Elizabeth Hales brother Nathaniel had joined the Methodists in Wells, Vermont, with his parents along with some of [their] children and neighbors. But Elizabeth had not.181 Because of her fathers conversion, however, she may have been sympathetic to Methodism early. The Hale log home never reappeared in the records and thus by the time Mumford left town in 1831 the building was no longer a residence and was repurposed to house animals or store supplies. Searle, diary, June 1832Nov. By rejecting non-essential cookies, Reddit may still use certain cookies to ensure the proper functionality of our platform. Joseph Smith Jr. resided near me for some time after this, and I had a good opportunity of becoming acquainted with him, and somewhat acquainted with his associates, and I conscientiously believe from the facts I have detailed, and from many other circumstances, which I do not deem it necessary to relate, that the whole "Book of Mormon" (so called) is a silly fabrication of falsehood and wickedness, got up for speculation, and with a design to dupe the credulous and unwary -- and in order that its fabricators may live upon the spoils of those who swallow the deception. Emma served the needy: in Kirtland, she and Elizabeth Ann Whitney coordinated feasts for the poor, and in Nauvoo, she opened her home to the sick, orphaned, and homeless. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. Cookie Notice I enquired whose words they were, and was informed by Joseph or Emma, (I rather think it was the former) that they were the words of Jesus Christ. These reports are on file in the Historic Sites Division. A surveyor in the employment of Dr. R. H. Rose, while tracing a boundary line through the woods, placed his hand high on a tree to mark where the ax-man, who followed, should strike out a chip as an evidence of the line that had been run. . Shingles were the first wood product sold because they were easily made without special equipment. It would be twenty years before forests would become cultivated fields. all Lands held by patent, warrant, location, or improvements; Houses and lots of ground, and groundrents; all gristmills, sawmills, hempmills, oilmills, snuffmills, papermills, and powdermills; all Furnaces, Forges, Bloomirzes [bloomeries], Distilleries, Sugarhouses, malthouses, Breweries, Tanningyards and farries [ferries]; all Negro and Maulatto slaves; all Horses mares geldings and Cattle above the age of four years, and all offices and posts of profit, trades and occupations, Ministers of the Gospel of Everry Denomination and Schoolmasters only excepted. Laban Capern and Johnah Brewster, letter to John Hilborn, January 24, 1814, 1813-1814 Tax Assessment Records, Harmony Township, Susquehanna County Courthouse, Montrose, Pennsylvania. Let come what will, youve got to bear ittaint no use to flinch. Mark H. Forscutt, Commemorative Discourse on the Death of Mrs. Emma Bidamon,The Saints Herald(July 15, 1879): 20917; see also, Paul V. Ludy, ed.,A Tribute To Emma(Bates City, Missouri: Paul V. Ludy and Associates, 2002), 5. 188. The tree that marked the spot had been cut down when he shared his story with Catlin and the old man could not tell him where it was buried. It's worth noting that this is the historical record and there might be different perspectives on Isaac Hale's relationship with Joseph Smith. But I have not been able to reconcile the known data with this possibility. Photograph by. Everyone in the valley assisted each other in their daily tasks during social events where this combination of work and play were known as frolics. Frolics were occasions for dancing, eating, and socializing while settlers raised barns, husked corn, quilted fabric, or other tasks usually completed as a community. The original tax booklet as prepared by Comfort and Hale included columns for different rates of land (1st, 2nd, 3rd, and unimproved) and a column each for houses, mills, horses, oxen, cows, and occupation. Harmony, Pennsylvania | Doctrine and Covenants Central 96. [13] The bank's demise led to serious problems for the church and the Smith family. Rose charged the Hales $3.79 an acre for their land which was more than ten times the amount Bennett initially paid for it and a dollar per acre higher than Rose charged Isaac and Elizabeth Hales neighbors, suggesting he took advantage of the added value twenty years of Hale family improvements had given the land. There were also other features in the home that could have impressed Lucy. Willingborough Township, Direct Tax Lists 1798, 4. He was tasked with finding and unearthing buried treasure presumed to be located there. 