John Cooke, and Noadiah Woodruff (a distant relative).⁷⁴ By 1828 Reverend Noah Porter, Solomon Cowles, Edward Hooker, Timothy Pitkin, and George Cowles were serving as academy trustees.⁷⁵

Wilford pursued formal education beyond common school for about four years. He maintained his work-study program with George Cowles until June 1823. After that Aphek arranged for Wilford to live with Andrew Mills of West Hartford, the town adjoining Farmington on the east. Wilford did chores for Mills in return for board and room and spent his days at school. After a bout with homesickness, Wilford continued his education there through the spring of 1824. He again attended school during the winter of 1825-26 at home while recuperating from an accident.⁷⁶

At age eighteen Wilford ended his formal schooling. An uncommon formal education for a nineteenth-century youth when a few years was the norm, this experience made him one of the best educated of nineteenth-century Mormon leaders and better educated than any nineteenth-century LDS church president except Lorenzo Snow, who had attended Oberlin College.⁷⁷

During these school years Wilford helped his father and brothers with farm chores and played with friends around the barn and mill site. In addition to recovering from a bout with typhus, in what he later perceived as providential deliverance, he also escaped death from a number of accidents.⁷⁸ At the same time he took up angling for spotted trout, and he later remembered that he and his brother Thompson were considered the most successful fishermen on Old Farm Brook. In the winter the two of them trapped gray rabbits in the fields and woods around the mill and farm.⁷⁹

After Wilford completed the spring term of 1824 at school in West Hartford, Aphek decided to send his son to work for Horace Todd, a young Northington neighbor, whose father had died leaving him responsible for a large family. Shortly after beginning work for Todd, however, Wilford suffered one of his frequent accidents, splitting the instep of his foot with an axe. He returned to Farmington to recuperate, and his brother Thompson took his place. Leaving home for work in Northington again in the spring of 1825, Wilford was thrown from a horse and left with a broken leg. Escaping injury in 1826, he worked nine months for the Widow Deming—perhaps Demaris Deming—in east Northington, returning home to assist his father in operating the mill as he had done in the past.⁸⁰

In 1827 at age twenty, Wilford struck out on his own. Contracting to operate a flour mill near Avon Town center owned by his aunt, Helen Wheeler, for a percentage of the income, he left home never to return again except for visits.⁸¹ He ran the flour mill for three years, after which he lost much of his income through investments with unscrupulous and incompetent acquaintances. In May 1830 he contracted with Samuel Collins, owner of the ax factory at Collinsville northwest of Avon, to operate a flour mill. After a year Collins dismantled the mill, and Wilford moved westward to New Hartford, where he contracted to operate a mill for George Cowles for a year.⁸²

Lured by a desire to go west, Wilford rejected the inclination to move to Rhode Island and agreed in the spring of 1832 to emigrate to Richland, Oswego County, New York, with his brother Azmon and Azmon’s wife Elizabeth Hart Stanley. Having saved $800 between the two of them, the Woodruff brothers said goodby to their father and moved to New York. After arriving they purchased a 140-acre farm with a saw mill, house, and orchard for $1,800. They took out a mortgage for part of the purchase price, and Wilford’s half-brother Asahel, who ran a retail outlet in Farmington, forwarded some money from the family. Wilford remained there until the spring of 1834.⁸³

Throughout these business ventures, Wilford and other family members actively sought religious experiences and conversion. At home and at George Cowles’s in Farmington, he attended religious services conducted by Reverend Porter, and as he read and studied, he raised questions about the lack of charismatic gifts such as healing, which had existed in the primitive church.⁸⁴ While running the flour mill for his Aunt Helen in East Avon, he attended services and participated in revival meetings at the nearby Avon Congregational Church conducted by Reverend Bela Kellogg, a Williams College graduate.⁸⁵

A number of incidents in Wilford’s life paralleled those of other young men and women in the area. In episodes reported by ministers, the deaths of acquaintances seemed to arouse a need for religious experience by awakening a sense of personal mortality. Such deaths had influenced Jonathan Edwards’s thinking during the Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s.⁸⁶ In connection with revivals in 1813-14 in Simsbury, Reverend Allan McLean said that the death of a young man had focused the attention of local young adults on a sense of their need for personal redemption and revival of religion.⁸⁷

The deaths of several people and the future deaths of his parents prompted Wilford to think seriously about his own mortality and the need to follow God’s will. In 1825 while recuperating from one of his accidents, Wilford’s reflections on several murders at the hands of an insane man led him to wonder again about his mortal condition.⁸⁸

The deaths of two people close to him touched him even more deeply. In 1827 Philo, Wilford’s young half-brother, died following a serious illness and the administration of calomel. Shortly thereafter a wicked & profane young man named Henry Miller died after lightning struck him while he was working in a field.⁸⁹ Recalling these events later, Wilford said that the character principles & sentiments which are formed from age of eighteen to twenty five are generally so deeply planted in the heart, that they controll their future lives & remain with them through life whether they be good or evil.⁹⁰

Fear of dying in a sinful condition disturbed Wilford as he reflected on his own occasional backsliding. Between the ages twenty and twenty-three while operating the mill in East Avon and in the following year at Collinsville, he associated with young men who led him away from God. In East Avon he occasionally played cards, went dancing, or otherwise socialized with those who did. In Collinsville, however, he resisted invitations to similar activities and actually moved from a boarding house where he lived with employees of the ax factory to a private home to avoid such temptations.⁹¹ In West Hartford he actively sought the company of young men who shared his ideals.

In view of his desire for personal experiences of God’s grace, Wilford felt particularly confused when friends and family members were able to awaken within themselves deep religious convictions that he could not. In May 1830 a revival in Farmington converted his half-brother Asahel to Methodism.⁹² His uncle and aunt, Ozem and Hannah Hart Woodruff, seemed deeply engaged in the service of the Lord in the Baptist confession.⁹³ Considering the happiness these family members found, Wilford’s inability to feel the guidance of God’s spirit troubled him even more.

By 1830, away from home and in contact with his family only through correspondence, he found more profit by studying on his own than by attending religious services. Continuing, nevertheless, to visit revivals and religious meetings, he charted his own course in spiritual matters. At the time, however, these events, his study and reflection on their meaning, and most important his despair of