Chapter Fifteen:
Babbitt
Just two months after the war ended, on the other side of the world, in the late afternoon local time of April 5, 1815, a mountain called Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in the tropical archipelago that is now Indonesia exploded with the force of 2 million Hiroshima bombs.
Tambora is what is now called a supervolcano. There are fewer than 20 known in the world. The nature of the gasses dissolved in the magma which feeds them makes them vastly more explosive than other volcanoes. Toba, also in Indonesia, is one. It erupted 70,000 years ago and nearly wiped out the fledgling human race. Yellowstone, in Wyoming, is another. Its last eruption was about 600,000 years ago, before modern humans interested in the history of Euclid Township had evolved. Its usual eruption period is roughly 500,000 years, making it about 100,000 years overdue. It will erupt again (another 100,000 years? next month?) and destroy the United States, or whatever polity or polities then occupy its territory. But when it does the effects will not be limited to North America. They will be global, and will likely create another extinction crisis for the humans. Nothing can be done to stop this. It will happen.
Some other—though not many—volcanic eruptions have been larger (such as Toba, such as Yellowstone), but the 1815 Tambora event was the largest to take place in recorded human history. The famous Krakatoa eruption (again: Indonesia) in 1883 was less than half its size. Mount Vesuvius, which made chilling statues of the inhabitants of Roman Pompeii in 79 CE, was just one-twentieth. Tambora 1815 rated a seven on volcanologists' eight-point Volcanic Explosivity Index. Mount St. Helens in the United States in 1980 was a three.
Locally, the tsunami the Tambora blast made and the searing pyroclastic flows which thundered down its slopes and sizzled across the surface of the Java Sea killed perhaps 100,000 people. Later that year the starvation caused by the destruction of human and livestock food crops covered in its ash would claim many hundreds of thousands more. It sent aloft a plume of microscopically fine particles and sulfur-dioxide which reached the stratosphere and encircled the planet within months. The sulfur-dioxide reacted in the atmosphere and became sulfuric acid which returned to earth as acid rain, burning the flesh of living things and killing cultivated plants. The fine particles blocked sunlight, killing even more food plants, and cooled global temperatures by three degrees. There are fewer records documenting Tambora's effects available from the Southern Hemisphere, but in North America, Europe and Asia the climate disruption was major and catastrophic. American weather historians remember 1816 as "The Cold Summer," or, more ominously "The Year Without a Summer," or, more ominously still, "Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death."
Very few regular folk likely ever knew the volcano had erupted, and not even the most learned natural philosophers would have been able to explain how a volcanic event, no matter how large, in the Eastern Tropics could affect climate in North America. Not until the late 20th century would researchers studying the possible effects of a large-scale nuclear war find models showing the global cooling effects of large amounts of fine particles in the atmosphere. This same line of inquiry also led to the current understanding of a major component of the cause of the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Gertrude Van Rensselaer Wickham, herself ignorant of its cause when she was writing in the late 19th century, described the mysterious weather which occurred in 1816 and after:
"1816: The Notable Summer Called 'The Cold Summer.' There were severe frosts every month of this year all over New England. There was no corn raised, and very little hay or oats. All kinds of vegetables were cut down by frost when half grown. This caused great poverty and suffering in that section of the country. Horses and cattle had to be almost given away, or killed because of the lack of fodder. The winter of 1816-1817 was extremely severe, and the following spring was so backward that New England farmers were plunged into despair. In June the hills along the Connecticut Valley were almost as barren as an ordinary November. Cattle died by thousands, and many farmers' families came near perishing from starvation. This unprecedented weather was also experienced in Ohio, and caused much poverty and suffering."
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John Crosier left his home in western Massachusetts on New Years Day, 1816, for the frontier West and walked right into the teeth of it.
Crosier was a gunsmith in his youth near Boston, and a Minuteman at Lexington, fighting the British on the first morning of the Revolutionary War. He was wounded at the Battle of Bunker Hill, and later enlisted in the Continental Army, fighting under Washington, and witnessed the British surrender at Yorktown. After the peace he moved his family outside of town to Roxbury, where his first wife, Fanna Whiting, whom he married just six days before Lexington, would give birth in 1789 to his second daughter, Nancy.