11. On November 17, 1844, she gave birth to David Hyrum Smith, the last child that she and Joseph had together. Buck served as the first permanent minister stationed in the Everlasting Hills.166 He found success in his attempt to spread religious conviction, and he developed a congregation downriver eight miles from the Hale home. The newlyweds then settled six miles north of Litchfield in Goshen, Connecticut, where their first child was born November 19 or 20, 1767.71 They named her Elizabeth Lewis. Plumbing brought water from a nearby well to the house in later years, and since the well was built early and the Hale family did not have a cistern under or near the house, a hand pump likely brought water directly from the well into the kitchen during Hale occupation to make the tasks of the women easier. sweet things to write in a baby book. Emma and Joseph met when he boarded at her fathers inn while working in the area. 1828 Susquehanna County Tax Records. Dubois and Pike,Centennial of Susquehanna County,73. A man who lived seven miles upriver from the Hale family and knew little of their personal religious devotion, still may have accurately ascribed to them a general Methodist approach to religion in the region when he noted how Emma Hale as a little girl, often got the power, as did most of those with sincere religious feelings in the valley.209, J. Lavina Fielding Anderson, ed.,Lucys Book: A Critical Edition of Lucy Mack Smiths Family Memoir(Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2001), 430. Trial Notes, Scribe A and Trial Notes, Scribe B.. 2 Isaac Hale (1763-1839) 3 Joseph Smith Sr. (1771-1840), was a treasure seeker. Joseph and Emma in a home nearby while he translated most of the Book of Mormon with Oliver Cowdery serving as scribe. They were not allowed to come into a room where their parents were talking with strangers, unless they were invited in; and if a stranger came in to talk to their parents, they were to bow and withdraw from the room.300 A good son would wait to speak to his father until spoken to, and then answer in as few words as possible. Dubois believed, Taint no use to worryit only makes things worse. Despite a thorough search through the years of the islands in the vicinity, no one found Kidds silver. On April 6, 1830, Joseph and five other men established the Church of Christ. Jane C. Nylander,Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home, 17601860(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 63. Brother of Reuben Hale. As a result, his estate was entirely wrapped up with the finances of the church. Isaac Hales perception of Joseph was that he was not very well educated, he was a stranger, and he followed a business that I could not approve.312 Given the social position and wealth of the Comfort family, when John and Phoebe Comforts son James was born in September 1805, he must have soon become one of the most eligible bachelors in the valley. Travelers complained in letters and reminiscences how during wet months of the year the hard clay became deep ruts, supporting treacherous puddles on the Harmony Turnpike.1Despite their complaints, the turnpike was the quickest route from western New York to the urban areas of southern Pennsylvania and the thoroughfare was always busy. 198. Mark Ashurst-McGee argues that as a result of the success Methodism found in America, religious leaders sought to distance it from folk religious practices such as dowsing in order to make themselves socially established. Mark Ashurst-McGee, Zion Rising: Joseph Smiths Early Social and Political Thought (PhD diss., Arizona State University, 2008, 70; see also Marvin Hill, Money-Digging Folklore and the Beginnings of Mormonism: An Interpretive Suggestion,BYU Studies24 (Fall 1984): 48486; and D. Michael Quinn,Early Mormonism and the Magic World View(Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1998), 31. Photographs of these headstones are in the authors collection. 296. Emma and Joseph III returned to Nauvoo after the conference and he led the church from there until moving to Plano, Illinois, in 1866. If this account is accurate, it places members of the Stowell family living in a home in the valley as well. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. . He continued to express similar discouragement in his letters for the next decade, such as when he noted, poor Backsliden Lanesboro is left to mourn her bareness and Distance from her Duty and privilege. John Comfort, letter to Dear Children, April 8, 1837, and it is poor wicked Lanesboro still. John Comfort, letter to Silas Comfort, March 28, 1838. Wilkinson,Annals of Binghamton,35. A local historian argued wheat could grow well on high, south facing ground that was above the shade of southern mountains, Rhamanthus M. Stocker,Centennial History of Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania,(Philadelphia: R. T. Peck & Co., 1887), 179, but this ground was usually too steep and rocky to farm adequately. Stocker,Centennial History of Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, 543. She likely lived at the school during the week. The Hales helped Emma and Joseph obtain a house and a small farm. She found her long home before her parents, as they placed her in a coffin and buried her nearby in the Hale family cemetery plot. 40:1, [and] James 4:8. George Peck, Memorandums of Circuit Travels, 18161818.. 18 (October 27, 1821): 141. Goodrich,The State of Vermont Rolls of the Soldiers in the Revolutionary War, 17751783, 208209. Her mother Elizabeth Lewis Hale died in 1842. The Warrior Path was a major travel route created by Native Americans on foot as war parties moved rapidly through the region to control territory of interest to competing tribes active in the beaver fur trade.37It also led to hunting grounds along the rivers tributaries. As the elect lady, she presided over the Female Relief Society of Nauvoo from its founding in 1842 until 1844, providing relief to new immigrants and destitute families. Ancestry and Posterity of Joseph Smith and Emma Hale: With Little Sketches of Their Immigrant Ancestors All of Whom Came to America between the Years 1620 and 1685, and Settled in the States of Massachusetts and Connecticut. Emma also compiled a second hymnal by the same title, which was published in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1841. Tavern owners needed a license from the county to operate their business. 