Faceby Saints in Captain Ballantyne's Company: July to September 1855

The 4th Company was under Captain Richard Ballantyne.  He was 37 years old and Scottish by birth.  He had lived in America for many years and was now returning home from mission in India.

The 4th Company was a train of 46 waggons and 414 people, three horses and a mule.  To each waggon there were ten or eleven people, a yoke of oxen, and a yoke of young steers or cows.  Nearly all the people were funded by the Perpetual Emigration Fund.  They were therefore travelling comparatively light compared with the self-funding 2nd Company, as they were obliged to obey the P.E.F's baggage restrictions.  These were necessary to reduce the burden on the Fund of the expense of transporting goods across the plains.

In this company travelled:

• George Stanger, aged 22 (already secretly married to Mary Etherington)

• Thomas Stanger, aged 25, his wife Jane Wilson, and their toddler

• Jane Wilson’s brother Thomas

• Charles Hogg, aged 24, and his now very pregnant wife Ann Stanger, aged 27, and their son James, aged 2

The Company’s cattle were wild – the “wildest cattle that I had ever seen”, wrote George Mayer, Captain of a Ten.  He had to break them in by having them drag logs round the camp before they set off – and, he remembered,

“the teamsters were as wild and ignorant of oxen and how to yoke cattle as the oxen were, and I found I had my hands full.”

The Etherington family cross the Plains: June to September 1855

John and Elizabeth Etherington, aged 61 and 56, were travelling with four of their children: their two youngest, Thomas (19) and Mary (20); Elizabeth (28) and her husband John Pugh, with their toddler and six month old baby; and Ann (25) with her small son and new baby. 

Ann's husband Thomas Heslop had remained behind in Liverpool and Mary was keeping secret her marriage to George Stanger.

They travelled in the 2nd Company led by Captain Jacob Secrist, a 36 year old who was returning from mission in Germany.  The Captain of the First Ten was Osmyn Merritt Deuel, with whom they had travelled on the Siddons.

There were 368 people in 54 waggons.  More than half of the travellers were Danish. These were self-funding people who had been able to buy up their own supplies for the journey and their new life.  Consequently their problem was not that they were short of provisions, but rather that they were overloaded.

They set out on Thursday 14 June, but they soon encountered difficulties.  There was cholera and measles in the camp and on the 11th day, at Elm Creek on the way to the Big Blue River, they met with disaster.

The Faceby Mormons make ready for the Plains: May & June 1855

Atchison in Kansas Territory was a new town, still under construction.  The people of Atchison were glad to welcome the Mormon emigrants because they provided a workforce while they waited to set off for the west, and because they bought supplies in the town for their journey.

Camping at Mormon Grove

Charles Hogg remembered:

"We moved out on to camp ground May 14; about ten had to occupy one tent. The one we got was not finished. The first night came up a very heavy storm of wind, thunder, lightning, and rain. It blew many of the tents to the ground. The screams of women and children were painful to hear. We passed through three such nights in succession. We had never witnessed such awful storms as were so common in this country. We moved camp (after staying here a few days) to Mormon Grove, about eight miles west of Atchinson."

There was an old Mormon campground near the levée, and they had bought 150 acres on the high prairie some five miles off.  It was well watered and had a grove of hickory trees, and had been named Mormon Grove.  There were high hopes for Mormon Grove – but unfortunately it had to be abandoned after 1855 because of the cholera.

The emigrants, arriving there with ox-drawn waggons from the levee, were surprised by the appearance of this vast tent city, set out in orderly rows.  There they were to spend May and June 1855 planting crops and making preparations for the journey across the Plains.

The Faceby Mormons leave Philadelphia for Kansas Territory

More than half the Mormon emigrants on board the Siddons were stopping in the eastern states, to earn money to make the rest of the journey later – the Wake family from Faceby among them – but the rest of the Faceby Saints were going through to the Valley that season.

