In the spring of 1844 Elders Hyrum Smith and Lyman Wight came there on a special mission.
Quite a number of people in that vicinity embraced the new faith and a branch of the Church was organized and presided over by Elder Samuel Bent. My father did not believe so readily, but after a few weeks he, too, was convinced and my parents became members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints–they being baptized by immersion for the remission of sins and having hands laid upon them for the reception of the Holy Ghost. The writer went in that meeting prepared to believe all the speaker said, and your humble friend has been a believer in what many call Mormonism from that hour.Īfter attending one or two more meetings and reading the Book of Mormon all she could, my mother was fully convinced of the truth of the gospel. It is said in the scriptures: “Blessed are they who know the joyful sound ” so the writer must just then have been one of the favored, for at the very first sound of Jared Carter’s voice–for it was he who was speaking–a strange, unaccountable feeling came over me, and before hearing one word pronounced by him, there was something connected with the tone of his voice that convinced me he was a man of God and was telling the truth.
#Omer melody assistant full#
Their place of holding meeting was in a log schoolhouse built in the edge of some timber and as we turned from the main road to drive near we knew that meeting had commenced, for we heard the speaker in a full and animated tone of voice enunciating his doctrines. It was winter and of course a sleigh was our mode of conveyance. Their little son Lyman was permitted to bear them company. My parents were members of the Methodist Church and did not wish to exchange that faith for another but they went to hear what these strangers had to say. Naturally enough we felt a curiosity to see these strange men and hear more concerning their new religion. Of course we knew they were followers of Joseph Smith, whom rumor had associated with the golden Bible matter concerning which we had heard in the state of New York. Not only after our location there, two Mormon Elders came to our neighborhood and held meetings. Soon after hearing this rumor it was my lot to turn my back upon the hallowed scenes of that natal home–scenes still dear in memory–as my parents removed to Michigan, settling near the town of Pontiac, in Oakland county. This strange rumor became the topic of much talk and wonderment through that part of the country. But, at such meeting, did some fortuitous chance reveal the parties’ names, the intuitive powers would be instantaneous in throwing off feelings of restraint and prompting enquiries into the fortunes of each since the days of childhood had gone down forever in the great whirlpool of time.Ī golden bible–the rumor said–had been taken out of the earth in the western portion of New York State by a young man named Joseph Smith, who said an angel of the Lord had revealed it to him: that it purported to give an account of a great and enlightened nation of people, then extinct, from whom the American Indians were descendants. The actors are scattered upon the wide globe, and those then so devoted in their friendships would be strangers now if chance were to bring them together. In that neighborhood he made his infantile debut upon this terrestrial globe and there is laid the scene of his earliest recollections. When his mind wanders back over the vista of the past to call up the time and place where he first heard a rumor of anything pertaining to the strange people now having a world-wide fame as Mormons, or, more properly, Latter-day Saints, the focus of his mind concentrates upon a spot in dear old Verona which was his home by virtue of its being the abode of his parents. Counting up the years, it is easily determined that he is now nearing the “three score and ten,” which so frequently fixes the limit of human life. He is a native of the state of New York, township of Verona, Oneida County, and first breathed the vital spark of life November 22, 1819. His grandfather, Josiah Littlefield, fought through the war of 1812, for which service he drew a pension during the latter years of his life. Lyman Omer Littlefield, who has undertaken in this little volume to give publicity to many incidents connected with the experience of the Saints, is the second son of Waldo Littlefield and Mercy Higgins.
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