We can imagine ourselves visiting Aunt Rachel Grant, long-time president of the Thirteenth Ward Relief Society and one of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint’s “leading ladies” at her home on Salt Lake City’s Second East Street. In the year of our visit, 1890, her two-story, plastered adobe home partakes of the prevailing feminine ideal which stresses homemaking and handicraft. The stove is highly burnished, while the arms of each chair are covered with homemade lace crocheting. A corner “whatnot” meticulously displays pictures, small framed mottoes, wax and hair flowers, and other curios. Rachel’s person also reflects her times. Despite her sixty-nine years, her skin remains supple and clear. She credits her preservation to a lifetime devotion to skin hygiene—no cosmetics, no sunlight without a protecting bonnet, no dusting or sweeping without gloves. [1]

We visit Rachel Grant not wishing to find fault with her domesticity and primness nor with the other Victorian values she so fully embodies. Rather, we seek to understand her and her age—and in a sense ourselves. Aunt Rachel may not be as celebrated a feminist as her contemporaries Eliza R. Snow, Bathsheba W. Smith, or Emmeline B. Wells. But she has influenced later generations certainly as much and perhaps a great deal more. In our age which often overlooks the obvious, we forget the power which a nineteenth-century woman often wielded from her home. Rachel’s only child, Heber J. Grant, with whom she enjoyed a particularly close relationship, led the Church for twenty-seven years of the twentieth century, preaching and practicing the values he had learned from her.

When we understand Rachel Grant, we will also learn something about the personality of present-day Mormonism.

II

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.” [6]

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.[7]

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.” [8]

“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. [9]

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. [10]

“The first year of my stay was a very happy one,” she remembered. Her cousins Charles and James Ivins rose to immediate prominence. As two of the richest capitalists in the young city, they resumed their merchandising, met in council with Church leaders, and eventually operated the Nauvoo ferry. Their imposing, Federal-style, three-building complex on the corner of Kimball and Main streets was used for retailing and small community gatherings and served as a home as well. Here Rachel lived with James and his family in comfort and relative high style. [11]

Well bred and in her early twenties, Rachel must have turned the head of more than one admirer. While she herself denied having been a belle, she possessed charm and quiet refinement. A friend remembered her Nauvoo appearance: “She was dressed in silk with a handsome lace collar, or fichu, and an elegant shawl over her shoulder, and a long white lace veil thrown back over the simple straw bonnet. She carried and elaborate feather fan . . . , I recall the fascination of that fan. One could easily discern the subdued Quaker pride in her method of using it, for Sister Rachel had the air, the tone, and mannerisms of the Quakers.” [12]

There was more than a subdued and attractive façade. While little is known of her daily Nauvoo activity and interests, her bosom companion was Sarah Kimball, which suggests a great deal. Several years Rachel’s senior, this young and affluent matron entertained Mormon leaders with memorable elegance. Significantly, she was a thorough-going feminist who sought stimulation beyond the thimble and needles and who helped to initiate the Nauvoo Female Relief Society. The intimate friendship of Sarah and Rachel would continue the rest of their lives. [13]

During these Nauvoo days Rachel came to see the Church and its leaders at close view. Her understanding and acceptance of LDS teachings deepened. Because of her love of family and tradition, she especially found the newly declared doctrine promising salvation to the worthy dead “very precious to my soul.” Yet, Joseph Smith proved to be an enigma. When he preached, his power deeply affected her. But in private and informal moments, he seemed distressingly “unProphet-like.” Outgoing and playful, his personality was the polar opposite of Rachel’s—and contradicted her view of what a prophet should be. [14]

There were interludes when Joseph whittled away at her sectarian seriousness, and she came to admire him, along with his brother Hyrum, more than any men she had ever known. She was often at the Prophet's home for parties, although he was present only occasionally. “He would play with the people, and he was always cheerful and happy,” she remembered of these occasions. Once while visiting the Ivinses on the Sabbath, he requested the family girls sing the popular “In the Gloaming.” Rachel believed singing and newspaper reading breached the Sabbath and responded with a mortified, “Why Joseph, it’s Sunday!” Smith swept her objections aside with a smile and the comment, “The better the day, the better the deed.” [15]

