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.

Hallowe'en

Time for tales of the supernatural and the ghostly.

Dragons, to begin with.  There was a dragon at Sexhow - and a dragon at Whorl Hill near Swainby.

View of Whorl Hill

(Or possibly, the same dragon, with two lairs).

These frightful Worms were a menace and a dread to the people.  They suffered terribly from the depredations of the beasts, hoping always to be rescued by some gallant knight in shining armour.

When at last the Worm of Sexhow was slain, the happy villagers carried its pelt to the parish church in Hutton Rudby, and hung it in triumph against the wall, where it remained for many long years ...

And now the tale of Awd Nan of Sexhow - a suitably frightful story for Hallowe'en.

Awd Nan had been the village witch.  One night, her ghost appeared to a Sexhow farmer to tell him the whereabouts of some buried treasure.  The silver he was to keep for himself, but the gold must be given to Awd Nan's niece, who lived in Stokesley.  At the end of a year, the ghost warned him, she would be back to see what he had done.  But the foolish man kept both the gold and the silver.  At last Awd Nan reappeared to him and jumped up behind him on his horse at Stokesley.  Seizing him by the throat, she gripped him tighter and tighter until he fell dead at his own door.

And then there's the White Lady of Skutterskelfe (though she might be just the mist over the beck) and some speak of the Grey Lady of Drumrauch, though little is known about her.  I sometimes wonder if they were just ways of terrifying the young from straying far from the village. 

Branwell Brontë’s ‘honest and kindly friend’: Dr John Crosby of Great Ouseburn

An article of particular interest to Brontë enthusiasts:

The experiences of Anne and Branwell Brontë in the household of the Reverend Edmund Robinson of Thorp Green near York had significant and dramatic consequences for them both.

Branwell never worked again after his sudden dismissal as tutor to young Edmund Robinson in June 1845; it precipitated the self-destructive decline that ended in his death in September 1848.  Anne’s novels Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall derive much material from her five years as governess to the Robinsons’ daughters and from the painful three years at Haworth Parsonage during which Branwell descended into drunkenness, irreligion and despair.

The cause of Branwell’s dismissal has long been a subject of debate, while in recent years there has been increasing interest in Anne and appreciation of her work. The lack of information about their time at Thorp Green has therefore been most unfortunate; the following account of Branwell’s ‘honest and kindly friend’ [1]  Dr John Crosby and his friends and neighbours, whose social life Branwell probably shared, may therefore be appreciated.