1833, Letter to David Hale, 1219February 1841, Travel Account and Questions, November 1837. Isaac Hale is the son of the wealthiest farmer in the village where Feyre Archeron and her family live. Susan Easton Black, Isaac Hale: Antagonist of Joseph Smith,Regional Studies in Latter-day Saint Church History: New York,1992, 93111. She was also charged to act as a scribe to Joseph, to expound the scriptures, to exhort the Church, and to coordinate the publication of sacred music in a hymnbook. Anyone who lived in the region automatically became a South Sea man whether connected to the sea or not. I have named one of the judges Scribe A (see Trial Notes Scribe A) as he recorded the following testimony, confirming the log home still stood in May 1824. 54. and visited at the house of Isaac Hale, Joe Smith's father-in-law, when she was seventeen years old. Alva was to give each of the other sons $25.00, and the daughters, including Emma, would receive what would be proper. Isaac also requested that he be buried on his own land back of the garden near the line betwixt me and Joseph McKune, Jr.289 Isaac was always a man of solitude, and so it was perhaps natural that he chose not to be crowded in the cemetery a few hundred feet away with all of the other graves, but the spot he selected was right next to the home where his son-in-law Joseph Smith had livedalmost as if he were still protecting his family from that place. See Returned as Elected, Quarter Sessions Docket, Susquehanna County, 3: 3637, 7071, 101, 120. The best circumstantial argument for the Hale family using their log home briefly as rental property comes immediately after the 1825 tax assessment when Isaac Hale no longer pays taxes for the log home but Jeriah Mumford & Co. comes into the valley and rents four homes. If correct, this places the Hale land payments at somewhere around $35.00 a year for a decade. 314. In 1834, Isaac Hale, who was the father-in-law of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, swore a legal affidavit against Joseph saying that Joseph was involved in trea. George Edward Anderson, 1909. A grandson of Isaac and Elizabeth Hale, Lorenzo D. Wasson left the valley for Nauvoo, Illinois, perhaps to share news of Isaacs death, but also to learn more about his aunts unusual religion. Anderson,Ancestry and Posterity of Joseph Smith and Emma Hale), 1:131, 399, 463, 580, 711; Correll H. Tiffany, comp., West Hartland, Conn.: A Documentary History of Her Homesteads, 17601916, unpublished manuscript, Connecticut State Library; Sharpe,History of Oxford,14; Henry P. Johnston, ed.,The Record of Connecticut Men in the Military and Naval Service During the War of the Revolution, 17751783(Hartford, Conn.: Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company, 1889), 326, 364, 643. The other families were those of John Hilborn, Martin Lane, and John Comfort. As a native of Cape Cod and a South Sea man, born to Mary and Gershom Lewis in Gilford, Connecticut, Nathaniel Lewis grew up in shipping and worked for a time as a sailor.63 He also lived on the Connecticut coast within view of Gardiners Island where Captain William Kidd purportedly buried stolen silver before moving to Block Island to negotiate his surrender for piracy. 284. settled opposite what was called Pleasant Island, on the north side of the river, a little above the painted rocks. . Elder Lewis [prayed], Send the mind of the people up the river down to me, and the people down the river (the Presbyterians) may go to hell, and I care not. Mrs. Stid, at the same meeting, [prayed]: O Lord, take Capt. Upham,Life of Timothy Pickering, 117, emphasis in original. It appears the Lewis men sided with the majority of Methodists that disapproved of divining rod use.89 Nathaniel moved to the Susquehanna in autumn 1790, and whatever existed of the Methodists in Middletown where he had lived quickly dissolved so that when Methodist preacher Laban Clark arrived in the town in 1799, the family of a Mr. John Comfort, letter to Silas Comfort, April 8, 1837. Stewart because of similarities in their work. (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2013), 2:33138; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Womens Rights in Early Mormonism, 18351870 (New York: AlfredA. Knopf, 2017), 8696. 18008 Bothell Everett Hwy SE # F, Bothell, WA 98012. 297. 130. Mrs. Arthur Webb argued the name meant crooked river, but she does not provide a source for her conclusions and writes too late to have worked through a native speaker, Mrs. Arthur Webb. These men assessed real property in Harmony Township as directed in Section Eight of the General Assembly Act of April 11, 1799, implementing the tax laws that remained in place for many years (with some small revisions made in 1834 and 1844). See also, Mark Ashurst-McGee, A Pathway to Prophethood: Joseph Smith Junior as Rodsman, Village Seer, and Judeo-Christian Prophet, (masters thesis, Utah State University, 2000); Dan Vogel, The Locations of Joseph Smiths Early Treasure Quests,Dialogue27 (Fall 1994): 20407. . She was also directed to compile a book of hymns for the Church, and she was warned to continue in a spirit of meekness, and beware of pride. (D&C 25:1113.). : mormon Isaac Hale (1763 - 1839): Father