These pleasant moments were not long lasting. Smith’s opponents, some of whom were in Rachel’s own household, were gathering force. Charles and apparently James Ivins joined the Law, Foster, and Higbee brothers in resisting the growing economic and doctrinal complexity of Mormonism. Charles, who despite his original capital worth, had not prospered in Nauvoo, reacted with particular outrage to rumors that some Church leaders were teaching and practicing plural marriage. [16]

Rachel also knew of these rumors in a very personal way. When Joseph sought an interview with her, she believed he wished to ask for her hand in plural marriage. Her personal turmoil over this prospect must have been excruciating. On one hand, there was the weight of outraged tradition, her cautious and puritanical instincts, and her family’s clamor that she withdraw from the Church with them. (Charles Ivins’s name appeared on the anti-Smith Nauvoo Expositor masthead as one of its publishers.) Her initial response was offended outrage, and she vowed with untypical shrillness that she would “sooner go to hell as a virtuous woman than to heaven as a whore.” Yet in other moments she must have considered her still strong feelings for Mormonism and her respect for Joseph. In her emotional distress, Rachel found it impossible to throw off a persistent fever which eventually threatened her life. [17]

The record during these difficult times is inconsistent, perhaps reflecting her own ambivalence. She refused to meet with Joseph Smith, yet years later she insisted that her faith in Mormonism never wavered. In fact, she repeatedly requested that the elders rebuke her illness; each time she felt strengthened. When Sidney Rigdon sought to lead the Church after the Prophet’s assassination, she saw Joseph’s mantle fall instead upon Brigham Young. “If you had had your eyes shut,” she later testified of President Young’s remarkable speech, “you would have thought it was the Prophet [Joseph]. In fact he looked like him, his very countenance seemed to change, and he spoke like him.” [18]

Notwithstanding these remarkable experiences, Rachel left Nauvoo in late 1844 bewildered and emotionally scarred. As her son later revealed, “When plural marriage was first taught, my mother left the church on account of it.” She returned to New Jersey, ailing physically as well as spiritually and planning never to mingle with the Saints again. She would be gone almost ten years. [19]

III

In Victorian symbolism, a dried white rose had an unmistakable meaning: better be ravaged by time and death than to lose one’s virtue. While Mormon leaders insisted that their plural marriage was heaven-sent and honorable, Rachel, like most women of her generation, initially rejected the practice. She was, in fact, the quintessence of the nineteenth century’s prevailing feminine ideal. Where and how she absorbed these values can only be suggested. Her first school was an eighteen-by-twenty-four-foot affair with a ceiling hardly high enough for an adult to stand, but nothing is known about what really counts—her teachers, primers, and curricula. She continued her formal studies while living in Trenton. Schools for young women in the area, like the Young Ladies’ Seminary at Border-town, emphasized as their most important duty “the forming of a sound and virtuous character.” Rachel was schooled in the heart, not necessarily the mind. She also assimilated the ideal image of womanhood by reading popular religious literature and almost certainly women’s magazines and gift annuals—the common purveyors of the reigning feminine ideal. [20]

Following her Nauvoo experience and her return to the East, Rachel first ran the old Hornerstown household. When her brother Augustus married, she transferred her talents successively to the homes of her sisters Anna, Edith Ann, and particularly Sarah. Very much in her natural element, Rachel became a devoted spinster-aunt. She sang to her nieces and nephews the melodies of her own youth, sewed their clothing, and did more for them, according to their hard-pressed mothers, than they themselves could do. There were also times of inspiration. When consumptive Sarah lay discouraged because of her daily fevers and chills, she asked Rachel to pray and sing several Mormon hymns. When Rachel rendered, “Oh, Then Arise and Be Baptized,” Sarah found the unexpected strength to sing with her and, remembering the hymn’s message, requested LDS baptism. Thereupon Sarah’s fainting spells ended. [21]

