1985-Walker-Rachel R Grant
Rachel R. Grant: The Continuing Legacy of the Feminine Ideal
Walker, Ronald W., “Rachel R. Grant: The Continuing Legacy of the Feminine Ideal,” in Supporting Saints: Life Stories of Nineteenth-Century Mormons (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1985), 17–42.
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Rachel Ridgway Ivins was born at Hornerstown, New Jersey, 7 March 1821, the sixth of eight children. She would have few memories of her parents. Caleb, her father, evidently involved himself in the family’s expansive business concerns which included Hornerstown’s distillery, country store, and grist and saw mills. Due to apparent sunstroke exposure, he died when Rachel was six. To compound the tragedy, Edith Ridgway Ivins, her mother, described by her contemporaries as a “lovely, spirited woman, liked by all,” died just four years later.[2]
The orphan was subsequently raised by a succession of her close-knit relatives. For several years she remained at Hornerstown with Caleb Sr., her indulgent grandfather. However, she found the stringent household of her married cousins Joshua and Theodosia Wright at Trenton more to her liking. The Wrights’ home, which was set off by gardens complete with statuary and wildlife, represented no diminution in her lifestyle. Moreover, much to Rachel’s delight, the house was run by cousin Theodosia with precision, industry and regularity. Under the older woman’s demanding, six-year tutelage, teenage Rachel learned both personal discipline and the domestic arts. An able student, she returned to Monmouth County when she was about eighteen as a housekeeper for Richard Ridgway, her widower uncle.[3]
She must have marveled at the religious changes in her neighborhood. Like upstate New York’s earlier and more famous “Burned-Over” district, central New Jersey experienced wave after wave of religious excitement during the first half of the nineteenth century, with the newfangled and despised Mormons competing with the more established Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians. By the late 1830s, a cadre of some of Mormonism’s ablest missionaries, including Jedediah Grant, Erastus Snow, Benjamin Winchester, Wilford Woodruff, and Orson and Parley Pratt had founded a half-dozen Latter-day Saint congregations in central New Jersey, several with their own unpretentious chapels.[4]
Rachel’s kin played a major role in this activity. Young Israel Ivins was the first LDS convert from Monmouth County. Merchants Charles and James Ivins soon followed. Parley Pratt described the latter as a “very wealthy man” and enrolled him, along with himself, as a committee of two to reissue the Book of Mormon in the East. But no conversion was as telling upon Rachel as that of her older sister, Anna Lowrie Ivins. Optimistic and stoical, Anna was her alter ego and would remain so to the end of her life.[5]
Little is known of the sociology of conversion and less of its psychology, but Rachel, despite her initial belief that the Mormon preachers were “the false prophets the Bible speaks of,” seemed ideally prepared to accept the new religion. She always had been “religiously inclined, but not of the long-faced variety” and had enjoyed reading the Bible. Yet in a century which cultivated such things, she was a young lady without strong ties to a visible religious establishment. For generations her progenitors had been practicing Quakers, but by the nineteenth century this commitment had begun to wane; Rachel herself bridled at the Friend’s prohibition against song. While at the straitlaced Wrights’, who banned music from their home, she would retreat to a small grove of trees where she would sing as she sewed for her dolls. This penchant for music may have contributed to her conversion at sixteen to the more musically inclined Baptists, though her commitment failed to go very deep. She later claimed to have “never learned anything from them.”[1]
When Anna and a friend from Trenton told her that Erastus Snow and Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet, would preach at the “Ridge” above Hornerstown, she concluded after some hesitation to go. Though she found Joseph to be a “fine, noble looking man . . . so neat,” she was by her own account “prejudiced” and thus paid little heed to his message. Only politeness to her Trenton friend persuaded her to return the following day, Sunday, to hear Joseph Smith once more. Thereupon she returned to her room and pled for the Lord’s forgiveness for deliberately listening to false doctrine on the Sabbath. But Joseph Smith’s preaching planted a seed which continued to grow. “I attended some more meetings,” she recalled, “and commenced reading the Book of Mormon [so enthralled she began reading one evening and did not stop until almost daybreak], Voice of Warning, and other works” and was soon convinced that they were true. “A new light seemed to break in upon me, the scriptures were plainer to my mind, and the light of the everlasting Gospel began to illumine my soul.” When a Baptist minister’s funeral sermon consigned an unbaptized youth to hell she noted with favor the contrast of Orson Hyde’s discourse on the innocence and salvation of young children.[2]