President Fullmer took the advice of the Elders in Philadelphia and arranged for the travellers to go by train on the Pennsylvania Central route to Pittsburgh, intending to take a packet ship from there.  They were able to negotiate a price for the travellers, of $4.50 per adult, with 80lb baggage free.

So on Monday 23 April, the emigrants got up at 5 am to get their baggage ready for the Customs inspectors and at last reached the railway station at 11 o'clock.

They would be travelling throughout Monday and Tuesday, arriving at Pittsburgh at 4.15 in the morning.

Henry Stocks wrote:

“I may say that we are nearly all the time traveling through woods, thousands & thousands of acres of timber… I viewed the engine … Not so neat as the English engines, they seem great & clumsy.  Carriages is about 18 yards long, same width as English … Inside there is a passage from one end of the train to the other & seats with backs two feet high.  A stove & potty (or necessary) & a water barrel …”

The Faceby Mormons cross the Atlantic: February to April 1855

1855: Faceby to Liverpool

In the bitter cold of early February 1855, the Faceby Saints made ready to leave.  Charles Hogg

"delivered up books with Branch record to Elder Smith, traveling elder in that part.  Left this part of the world Feb 14, 1855, with a conscience void of offence toward God and all men, free from debt to anyone.  I visited father, mother, and what family there were at home here at Deighton … I could not stay with my beloved father and mother but a few minutes, bid them goodbye, off to catch the train." 

Ann Stanger Hogg's descendants record that,

"it was extremely difficult for them to leave their home and bid their loved ones goodbye, never to see them again, and depart for a strange new land.  It was only their firm belief in the Gospel that gave them such strength."

At the Mission Office in Liverpool the Faceby Saints registered to travel on the Siddons, a sailing ship bound for Philadelphia.

Mormons in Faceby: 1852-55

With Mitt Romney in the final days of his campaign to be President of the USA, this seems the ideal time for the story of the villagers of Faceby who became Mormons and left Yorkshire for America in 1855.

I came across the Faceby Saints when researching my book on the 1832 cholera epidemic in Hutton Rudby and the vicar, Robert Barlow.  When I realised that the Revd Barlow was related to Mormons in Utah, I couldn’t resist finding out more.

View from near Mr Barlow's vicarage towards the hills & Faceby

Luckily the internet provided me with Charles Hogg's account of his own life and the biography of Ann Stanger Hogg written by her granddaughter Katheryn Hart Conger, which enabled me to begin to piece the story together.  I've just looked up those links again for this post, and was delighted to find they now include photographs of Charles and Ann.

More information came from descendants.  After I gave a talk on the subject to the Swainby History Society, I was put in touch with Mrs Dorothy Jewitt, a descendant of William Wilson, and posting an article about the Faceby Saints on my (now defunct) website www.jakesbarn.co.uk brought me contacts from descendants in the USA and the UK.  Each time I've given a talk on the subject it has prompted me to do a bit more research, so I have revised and expanded the original article for this blog.

Faceby, North Yorkshire

In February 1855 a large party of people left the small Yorkshire village of Faceby.  It was the beginning of a long journey to America.  They were Mormons – the members of the Faceby Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and most of them belonged to two extended families, the Etheringtons and the Stangers.

The War Memorial to the 50th (Northumbrian) Division

Not far from Ypres and near the cemetery on the Oxford Road, stands a memorial dedicated ‘to the enduring memory of all ranks of the 50th (Northumbrian) Division who fell in the Great War’.  An inscription below commemorates ‘their comrades of the same Division who gave their lives in the War of 1939-1945 for the liberation of France, Belgium and Holland’.

This was a first line Division of the Territorial Force, drawn from Northumberland, Durham and the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire.  It was sent to the Western Front in April 1915 and soon saw action in the Second Battle of Ypres.

The memorial is a plain white pillar in a green enclosure, standing beside a farm on a windswept hillside.

How had the design been chosen?  Amongst the papers of the Middlesbrough solicitor Major T.D.H. (“Duncan”) Stubbs are documents that provide some answers.