The New Jersey branches which previously had yielded LDS converts so bounteously still had some members. Sam Brannan recruited some of the New Jersey Saints to join the Brooklyn’s 1846 voyage to California. Two years later Elder William Appleby returned from the West to revive the local flocks and, incidentally, to administer to Rachel for her periodic bronchitis. But this activity was a pale imitation of the excitement which had once burned through the region. Seeking to integrate Mormonism more fully with their daily lives, Anna Ivins, her husband-cousin Israel, and several other members of the Ivins family still loyal to the new faith decided in 1853 to join a large company of New Jersey Saints gathering to Utah. [22]

The request forced Rachel into a final weighing of Mormonism and plural marriage. For a time after Nauvoo she had compartmentalized the two. Even in her early distress about polygamy, she had refused to listen to William Smith, Joseph’s schismatic brother, when he had come to the Ivinses’ Hornerstown home preaching “another Gospel.” When possible she continued her outward LDS activity. But for at least several years she struggled with plural marriage, until at some point through prayerful self-searching she found she could accept the doctrine. Although anti-Mormon family members warned that the westward journey would endanger her health and offered a lifetime annuity if she would stay, Rachel turned her face once again to the Mormon promised land, and this time she did not look back. [23]

She prepared carefully. Anticipating frontier scarcity, she filled a chest with bedding, wool and calico piece goods, and a practical wardrobe of bonnets, gloves, and dresses. Other members of the emigrating party, all relatively prosperous, were equally well stocked. By their preparations they were in fact saying good-by to their life in the East. [24]

The emigrants traveled comfortably. Rachel had the familiar society of several of her Ivins relations, including her cousins Theodore McKean and Anthony Ivins as well as Anna and Israel. Leaving Toms River on 5 April 1853, the party—comprising “a large number of persons from Toms River and other places in the state”—made its way to Philadelphia, boarded the train to Pittsburgh, and then floated on river steamers via Saint Louis to Kansas City. After visiting sites of interest in Jackson County, they purchased mule and wagon outfits (remembered as “one of the best equipments that ever came to Utah in the early fifties”) and began the trek west. [25]

The two-and-a-half months on the plains passed equally pleasantly. Anna and Israel traveled with a milk cow and two heavily provisioned wagons. One of these was furnished as a portable room, complete with chairs, a folding bed, and stairs descending from its tailgate. Rachel walked, spent much of her time knitting, and when tired mounted the stairs and the bed for a rest. Rachel believed the arid Great Plains air permanently thinned and dried her hair, but it also cured her long-standing bronchitis. After about a 130-day journey from New Jersey the Ivins pioneers arrived in Salt Lake City on 11 August and turned up Main Street. There they found temporary lodging with their preacher-friend from years before, Jedediah Grant. [26]

Rachel was now a mature thirty-two. The bloom of youth had passed, but her statuesque charm remained. In polygamous Utah, where sex ratios were perhaps slightly in her favor, she must have had her admirers. But the Ivinses seemed unhurried and cautious about such things. Three of her four brothers never married, and the fourth waited until he was in his thirties. Two of her sisters married cousins. For Rachel’s part, she discounted romance or physical attraction. “One could be happy in the marriage relations without love,” she reportedly advised, “but could never be happy without respect.” [27]

Whether seeking respect or more likely hoping to find a spouse worthy of her own esteem, Rachel’s hopes were fulfilled by Jedediah Morgan Grant. She had known him from her late teens when “Jeddy,” as he was familiarly known, barnstormed through the New Jersey camp meeting circuit as a Mormon missionary. His wit and eloquence won scores of Mormon converts and his preaching reputation became a local legend. A biographer has aptly labelled him “Mormon Thunder,” but he was more than a religious enthusiast. As a teenager he ambitiously read from Wesley, Locke, Rousseau, Watts, Abercrombie, and Mather. In Salt Lake City his charity was open-handed and widely heralded. Brigham Young chose him as his counselor and as mayor of Salt Lake City. Already much married, Jeddy sought out Rachel’s hand as his seventh wife two years after her Utah arrival. [28]