After just a few seasons in Roxbury Crosier learned of cheap land in the Berkshires. He bought 150 acres in Partridgefield, now Peru, Massachusetts, and moved his family there in 1791. He lost his 16-year-old son Paul there in 1803 to a gun accident. The tragedy destroyed Fanna, who besides her inconsolable grief suffered with incurable tuberculosis and had but few years ahead of her. She died in 1807, and Crosier married Druscilla Gleason the following fall. They had no children together, and she lived not two and a half years after their marriage. Four months after Druscilla's death, Crosier married a young Irish widow with two small children named Sally Bemis, the wife who would accompany him to Euclid Township.
The Crosiers left Partridgefield for Euclid January 1, 1816, driving their oxen across the frozen Hudson River north of Albany and on across New York through the Mohawk Valley. Inference from other evidence suggests that with them came two of Crosier's sons, Andrew, age 36, and Jason, 34, plus their wives, Catharine McPherson, 30, and Almira Newton, 34. It's possible, perhaps likely, that also with them at this time were Crosier's daughter Nancy, by then 27-years-old, and her husband, 26-year-old Ira Babbitt.
It's clear the Crosiers struggled during their first year in Euclid, and the 1816 Tambora climate disruption is obviously implicated. Near as it can be reconstructed, in Ohio the year warmed as usual until April, when temperatures stopped their normal springtime increase and then began to slide. On May 20 a severe frost killed that year's entire crop of corn. Two days later snow fell. The weather improved in early June and the farmers replanted, but later that month and into July bizarre summer snowstorms gripped the entire Northeast. Seven inches of snow fell in New York and Massachusetts, ten in Vermont. In Ohio, Fourth of July celebrations were cancelled due not just to snow, but to heavy snow. Two more frosts in August and September delivered the final blows. And as Gertrude Van Rensselaer Wickham recalls, this "caused much poverty and suffering."
On January 20, 1817, the Euclid Township trustees issued a warrant to the constable to eject John, Andrew and Jason Crosier from the township. In the early Western Reserve townships employed an Overseer of the Poor, an officer there not to provide for indigent members of the community, but to prevent indigents from becoming members of the community. Vagrants were promptly ushered to the next township, where presumably, they were ushered to the next township, and so on. Referring the Crosiers for this treatment indicates that they had become destitute.
The family remained a part of Euclid, however, but whether this means they were ejected and returned in better circumstances or somehow convinced the township officials to allow them to stay is not clear. John and Sally Bemis Crosier and Ira and Nancy Crosier Babbitt appear to have settled on the lake plain near Euclid Creek. In 1820 Jason Crosier and two other men jointly bought 333 acres of land on the south side of State Road (Mayfield) on the trail leading to Warrensville (now Green Road) in what is now South Euclid. Jason later appeared on lists of people holding township office.
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If not actually with Nancy's father and brothers in 1816, Ira and Nancy Crosier Babbitt arrived in Euclid Township sometime prior to 1820 when they are found on the federal census, the first and only time they appear in records among the households of Euclid. They were not overly attached to the place, however, a not unusual situation for many of the early families who came, stayed for a while, then moved on to other parts of the Western Reserve or beyond Ohio altogether. In 1823, Ira and Nancy Crosier Babbitt left Euclid and moved about ten miles east to Kirtland. There the Babbitts' fate became linked with the talents and fortunes of a powerfully gifted orator from Pittsburgh named Sidney Rigdon.
In the early 1820s Rigdon had been a rising star in the Baptist church, first in Warren, Ohio, then back home in Pittsburgh where his skills as a preacher became legendary. However, around 1821, Rigdon began studying the teachings of a renegade minister named Alexander Campbell, founder of a movement that would bear his name as the Campbellites. The Baptists insisted on a mystical conversion experience before saving baptism would be administered, barring the doors of heaven to the sincere faithful who could not in honesty claim to have had such a vision. All an applicant to Campbell's church need do for baptism was profess belief that Jesus was the Son of God and baptism and its blessing of salvation would follow. Rigdon was convinced, and began to extol his new Campbellite beliefs from the pulpit. Heretical teaching coupled with Rigdon's extraordinary persuasive talents as a preacher won him a sacking from the Baptists, who could not allow such a charismatic figure to mislead their congregations. Unemployed, yet with zeal unshaken, Rigdon worked as a tanner for the next two years preaching the Campbellite gospel from the courthouse steps on Sundays.