of Joseph Smith's lawful wife, Emma Smith. Isaac straightened the original foundation for the log home by adding a wall in front of a previous curved foundation wall on the west side of the cellar.240 He dug out a larger area to expand the cellar with a kitchen in the new basement and added a new foundation on the east side of the cellar which included a stairway so the family could access the basement from bulkhead doors at ground level.241, When the Hales added a rearaddition to their home between 1820 and 1822 to accommodate a ground level kitchen, they did not add a cellar under the new addition.242 The larger space attached to the rear of the home provided enough room for a pantry and kitchen sleeping chamber (the borning room of later generations) in addition to including a kitchen big enough to take care of most of the familys needs with the basement kitchen useful for cooking in the summer months.243. [citation needed] On May 10, 1839,[13] they moved into a two-story log house in Nauvoo that they called the "Homestead". After Nathaniel Lewis Sr.s brief war service, he built a two-story frame house in the mountains to accommodate his growing family. 43. This is the same Oliver Cowdery, whose name may be found in the Book of Mormon. Blackman,History of Susquehanna County,433. I was allowed to feel the weight of the box, and they gave me to understand, that the book of plates was then in the box -- into which, however, I was not allowed to look. Perhaps because their public discussions of religion differed from what was commonly accepted, their neighbors described them as religious agitators. Emma was baptized into the Church of Christ by Oliver Cowdery in Colesville, New York, on June28, 1830, shortly after the Church was organized. Wilkinson,Annals of Binghamton,105; First Presbyterian Church Records, Hallstead, Pennsylvania. 116. Seba Smiths novel about life on the Susquehanna,Way Down East; or, Portraits of Yankee Life,(New York: H. W. Derby, 1857), included an entire chapter detailing the horrors of this tragedy. Rhoda was born the same year as Emma and the two were age mates who lived on neighboring farms and likely interacted together a great deal.253 Since Isaac expected his sons to provide a home for their new brides, it is likely David and Rhoda lived in the Hale log home. Meat, in fact, became the major form of currency in the region; when Isaac Hale and Nathaniel Lewis first settled the valley, they exchanged meat for help on their farms, and it became the custom to give cattle, or truck, as payment for work.124 During those early settlement years, Isaac Hale could easily have been a model for Nathaniel (Natty) Bumppo, the Leatherstocking in James Fenimore Coopers novel The Pioneers: or, The Sources of the Susquehanna, which reflected a larger than life heroic hunter dressed in buckskin with Indians as his closest friends. Rachel Cope, A Sacred Space for Women: Hymnody in Emma Hale Smiths Theology, Journal of Religious History (2017). Mark Lyman Staker serves as a Senior Researcher in the Church History Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and has beeninvolved in historic sites restoration for more than fifteen years. 1. 268. The home was remodeled in 18201822 which is likely when the debt on the land was paid. Thy heart shall rejoice in the great work of the Lord, and no one shall take thy rejoicing from thee. Transcript: President Nelson Priesthood Restoration - Church Newsroom Joseph Smith Jr., who was a passive employee of Stowell, said, I was put to board with a Mr. Isaac Hale, of that place,JSP, H1:236. Husband of Elizabeth (Lewis) Hale married 20 Sep 1790 in Wells, VT. Descendants. John Travas (also spelled Traves and Travis), a neighbor of the Hales, had a 15 x 30 foot home valued at $16, which was likely the value of a single story structure. On January 17, 1827, Joseph and Emma left the Stowell house and traveled to the house of Zachariah Tarbill[12] in South Bainbridge, New York, where they were married the following day. George Peck,Wyoming: Its History, Stirring Incidents, and Romantic Adventures(New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1858), 193. 1825, Appendix 2: Copies of Book of Mormon Characters, Isaac Hale and James Westfall, Elizabeth Hale connected herself to the Methodists early and may have been the one Hiel Lewis had heard about, confusing the details, but Isaac remained distant.190, Frederic Stier and Timothy Lee first arrived in the Susquehanna Valley in 1805 and found most of their success there in 1806.191 When Stier and Lee brought Methodism it resulted in a general revival of religion which swept along that portion of the Susquehanna Valley as the popular movement replaced Bucks Congregationalism.192 Lee did not list any Hales among his converts, but missing names in the records was not unusual as most individuals caught up in local revivals were not numbered among the short list of convertsparticularly if they were already baptized.193. REVOLUTIONARY WAR VETERAN --- This brief bio text was created by Tim Troxell, who initiated Mr. Hale's memorial: Isaac Hale was born to Reuben and Diantha (Ward) Hale. After these occurrences, young Smith made several visits at my house, and at length asked my consent to his marrying my daughter Emma. 241. These prayers resulted in the "Word of Wisdom". Diantha Ward was the mother of Isaac Hale. The Westfall farm had been of local interest for years.