Given Grant’s church, civic, and connubial duties and Rachel’s practicality, their courtship was probably unceremonious and perfunctory. Brigham Young insisted that she first be “eternally sealed” by proxy to his predecessor, apparently to satisfy any obligation owing Joseph. Then on 29 November 1855, Rachel left the home of Anna and Israel, where she had lived for the last two years, and married Grant “for time [in mortality] only” in the Endowment House. [29]

Life at the Grant adobe home on Main Street (the site now occupied by downtown ZCMI) must have been challenging to a woman so private and self-controlled. In turn, her ways and presence unsettles others. When little Belle Whitney was once sent to the Grant home for silk thread, she was startled. “I saw this strange, beautiful woman sitting there,” she recalled. “She looked to me like a queen, and I really thought she was one. I did not dare ask her for the silk . . . I turned and ran [away].” Initially the other Grant wives were also caught off guard. Instead of exchanging close confidences as women of the century were prone to do, Rachel was restrained. “She writes frequently [to you],” complained one of Jeddy’s wives with some edge, “but does not see fit to read them to us.” [30]

Rachel was not altogether happy at the Grant household. “Remember the trials your dead grandma had and that she was only a wife for a year,” wrote her son many years later to one of his own children. The fault did not lie with Jeddy. Though he was often absent on church assignment, the two evidently enjoyed a satisfactory relationship. She remembered her tendency to “lean” upon him—perhaps too much she later wondered—and in after years she never expressed a hint of criticism of her husband. In turn, one of Grant’s few surviving letters expresses concern, cautioning her “not to work to[o] hard.” On 22 November 1856, she bore him a son, Heber Jeddy Grant, nine days before “lung disease,” a combination of typhoid and pneumonia, took his life at the early age of forty. [31]

For a time attendants also feared for the new mother’s life. Rachel’s labor had been difficult, and the shock of her husband’s sudden death weakened her further. Without him she had no tangible source of security. Her cache of New Jersey “store goods” had long since been personally used or distributed to those around her, while Grant’s small estate would have to be divided with her sister-wives. Her eastern relatives had promised that the latch-string would always be out for her return—if she would renounce her religion. But she rejected this; in matters of faith Rachel had made her decision. [32]

Rachel eventually recovered, and because of the two dominant forces which now shaped her life—her religion and her son—she remarried. President Young promised the Grant wives that if they would remain as a unit and accept George Grant, Jeddy’s brother, as their new husband, they would successfully raise their children to be faithful Mormons. Rachel and several of the Grant wives complied, although her preference was to return to Anna’s Salt Lake household. She married George on 17 February 1858, resolute in her religious obedience and hopeful for the future of her son. [33]

The union was a disaster. George, once a faithful churchman, Indian fighter, and hero of the 1856 handcart tragedy was, unbeknown to Church leaders, on a downward course. His erratic and immoderate behavior, apparently due to alcoholism, soon became public. Six months after his marriage to Rachel, George “committed an unprovoked attack on Thos. S. Williams with [the] attempt to kill.” The fracas ended in a street brawl. With such incidents and George’s drinking becoming more common, President Young dissolved the two-year-old marriage, but Rachel’s hurt never entirely healed. “It was the one frightful ordeal of my mother’s life and the one thing she never wishes to refer to,” Heber remarked in later years. [34]

Rachel thereafter rejected every opportunity for remarriage. Although prizing her independence, her overriding concern was Heber. Nothing—not a new father nor any other uncontrollable circumstance—must inhibit his promise. For several years she and her son remained at the Grant home on Main Street with a couple of the other widowed and now divorced wives. But the lack of money forced the sale of that property and the break-up of their extended family. With President Young’s permission, Rachel took her $500 share of the transaction and purchased a cottage on Second East Street. [35]