Campbell and his teachings were not universally unpopular, however. To the contrary, in several congregations he was quite influential, among them being the Baptist church of Mentor, Ohio, adjacent to Kirtland and just five miles from Euclid. In June 1826 Campbell secured Rigdon some freelance preacher work delivering the funeral sermon of the church's late pastor, the Reverend Warner Goodall. Rigdon gave what might have been the sermon of his life that day, were he not to give several more such sermons in his extraordinary career. The Mentor congregation was awed by his power and eloquence, and on the strength of that single sermon invited him to become their permanent pastor. Restored to a pulpit, with a new following receptive to his Campbellite teachings, Rigdon proceeded to spread his message across the Western Reserve. In 1828 he and his brother in law held their first Campbellite revival in Mentor, where "the whole community was quickly and thoroughly aroused... Twenty persons were baptized the first time they repaired to the Jordan..." the Chagrin River in this case serving as proxy for the desert run in which Christ was baptized. "The immediate result was the conversion of over fifty souls to the Lord Jesus... From Mentor they went to Kirtland, where almost an equal ingathering awaited them. The fields were white for the harvest. At the first baptizing here, twenty souls were lifted into the kingdom. Others followed, and soon the numbers so increased that a separate organization became a necessity—so mightily prevailed the word of the Lord." This 1828 Kirtland revival may have been the occasion of the Babbitts' conversion to Campbellism. It would have been a small matter for them to attend one of the services of the persuasive and magnetic minister in nearby Mentor.
For three years Sidney Rigdon preached all over Northeast Ohio, and gained converts everywhere he went, including in Euclid Township in 1829, where he won over several members of the Dille and Cranny families, baptizing in Euclid Creek. But his unremitting search for, literally, the Gospel truth again brought him into conflict with the leaders of his own religious community. Rigdon, seeking a restoration of "the ancient order of things," life as depicted in the New Testament, wondered why miracles should be confined to Biblical times. He had also visited the Shaker colony at North Union in Warrensville Township and been impressed with their commitment to communal ownership of property. Alexander Campbell rejected both ideas and the dissonance of the two men became so acute as to cause a schism of Rigdon, his flock in tow, with the Campbellites in 1830. Once again the leader of a congregation without a church, Rigdon convinced one of his followers, Isaac Morley, to host an experiment in communal living on his farm in Kirtland. There, on the Morley farm, history would find Sidney Rigdon, ever struggling to discern God's will, barely one year later.
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Enter Parley Parker Pratt.
Growing up in Upstate New York, Parley Pratt struggled with many of the same religious dilemmas which had troubled Sidney Rigdon. He found no satisfactory answers to salve his anxious soul from either his father or the several Protestant sects which canvassed the Erie Canal region. As a young man, a series of financial setbacks led him to despair of ever establishing himself near his home and he sought to flee his shame and find meaning by abandoning the farming life and traveling to the mysterious West to preach the New Testament among the Indians of the Great Plains. He began his journey in 1826, but late in the year, and when winter closed in he'd only gotten as far as Amherst, Ohio, about 40 miles west of Euclid. He built a small cabin in the forest there and holed up for the season, living on venison and passing his solitary days with his Bible and the journals of Lewis and Clark. By spring he'd grown attached to the Western Reserve. He made a homestead and married, but his religious yearnings continued to gnaw at him until Rigdon's Campbellite revival rolled through. Rigdon's message of restoration of the ancient order of the Gospels and baptism for the remission of sins thrilled Pratt and he became an enthusiastic Campbellite.
The Babbitts too soon moved to Amherst. As with their moves to Euclid and Kirtland, the exact time and motivation for their move to Amherst is lost, but it took place after August 1827, when their last child, Harriet, was born in Kirtland, and, significantly, followed the movements of Sidney Rigdon. Several of the Babbitts' children and grandchildren stayed in Mentor and the family's ties to Rigdon's home base in the Mentor/Kirtland area remained strong.
