In the early summer of 1834, a woman named Hannah Carter lay sick in her home in the village of Newry, Maine. Her doctors had given her up, according to her daughter, Eliza Ann. Then, John Boynton and Daniel Bean, two elders from a new religion founded only four years earlier, came by the Carter home.
In the daughter’s words: “The elders told her they were preaching a new doctrine and they told her that she could be healed if she could have faith, that they would hold hands on her. They did lay hands on her and said, “In the name of the Lord Jesus be thou made whole” and she was made whole and arose and called for her clothes and said I must go to the water. She walked one-half mile and was baptized in the river called Bear River and confirmed. And there was a large branch (of the church) raised up in that place.”
Hannah’s husband John remarked, “Well, that beats doctor’s bills.” He never joined this new religion. Six of John and Hannah Carter’s nine living children did join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, in June of 1834. Two daughters and one son did not.
The Carters left Maine with others of the new church in 1836 and traveled to Kirtland, Ohio. Early in 1838, those faithful to Joseph Smith, the new religion’s founder, departed for Far West, Missouri. As described by Eliza Ann, now the wife of James C. Snow, the journey was difficult. In her words: “It was cold weather, and we suffered much with the cold, but we traveled until we came to Terre Haute, Indiana, and one of our oxen died, leaving us with one ox, so we were obliged to stop. We had no money, no house to go in and we got the privilege of going into a horse stable and I cleaned it out and was glad to get into a place out of the storms. After stopping in Indiana a few weeks Hyrum Smith’s company came along, and he being acquainted with me said, “If you will ride in my baggage wagon I will take you along and you can drive the team and the men can walk.” I said I would do so. We traveled until we came to Jacksonville, Illinois; there one of Hyrum Smith’s horses died and he had to leave us. There was a branch of the church nearby, but he didn’t leave us penniless amongst strangers, without home or friends, he called for the president of the branch and told him to let Brother Snow preside over the branch as a missionary and to feed and cloth us until the Kirtland Camp company came along in the fall, and he did so. … While we were there in the branch I looked out, and behold, there came my brother William with the one ox that we left behind. He had made a harness and tackled him up and the one ox carried his wife and three children to Missouri, and when I saw him, I rejoiced to see him have so much faith, but the Gentiles made all manner of fun of him. They said, “There goes a damn Mormon with one ox,” but he got there just the same and Father Joseph Smith said it should be in the annals of his history. After that the Kirtland Camp came along, and we went to Missouri.”
In the Kirtland Camp entourage were John and Hannah Carter, four of their married children, an unmarried son, and nine grandchildren. The Carter family of Mormons numbered twenty when they arrived in Missouri. John and Hannah and possibly two of their unmarried children settled in Monroe County while others went on to Caldwell County. The Mormons were driven out of Missouri during what was known as “the Missouri War.” Beginning in February of 1839, an estimated 5,000 crossed the Mississippi River at Quincy, many taking temporary refuge in Washington Park, with Quincy becoming what the Saints have called their “city of refuge.”
In early March of 1839, church elders Isaac Morley and Titus Billings came to a wooded area in Walker Township in Hancock County, about a mile north and a mile east of Lima. They found a leaky, windowless log cabin there. Morley bought it, built a chimney up one wall, and moved in his family. That year, others settled in the area, including John and Hannah Carter and their son William Furlsbury Carter and his family, as did Edmund and Lana Durfee. Many Mormons moved on to construct Nauvoo, the city that dominated Hancock County throughout the first half of the 1840s. Other settlements sprang up in the vicinity of Nauvoo in Hancock County, notably in Green Plains and on Bear Creek.
Isaac Morley was born in 1786 in Massachusetts. He was a flutist in a military band in the War of 1812. He married and became an early settler in Kirkland, Ohio, where in 1828 he joined Sidney Rigdon’s Campbellite community, later creating on his large farm there a communal society called the “Big Family.” He converted to Mormonism, as did Rigdon, in late 1830 or early 1831. The place in Hancock County at which Morley settled became known as Morley’s Settlement.
William G. Hartley, professor of history at Brigham Young University, described the settlement as a sprawling collection of individual farmsteads. It stretched over parts of at least three square-mile land sections in the township, Sections 29, 31 and 32. The Solomon Hancock family was in Section 29, the Carter family in Section 31. A town site, platted as Yelrome, which is Morley spelled backward with an added ‘e’ — but otherwise known as Morley Town — was in section 32, at the south edge of present-day Tioga. The town plat was recorded at the Carthage courthouse on April 24, 1844.
Joe Conover was the editor of The Herald Whig 1983-2001. John and Hannah Carter were his great-great-great grandparents.
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