The change in living standards was wrenching. The disappointed and disoriented six-year-old Heber wandered back to the Main Street home and vowed that some day he would live there again. Certainly the new home had no luxuries. Rachel at first had only six dining plates, two of which were cracked, an occasional cup and saucer, her bed and bedding, and several chairs. There were blustery nights with no fire and a meager diet which allowed only several pounds of butter and sugar for an entire year. One Christmas Rachel wept because she lacked a dime to buy a stick of candy for her boy’s holiday. [36]

Poverty, or at least scarcity, was a part of pioneer living, and Rachel’s situation differed from many others only in degree. Yet being accustomed to relative affluence and to giving rather than receiving, she must have found these trials poignant. Once while visiting Anna, who had moved to St. George in southern Utah, she firmly declined an offer from President Young of Church aid. Instead, she supported herself and Heber by sewing, at first by hand in the homes of others and later with a Wheeler and Wilcox sewing machine in her own house. “I sat on the floor at night until midnight,” Heber remembered many evenings, “and pumped the sewing machine to relieve her tired limbs.” The machine’s constantly moving treadles became a symbol of the Grant family’s stubborn independence. [37]

Despite her financial distress, she retained her personal style and preferences. A willing hostess, she often subjected Heber and herself to a diet of “fried bread” (slices of bread warmed in a greased frying pan) so she could “splurge” on entertaining her friends. And she continued her fastidious habits. “She could wear a dress longer than anyone I have seen and have it look fresh and nice,” a relative recalled. “She always changed her dress in the afternoon and washed herself and combed her hair, and if at home put on a nice white apron. . . . It would not look soiled [for several days].” Only her providence allowed this. She often cannibalized several thread-bare garments to produce something “new” and usable. [38]

About five years after moving to Second East Street, Rachel began serving meals to boarders out of her small basement kitchen. Alex Hawes, a non-Mormon New York Life insurance man, helped make her venture successful. Attracted by her intelligence, charm, and culinary skill, Hawes first boarded and then at his own expense outfitted a small room at the Grant’s for his use. His rent and warm testimonials to Rachel’s cooking provided her, as the boarding business increased, with a growing margin of financial security. [39]

Conversation at the Grants’ boarding table was interesting and at times lively. “How I used to chaff her on matters religious or otherwise,” Hawes recalled, “& how with her quiet sense of humor she would humor my sallies! We even made bets on certain events then in the future.” The intelligent, detached, and agnostic Hawes enjoyed the iconoclast’s role. “I know I respected [Hawes],” remembered Miss Joanna Van Rensselaer, a Methodist boarder, “notwithstanding his belief or want of belief—and recall vividly an argument between him and Miss Hayden—as to whether there was a real Devil.” [40]

Rachel was Hawes’s antithesis. She permitted no smoking in her home; gentlemen were told to indulge their habit on a tree stump in the yard. She was equally firm in defending Mormonism before her gentile boarders, never neglecting, as she remembered, “any opportunity to introduce Mormonism to them.” W. H. Harrington, an editor of the Salt Lake Herald recalled her kindly and repeated assurances of his forthcoming but never realized conversion (“at which I would smile quietly”). Her boarders came to call her “Aunt Rachel, following the lead of her two nieces who served the table.” [41]

Shortly after starting her boardinghouse business, Rachel was “blessed and set apart” as the Thirteenth Ward Relief Society “presidentess.” Relief Societies had been organized briefly in Nauvoo and later in Utah during the middle 1850s, but not until a decade later did the movement gain momentum. When it reached Rachel’s Thirteenth Ward, she fit Bishop Edwin D. Woolley’s bill of particulars for the job. “It was not his habit to be in a hurry in his movements,” Woolley told the women at their organizing session, and he wished the Relief Society sisters to be likewise “cool and deliberate” and their leaders obedient in carrying out “such measures as he should suggest from time to time.” His eye naturally rested upon Rachel. [42]