Despite successes sating the human longings for wife and warm hearth, the Gospels continued to pull at Parley Pratt. Scarcely a year had passed since his conversion to the Campbellites when he confessed to his wife a calling to abandon Ohio and return to his home in New York to preach among his old neighbors. Though she knew it meant poverty, his dutiful wife complied and they set off by lake steamer to Buffalo. Yet unknown to the Pratts, extraordinary things had been happening near Parley's childhood home. The excitement there centered around a young man from nearby Palmyra, New York, named Joseph Smith.
Smith claimed that for the past several years he'd been regularly visited by angels. They had given him, he said, instructions on where to find a set of golden plates engraved in a lost ancient language buried in a nearby hillside, along with magical stones which would allow him to read them. Smith placed the stones in his hat and stuck his face inside to block out all but their supernatural light and in this way, he said, he was able to read the golden plates, dictating their contents to a series of scribes. The product, Smith claimed, was a restored New Testament, born of miracles, not in the long past in far away Biblical lands, but then and there along the Erie Canal, a uniquely American Christianity with a resurrected Christ who'd visited ancient Indians long before the arrival of the Europeans. Smith published his work in March 1830 under the title The Book of Mormon. Two weeks later in Fayette, New York he founded a new church around it, called the Church of Jesus Christ, but which most outside it just called after the sect's holy book, the Mormons.
Parley Pratt first read The Book of Mormon in August 1830 and embraced Mormonism from the moment he learned of it. He met and discoursed with Joseph Smith and decided the events Smith described were the miracles he'd been waiting for. He was baptized into the Mormon church on September 1, 1830, and commenced to spread the word of his new faith. He preached about a month in New York before Smith appointed him and three others to carry the new gospel to the Indians on the Great Plains, Pratt's old goal from the time he'd originally left New York years earlier. Leaving his wife with family, Pratt and his companions headed west, making one very important stop on the way.
At the Morley farm in Kirtland Pratt called on his charismatic teacher, Sidney Rigdon. Initially skeptical, Rigdon was nonetheless polite, offering hospitality to his guests and agreeing to read the copy of The Book of Mormon they presented him. He did, and to his surprise found himself greatly impressed with its contents and the testimony of those witnesses who swore to its supernatural origins. He allowed the missionaries to preach to his congregation and to distribute copies of The Book of Mormon in and around Kirtland and Mentor. Rigdon, the indispensable figure in the survival and growth of this infant church, was baptized a Mormon in the Chagrin River in mid-November, 1830. Most of his congregation followed, including the Babbitts. Parley Pratt and his companions then continued on to found a branch of the Church of Jesus Christ in western Missouri, near the present location of Kansas City, a mission important both in the history of the Mormon church and the lives of Ira and Nancy Crosier Babbitt.
Meanwhile, back in New York, Smith and his new church had attracted the ire of the district. Long before his magic stones and his oracular top hat Joseph Smith had a reputation in the area as a con man. Now he'd come forward with essentially blasphemous assertions of divine revelations and condemnations of the churches confidently and comfortably attended by the good Protestant farm folk along the Erie Canal as "abominations in the sight of God." That the new church was succeeding and winning converts every day must have been especially galling. Soon Smith's life and the safety of his family were at risk, and it grew increasingly more advisable for him to leave New York. The Kirtland community, centered around Rigdon's converted Campbellite congregation, now enamored of their prophet Joseph Smith, had already invited him to join them in Ohio, and just at that propitious moment Smith had, he said, another revelation from God that he should do so. He arrived in Kirtland on the first of February, 1831, and called all Mormons everywhere to gather there with him. They did come, in startling numbers, causing the same feelings among their neighbors that accompanied every Mormon gathering to follow: anxiety, annoyance, then anger, and finally hatred.
If Smith thought the move to Ohio was the end of his troubles he was disappointed. The Mormons, unlike the Baptists or the Campbellites or the other sects which periodically swept through the Western Reserve in the frontier period, did not appear then pass like a weather front, but poured in, in numbers so large as to quickly dominate whatever area Joseph Smith designated for them to gather. These included many poor members of the church, whom their new neighbors feared would become dependent on the town for support. The Mormon church soon adopted Sidney Rigdon's bent toward communal property, an economic arrangement which disincentivized individuals from improving or even maintaining their homes and farm lots, negatively affecting property values in a world where one's wealth derived principally from his land. Then certain church leaders, beginning with Smith, began taking multiple wives, shocking the moral sensibilities of the neighborhood and even some other Mormons. (Sidney Rigdon, by the way, objected to the practice, and Ira Babbitt never joined with any woman other than Nancy Crosier.) Smith, furthermore, was a poor businessman. He extended credit where he shouldn't have, and ran up debts which he never repaid. Soon some of his followers, becoming better acquainted with Smith and observing his conduct and leadership, had second thoughts about his new church, doubted Smith and his miraculous claims. Some began to see him as the con man many had always said he was. Several of these apostates, as the Mormons labeled them, denounced Smith and the church in the local papers, further fanning the neighborhood's anti-Mormon flames. Mobs dragged Smith and Rigdon from their homes in early 1832 and tarred and feathered the two, but they refused to abandon their church or Kirtland.
