Personal Life
Folsom was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on March 25, 1815. By the age of 16 he held a supervisory position in his father's contracting firm. Folsom directed up to hundreds of employees on dock projects around Lake Erie. He and his father then moved to Buffalo, New York where they ran a building business.
In New York Folsom met his future wife Zervial Eliza Clark whom he married at age 22 on August 12, 1837. Folsom also encountered a Latter Day Saint ("Mormon") stonemason by the name of Enoch Reese, who helped convert him to Mormonism. Folsom and his wife were baptized in a frigid Niagara River on February 17, 1842.
Folsom and his wife traveled to Nauvoo, Illinois in the spring of 1842. Nauvoo was then center of the Latter Day Saint movement, and Folsom became an acquaintance of Joseph Smith, the movement's founder.
Read more about this topic: William Harrison Folsom
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