The burden of leadership was often heavy. She trembled to overcome her diffidence when speaking or conducting meetings. The kind Scandinavian sisters unknowingly repelled her as they grasped and kissed her hand. She “scarcely knew what to do” with some women who behaved irrationally and then demanded the Society’s charity. Rachel repeatedly gave herself solace by saying “it was not the numbers that constituted a good meeting.” And there was Bishop Woolley, whose bark was as legendary as his toothless bite. He scolded them for having “left undone some things that he told us to do, and we done some things that we ought not to.” But his comments apparently were nothing more serious than passing irritation, for he and his two successors retained Rachel in her position for thirty-five years. [43]

The detailed minutes of the Thirteenth Ward Relief Society suggest she closely resembled the nineteenth-century Mormon ideal woman. On occasion she prophesied. She experienced uncommon faith and expression while praying. Following priesthood counsel, she used when possible articles manufactured in Utah, and when Brigham Young requested women to abandon their cumbersome eastern styles, she wore, despite ridicule from many women, the simplified and home-designed “Deseret Costume.” Her name appeared with those of a half-dozen other prominent LDS women protesting the passage of the anti-Mormon Cullom Bill. Likewise, she was a member of a committee of leaders representing the “large and highly respectable assemblage of ladies” thanking Acting Governor S. A. Mann for his approval of the Utah Women’s Suffrage Act. [44]

However, as her Relief Society sermons show, Rachel was more a moralist than an activist. “We all have trials to pass through,” she spoke from personal experience, “but if living up to our duty they are sanctified to our best good.” Her tendency was to see only the good in life. She called for obedience to authority and the avoidance of faultfinding. God’s hand and his rewards were omnipresent. “I am a firm believer in our being rewarded for all the good we do,” she insisted, “& everything will come out right with those who do right.” She had long since made her peace with plural marriage. While its practice might be a woman’s “greatest trial,” she rejoiced that she herself had experienced the “Principle.” Propounding duty, goodness, obedience, toil, and sacrifice, her Quaker-Mormon attitudes blended comfortably with the era's prevailing Victorianism. [45]

Rachel and her Thirteenth Ward sisters did more than sermonize. Notwithstanding “often having to endure insults,” the Relief Society block teachers canvassed the congregation to discover the needy and to secure for their relief an occasional cash donation. The sisters were usually more successful in procuring yarn, thread, calico pieces, rugs, and discarded clothing which they transformed into stockings, quilts, and rag rugs. The Relief Society women also braided straw, fashioned hats and bonnets, stored grain, and sewed underwear, buckskin gloves, and burial and temple garments. On these items the poor had first claim; the remainder were sold with most of the proceeds going to charity. During Rachel’s three-and-a-half-decade ministry, a time of scarcity and deflated dollars, the Thirteenth Ward Relief Society’s liberality in cash and goods exceeded $7,750. The little money left she invested for her sisters in securities which appreciated spectacularly after her death. By 1925 the Thirteenth Ward Relief Society had assets worth $20,000. [46]

Rachel Grant’s “greatest trial” during her years as Relief Society president was her worsening hearing. She had noticed a hearing loss in late adolescence, but when she was almost fifty, an attack of quinsy left her virtually deaf with what she described as a “steam engine going night and day” in her head. No longer hearing melody, much conversation, nor the proceedings of her church meetings—among the things she valued most—she nevertheless attempted to carry on. In her Relief Society meetings she compensated for her disability with what her friends felt to be an extra sense. “She often picked up the thread of thought and conversation,” commented one of her Relief Society coworkers “and voiced her own conclusions so appropriately and so ably that her associates marveled afresh at the keenness of her spiritual comprehension.” [47]

Because she led the women of the prominent Thirteenth Ward, and in part because of her able manner, her influence in later years spread. She became recognized as one of Mormondom’s