The Mormon settlement in Missouri fared no better. They suffered the same sneers and setbacks as their brethren in Ohio with an added twist: Missouri was a slave state, settled by Southerners. The vast majority of Mormons came from New England and the eastern Great Lakes, and when they gathered, as they invariably did, it threatened not only Missouri's economic and social order as it had in Northeast Ohio, but the dominance of a pro-slavery electorate in a state created in a compromise struck to maintain the delicate pre Civil War balance of slave and free. Considerably further from the Eastern centers of American civilization and law than Fayette or Kirtland, opposition and, soon, violence against the Missouri Mormons reached an extreme in 1833. Desperate pleas from Parley Pratt and the others began arriving in Kirtland, begging their families and leaders to send aid.
Missouri's governor assured the Mormons he would restore order and protect their lives and property, but days then weeks passed with no orders to the militia to stop the theft and looting of Mormon farms, stores and homes in the state, not to mention shooting of the Mormons themselves. The Mormon elders in Kirtland listened with horror to the reports from Missouri. When they finished Smith stood and declared that he would personally lead an armed contingent west to save the settlements.
Through the spring of 1834 Smith and his delegates canvassed for recruits and were disappointed by the general reluctance they found to the call. One who did enthusiastically join was the Babbitts' second son, Almon Whiting, whose dedication to Mormonism would lead him on numerous adventures and eventually to leadership positions within the church. He marched with Smith, Pratt and about 100 others from Kirtland in a Mormon army dubbed Zion's Camp on May 5, 1834. Picking up recruits along the way, they passed through Hudson, Dayton, Indianapolis, Indiana, and Springfield, Illinois, before crossing the Mississippi into Missouri in early June. Understandably, Missouri's governor was disturbed by an armed force from a foreign, not to mention Northern, state entering his territory, and not only refused to render them assistance but tacitly supported the armed mobs and frontier vigilantes who menaced the Mormons with implications and overt threats of violence and death along the way. Within the Mormon host, bickering about the hardships of the march and serious doubts about Smith's leadership and claims of divine revelations further weakened the Mormon army to the point of disintegration. Divided and starving, they were anything but an effective fighting force when Smith announced that the Lord had suffered their mission to fail due to the members' lack of faith and failure to live by God's commandments. The announcement sparked and immediate mutiny in the ranks of Zion's Camp that was only stopped by a sudden outbreak of cholera, which they then passed to the Missouri Mormons whom they'd come to rescue.
Smith dismissed his army on July 3, 1834. Scores of Mormons abandoned the church on the spot and straggled back to their homes in Ohio, New York and New England, but not Almon Babbitt, nor his parents. Smith returned to Kirtland on the first of August. Almon Babbitt presumably returned about the same time. About eight weeks later in Kirtland Ira and Nancy's oldest daughter, 19-year-old Frances Maria, married Arvin Allen Avery, a wagon maker from Boonville, Missouri, a settlement in the central part of the state about 100 miles away from the troubles. He may have been one of the Mormon settlers whom Zion's Camp hoped to rescue. Presumably he returned with Smith's army to Ohio seeking safety in the company of his fellow Mormons and perhaps the prospect of finding a wife. Missouri eventually ended the crisis by creating three new counties in unsettled lands north of the troubles and inviting the Mormons to settle there where they would not be molested. Those Mormons left in Missouri entered the new lands and began a settlement there called Far West.
While their neighbors in Ohio and Missouri seethed against them, Zion's Camp fractured, and Smith faced personal bankruptcy and that of his church, plus enemies within and without, Kirtland from 1833 to 1836 was the scene of one of the Mormon church's most impressive accomplishments.
