Eliza R. Snow - Early Church Involvement

Early Church Involvement

Snow's Baptist parents welcomed a variety of religious believers into their home. In 1828, Snow and her parents joined Alexander Campbell’s Christian restorationist movement, the Disciples of Christ. When Joseph Smith, Jr., the Latter Day Saint prophet, took up residence in Hiram, Ohio, four miles from the Snow farm in 1831, the Snow family took a strong interest in the new religious movement. Eliza's mother and sister joined the Latter Day Saint Church early on; several years later, in 1835, Eliza was baptized and moved to Kirtland, Ohio, which was at the time the headquarters of the Church. Upon her arrival, Eliza donated her inheritance, a large sum of money, toward the building of the Church's Kirtland Temple. In appreciation, the building committee provided her with the title to "a very valuable -situated near the Temple, with a fruit tree-an excellent spring of water, and house that accommodated two families." Here Eliza taught school for Joseph Smith's family and was influential in interesting her younger brother Lorenzo Snow in the young Church. Lorenzo later became fifth President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Snow moved west with her family and the body of the Church, first to Adam-ondi-Ahman, a short-lived LDS settlement in Missouri, and then to Nauvoo, Illinois. In Nauvoo, Snow again made her living as a school teacher. She claimed to have secretly wed Joseph Smith, on 29 June 1842, as a plural wife. Eliza wrote fondly of Joseph “my beloved husband, the choice of my heart and the crown of my life”. However, Snow organized a petition in that same Summer of 1842, with a thousand female signatures, denying Smith was connected with polygamy and extoling his "virtue". Furthermore, as Secretary of the Ladies' Relief Society she organized the publishing of a certificate in October 1842 denouncing polygamy and denying Smith as its creator or participant. When Snow was informed that Smith's widow Emma Hale Smith had stated on her deathbed that her husband had never been a polygamist, Snow was reported to have stated "Sister Emma ... sunk so low ... (and) died with a libel on her lips."

Snow married polygamist Brigham Young as a plural wife. She traveled west across the plains and arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on 2 October 1847. There, childless Eliza became a prominent member of Young's family, moving into an upper bedroom in Young's Salt Lake City residence, the Lion House.