Rachel’s interest was neither isolated nor unique. “Hundreds attended the [Mormon] meetings,” a local historian wrote of Joseph Smith’s preaching foray, and he “sealed [in baptism] a large number.” The drama of the moment was heightened when the Prophet anointed a lame and opiated boy, promised him freedom from both his pain and crutches, and saw the results as promised. Alarmed at the rising Mormon tide, the old-line clergy used stern methods to put down the new faith. Rachel’s Baptist minister admonished her that if she continued attending the Mormon meetings, she could retain neither her pew nor her fellowship in the congregation. “This seemed to settle the question with me,” Rachel remembered “I soon handed in my name [to the Mormons] for baptism and rendered willing obedience.”[3]
“Oh, what joy filled my being!” she exclaimed. Her conversion opened a floodgate of suppressed emotions which brought her Quaker relatives to the point of despair: (“When she was a Baptist, she was better, but now she is full of levity—singing all the time.”) She delighted in the words of Joseph Smith and those of another dynamic young preacher, Jedediah Grant, and became completely enmeshed in the Saints’ close-knit society. In addition to the Ivinses, of whom probably a dozen joined the new faith, many of her neighbors also were baptized. “What good times we had then,” she proclaimed years later.[4]
Nevertheless, Rachel wanted to settle in Nauvoo, Illinois, the hub of Mormon activity during the early 1840s. Already Charles and James Ivins had reconnoitered the area and returned with plans to move their families there. Driven by “the spirit of gathering,” Rachel along with several of her Ivins relatives ventured to the Mormon capital in the spring of 1842.[5]
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Notes
- ↑ RRG, “How I Became a ‘Mormon,’” unpublished memorandum, HJG Papers, Box 177, fd 19; RRG, “Minutes of a Meeting of the General Boards of the Young Men and Young Women MIA,” 11 June 1902, in LC 35:324; Woman’s Exponent 31 (1 and 15 December 1902): 53. For women and nineteenth-century religion see Barbara Welter, “The Feminization of American Religion: 1800–1860,” in Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, eds. Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner (New York: Harper & Row/Harper Colophon Books, 1974), 137–57; and Mary P. Ryan, “A Woman’s Awakening: Evangelical Religion and the Families of Utica, New York, 1800–1840,” American Quarterly 30 (Winter 1978): 602–23.
- ↑ RRG, “How I Became A ‘Mormon,’” 1; and RRG, “Joseph Smith, the Prophet,” Young Woman’s Journal 16 (Dec. 1905): 550–551.
- ↑ Sharp, “The Latter-day Saints or ‘Mormons’ in New Jersey,” 1–2; Salter, History of Monmouth and Ocean Counties, 253; RRG, “How I Became a ‘Mormon’” 1–2.
- ↑ RRG, “How I Became a ‘Mormon,’” 1–2; RRG, “Minutes of a Meeting of the General Boards”; and Relief Society Minute Book 1875, Thirteenth Ward, 1 April 1875, 10, Church Archives. In addition to the Ivinses, the Appleby, Applegate, Brown, Bennett, Curtis, Doremus, Horner, Implay, McKean, Robbins, Sill, Stoddard, Woodward, Wright, and Wychoff families mixed together without social distinction in their central New Jersey branches.
- ↑ Erastus Snow, Journal, typescript, vol. 2, 25, Church Archives; and RRG, “How I Became a ‘Mormon,’” 2. Snow, who visited his New Jersey flock in late 1841, declared, “I found them strong in the faith, many having of late been added to them and several families, I found about ready to move to Nauvoo,” Journal 2:28.
[2] Luther Prentice Allen, The Genealogy and History of the Shreve Family, 210, as quoted in Frances Bennett Jeppson, “With Joy Wend Your Way: The Life of Rachel Ivins Grant, My Great-Grandmother,” 1, typescript, 1952, Church Archives.
[3] Jeppson, “With Joy Wend Your Way,” 2; Rachel Ridgway Grant [hereafter RRG] to HJG, 18 December 1904, Box 176, fd. 22, HJG Papers; and Lucy Grant Cannon, “Recollections of Rachel Ivins Grant” Relief Society Magazine 25 (May 1938): 295–96.
[4] The Mormon invasion and success in central New Jersey is an Important but untold story of early LDS proselyting. The Mormon chapels must have been among the earliest built by Church members anywhere. William Sharp, “The Latter-day Saints or ‘Mormons’ in New Jersey,” typescript of a memorandum prepared in 1897, Church Archives, 3; Edwin Salter, History of Monmouth and Ocean Counties (Bayonne, NJ: E. Gardner and Son, 1890), 253; and Franklin Ellis, The History of Monmouth County, New Jersey (Cottonport, LA.: Polyanthos, 1974), 633. Later in the 1840s, LDS converts apparently founded a small fishing village on the New Jersey coast which they named “Nauvoo,” Stanley B. Kimball, “‘Nauvoo’ Found in Seven States,” Ensign, Apr. 1973, 23.
[5] Anthony W. Ivins, Diary, vol. 1, 3, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah; Kimball S. Erdman, Israel Ivins: A Biography (n.p., 1969), 3, Church Archives; Parley P. Pratt to Joseph Smith, Jr., 22 November 1839, Joseph Smith papers, Church Archives. At the Mormon Church conference held in Philadelphia, 13 January 1840, Ivins suggested and Joseph Smith agreed that the Book of Mormon should be printed instead in the West, Philadelphia Church Records 1840–1854 microfilm, Church Archives.