Beginning, per usual, with a new revelation to Smith in 1833, the Mormon community of Kirtland began fundraising and construction of the Kirtland Temple, three stories of exalted New England meetinghouse, the exterior of which rendered gleaming white by the home glassware donated by the faithful women of the community which was crushed and mixed with the plaster and sparkled in the sunlight. The Mormons dedicated it in the spring of 1836 with a week of ecstatic celebrations featuring a three hour sermon by Sidney Rigdon on the first day. But the glory of their Temple did not last. Within mere months of the dedication, Smith would plant the seed for the greatest and final debacle of the Ohio period of the church.
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The Mormon venture in Kirtland never became economically viable. Heavily in debt, short on credit, overrun by indigent members who'd swarmed to Kirtland from all parts of the country, boycotted by neighbors hostile to their movement—obstacles, incidentally, which make the construction of the temple at that time even more impressive, if perhaps reckless—the Mormons struggled constantly to keep their community afloat. Smith and Rigdon determined that if they could not get cash and capital from others they would simply give it to themselves, by starting a bank. Backed by stock sales and the value of the community's farms held in common by the church, they called their venture the Kirtland Safety Society Bank. They dispatched a representative to Philadelphia to buy plates to print bank notes and another to Columbus to acquire a charter from the state. The plates arrived from Philadelphia and the Mormons printed nearly $100,000 in notes, an action that would soon reveal itself to be premature. Their man in Columbus returned with the upsetting news that the legislature had rejected their application for a bank charter. With a significant investment in the venture already made in plates and printing and the sale of stock, they pressed ahead nonetheless, illegally. They stamped the prefix "anti—" and suffix "—ing" on the bank notes, rendering the name of the issuing institution "The Kirtland Safety Society anti—Bank—ing Company," and these worthless slips of paper soon covered Northeast Ohio. Just three weeks after opening for business in January 1837 the bank announced that its notes could not be redeemed for specie. That summer, the Panic of 1837 began a nationwide depression that lasted six years. Smith and Rigdon were sued for illegal banking, but with armed mobs hunting them being hauled before the courts was the least of their worries. Before judgment could be rendered in the case Smith and Rigdon fled the state, finding refuge in the settlement at Far West, Missouri. In the spring of 1838 Smith called the Mormons to gather in Far West and that summer the Mormons began their exodus from Kirtland, leaving just a tiny and scattered community behind, which included Ira and Nancy Crosier Babbitt. Just as well. The Mormon gathering at Far West sparked one of the ugliest episodes in the American western migration known as the Mormon War. In October 1838, the Missouri governor issued a proclamation that the Mormons should be driven from the state or "exterminated." There immediately followed a massacre at a place called Haun's Mill, a slaughter of defenseless Mormon settlers including several young children and an elderly man who was hacked to death. Smith, Rigdon and Pratt were all captured by the state militia and sentenced to death and only spared by the commanding general refusing to carry out the order. A long trial followed into 1839, culminating in the Mormon leaders' mysterious escape, which may have been ordered to be allowed to happen at high levels of the state government. They fled back across the Mississippi into Illinois to a river settlement called Commerce. There Smith again called the Mormons to gather and renamed the town Nauvoo.
The 1840 census showed Ira and Nancy Crosier Babbitt had moved again, this time to Mentor, close to Kirtland and the site of Rigdon's congregation which had seeded the Mormon church. That fall the church leaders in Nauvoo named Almon Whiting Babbitt president of the skeletal Mormon community in Kirtland. The Babbitts married another daughter at the Kirtland Temple, then buried two sons there, before another revelation announced that the time had come for the Mormons left in Kirtland to join their brethren in Illinois. Ira and Nancy Crosier Babbitt left Ohio for good sometime around May 1843, bound for Nauvoo.
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The mob finally caught up to Joseph Smith on June 26, 1844, in Carthage, Illinois, where he was gunned down in the town jail while there in protective custody. He'd already fallen out with Rigdon by that time, their serious troubles beginning nearly two years earlier when Smith tried to take Rigdon's teenaged daughter as one of his plural wives. On the day of Smith's murder Sidney Rigdon had already left the Mormon church. He was on the long trail back home to Pittsburgh when a rider overtook him with the news. He turned back to Nauvoo to join in the council assembling there to decide on the new leadership of the church. Although Rigdon had been Smith's number two since the move to Kirtland and had literally ensured the survival of the church on multiple occasions, he lost the contest for leadership that followed Smith's death to his old Kirtland neighbor, Brigham Young. One of Young's first acts as leader was the excommunication of Rigdon, the most serious threat to his newly acquired power. Exhausted, dejected and bitter, Rigdon accepted an offer to go live with his son-in-law in Friendship, New York, where he died in 1876.
Parley Pratt died in 1857 in Arkansas, stabbed and then shot by the enraged husband of a woman he'd appropriated to be a plural Mormon wife.
In 1846 Brigham Young abandoned the United States. He led the Mormons from Nauvoo, across the Plains, into Mexico, whose territory at the time reached north to present Oregon. There he established their new capital in Alta California on the shores of the Great Salt Lake. But that very same year the U.S. went to war with their southern neighbor, manifesting their destiny. They conquered Mexico, annexed its northern half, and pulled Salt Lake City back in to the United States. Brigham Young would add first governor of the Utah Territory to his resume and become a power broker in the construction of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s. In the 1890s plural marriage would be a serious complication to Utah's admission as a state.
Today the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints based in Salt Lake City, Utah, claims over 17 million adherents in 160 countries. Kirtland, Ohio, remains the location of some of the faith's holiest places where, they teach, their prophet received some of his most important revelations. They hold the nearby Chapin Forest Reservation of the Lake Metroparks as the site of several miracles. Almon Whiting Babbitt rests in the Temple's sacred yard.
After the Mormons' departure the Kirtland Temple was bought and sold many times, originally to settle some of Joseph Smith's unpaid debts. At various times through the years it was used as a secular public meetinghouse and even as a livestock shed. It still stands, at 9020 Chillicothe Road in Kirtland, and is once again a Mormon holy site.
The affiliation of the Kirtland Temple, however, is no longer with the main Mormon church based in Salt Lake City, but a schismatic sect, the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or RLDS. In the 1980s a member of the RLDS movement from Missouri became obsessed with the Kirtland Temple and organized a cult group near it in a house across the street from the Lake Metroparks Farmpark on Chardon Road, and in its name there murdered the five members of the Avery family—parents Dennis and Cheryl, and daughters Trina, age 15, Becky, 13, and Karen, six—in April 1989. The cult leader was executed by the State of Ohio in 2006. The Averys are buried together in the Oak Ridge Memory Gardens cemetery in Independence, Missouri.
John Crosier died in Euclid Township in 1823. His family buried him in the lost Baptist burial ground, about which more will be said shortly. They erected a wooden cross to mark the spot, and laid a brookstone beside it, carved with the initials "J.C." In 1881 a man named Seney ran the Nickel Plate Railroad over John Crosier's grave (hence: lost). Almost 30 years later his great grandson moved him to the township cemetery west of Highland Road in Euclid with one of the simple and dignified headstones provided for veterans by the federal government. There both it and he can be found today.
Ira and Nancy Crosier Babbitt did not go with the other Mormons to the Great Salt Lake. By 1846 they were both in their late 50s and may not have felt up to the challenges of the trek across the Plains and the desert. Many of the facts of their lives—their conversion to his congregation before Smith and the Mormons entered the picture, rejection of plural marriage, following him from Mentor to Amherst to Kirtland—suggest a core loyalty to Sidney Rigdon rather than Joseph Smith or Brigham Young, and Rigdon was gone. They may have known Young back in Kirtland and may not have trusted him or his leadership. They may have just finally been fed up with the whole thing.
Ira and Nancy made their final move from Nauvoo, Illinois, to Boonville, Missouri, presumably to live with the family of their daughter Francis Maria and her husband Arvin Avery, the wagon maker, perhaps as early as 1843.
There Nancy Crosier Babbitt died on January 23, 1859. Ira Babbitt lived a few more years then followed her, on March 5, 1867. They rest beside one another today in the Sunset Hill Cemetery in Boonville, Missouri.
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In Euclid Ira and Nancy Crosier Babbitt have a unique memorial.
To speed commerce, in 1906 the City of Cleveland adopted a new system of street designations. Splitting the city east and west down the center of Public Square it stripped the names of all north-south running thoroughfares, abolishing their original descriptive, historic, honorific names, and replacing them with bland, efficient numbers. In the Warehouse District, Spring Street became West 10th, Water Street West 9th, Bank Street West 6th, and Seneca West 3rd. East of the square Wood Street became East 3rd, Bond Street East 6th, and Erie Street East 9th. Anyone who has ever been downtown for a ball game and wondered what the Erie Street Cemetery is doing on East 9th Street, that's what. Case would be East 40th, and Willson East 55th, and the major road through Doan's Corners named for Nathaniel Doan became East 105th Street.
Cleveland annexed Collinwood Village in 1910, and made Adams Street, which marked the western boundary of Euclid Township, East 140th. Collamer Road, leading to the heart of the original Euclid Village, now East Cleveland, became East 152nd. Cleveland then took Nottingham Village in 1912. There had been in Nottingham on the west side of Euclid Creek a Crosier Avenue. Already sliced in two by the Collinwood Rail Yards (more on them later too), this became East 173rd. It would get sliced again in the late 20th century by the Lakeland Freeway.
Attempting to remain within the sphere of the central city's economic progress the Village of Euclid adopted the scheme, beginning their street numbers where Cleveland's left off. Babbitt Road, however, ran, still runs, not straight north and south but diagonal, southeast to northwest, and its original, historic name was therefore spared, and thus remains. It's the most prominent road in the City of Euclid and among the most prominent within the bounds of the old township to preserve the name of any of the early settlers. And well that it does, as the Babbitts' and the Crosiers' complicated story—from Tambora to the Mormons—is among the most fascinating of early Euclid Township, as well as among the most thoroughly forgotten.
The information in Chapter Fifteen is drawn from the following sources:
Backman, Milton Vaughn. The Heavens Resound: A History of the Latter-Day Saints in Ohio, 1830-1838. Deseret Book Co., 1983.
D'Arcy Wood, Gillen. Tambora: The Volcano that Changed the World. Princeton University Press, 2014.
Earley, Pete. Prophet of Death: the Mormon Blood-Atonement Killings. Morrow, 1991.
Euclid Township Trustees Minutes, Euclid, Ohio, 1809-1877. Microfilm: Cabinet 54, Drawer 2. WRHS archive, Cleveland, Ohio.
Goddard, Dick. Dick Goddard’s Weather Guide and Almanac for Northeast Ohio. Gray & Co., 1998.
Hayden, A.S. Early History of the Disciples in the Western Reserve, Ohio: with Biographical Sketches of the Principal Agents in their Religious Movement. Unigraphic, 1979.
Klingaman, William K. and Nichols P. Klingaman. The Year Without a Summer: 1816 and the Volcano that Darkened the World and Changed History. St. Martin's Press, 2013.
McKiernan, F. Mark. The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness: Sidney Rigdon, Religious Reformer, 1793-1876. Coronado Press, 1971.
Pratt, Parley P. The Autobiography of Parley Parker Pratt: One of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Embracing his Life, Ministry and Travels, with Extracts from his Miscellaneous Writings. Russell Bros., 1874.
Remini, Robert V. Joseph Smith. Viking, 2002.
Sassé, Cynthia Stalter and Peggy Murphy Widder. The Kirtland Massacre. D.I. Fine, 1991.
Stanley, Reva. A Biography of Parley P. Pratt: The Archer of Paradise. Caxton Printers, 1937.
Wickham, Gertrude Van Rensselaer. Memorial to the Pioneer Women of the Western Reserve. The Woman's Department of the Cleveland Centennial Commission, 1896.
Wickham, Gertrude Van Rensselaer. The Pioneer Families of Cleveland 1796-1840, Under the Auspices of the Woman's Department of the Cleveland Centennial Commission, 1896. Evangelical Publishing House, 1914.
Wright Crozier, Ida Florence and Darlene Ann Budzey Crozier. The Family History of Lieutenant John Crosier and his Descendants, 1750-1995. GENCO, 1995.
Revolutionary War pension application accessed via the Fold3 Database:
John Crosier, Cuyahoga County, Ohio, application S43406
Genealogy websites:
ancestry.com
findagrave.com