“leading sisters” who in lieu of a centralized Relief Society staff, traveled throughout the territory speaking and advising on distaff questions, becoming “Aunt Rachel,” an honored pioneer title, to more than her boarders. While never rivaling Eliza R. Snow, Bathsheba W. Smith, or Emmeline Wells as women’s exponents (the latter two served under her presidency during the Thirteenth Ward Relief Society’s early years), she was nonetheless esteemed as a model of proper behavior. Stately, serene, fastidious, and proper, Rachel came to be compared with Victoria herself. [48]

Rachel might travel and preach in the outlying settlements, but she was always uneasy at center stage—restrained not only by her natural hesitancy and lack of hearing but also by her preoccupation with Heber. She never doubted that the boy’s destiny would at least equal his father’s, and her urgent anticipations coupled with her light discipline did much to forge his character. If the youthful Heber took advantage of her leniency and proved to be very much a boy, in later years his attitude toward her became reverential. “There are many things about her that I could wish were different,” he candidly declared in adulthood, apparently with reference to her firmly programmed ways and mannerisms, “but mother is one of the sweetest and kindest of women and as loveable as can be.” [49]

In many ways, and especially in the ways most pleasing to her, Heber proved a facsimile of herself. Neither prim nor systematic, he accepted the Ivinses’ business-mindedness and Rachel’s Victorian values. Above all, she bequeathed to him her towering commitment to Mormonism along with her feelings of LDS embattlement and persecution. As Heber J. Grant rose to commercial and Church prominence, becoming during the last twenty-five years of her life a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, his career was the fulfillment of her own.

Her last years were again dominated by family concerns. Due to the long illness and eventual death of Lucy Stringham Grant, the first of Heber’s three plural wives, Rachel’s grandmotherly duties were heavy. For a time, the seventy-year-old woman personally tended Lucy’s six children. Later she moved to an upstairs room and surrendered much of this role to her son's second wife, Augusta Winters Grant. Yet she still darned, mended, and sewed for the family and invited her grandchildren to her room for school study and silent companionship—though they learned that Rachel’s displeasure might easily be aroused if they wandered too close to her immaculate and painstakingly made bed. Her deafness insulated her from the family’s quarrels and prompted occasional humor. The children “had no idea,” she told them, “how funny it was to see their angry faces and hear none of their words.” [50]

Such a statement reveals a characteristic attempt to see the bright side of her tormenting disability. To the end she refused to accept its finality. She was repeatedly anointed and blessed. As a measure of their regard, congregations from Idaho to Arizona in 1900 fasted and prayed for her hearing. She repeatedly repaired to the temple, hoping that baptism in a holy place might bring a cure. “I watched in breathless silence to see the miracle performed,” Susa Young Gates recalled of one such temple experience. “I saw my miracle . . . eight long agonizing times [she was baptized with no effect] . . . the vision of Aunt Rachel’s beaming smile at God’s refusal to hear her prayer gripped my soul with power to bear.” The miracle, of course, lay within Rachel herself. [51]

Rachel Grant was equanimity personified. The financial panics of the 1890s crushed her son’s ascendency for several decades; to aid him, she transferred to him the stocks and properties which he had previously given her. She reacted with similar stoicism to the death of little Heber, her semi-invalid grandson upon whom she had lavished so much love and attention. In 1903 at the age of eighty-two, she retired from the Thirteenth Ward Relief Society. “I am not one,” her resignation read, “who wishes to hold on to an office when I can not do as I wish.” She thus conceded to old age what she had steadfastly refused to grant to her deafness. [52]

During her final five or six years Rachel retired from most pursuits—with the exception of her reading, meditating, and letter-writing. She was annually honored by a “surprise” birthday party. After one such fete, a reporter from the Woman’s Exponent found her “the picture of health and happiness. . . . It can truly be said of Sister Rachel, that she has grown old gracefully.” Yet her lifetime of physical and psychological toil had its effect. Rheumatism, nerves, and the constant cacophony within her head would often not allow sleep until 3:00 or 4:00 A.M. Accordingly, she would take a hymnal from under her pillow and sing the silent sounds of the past. “I was awake early this morning & thinking of my past life,” she wrote revealingly to Heber on such an occasion. “When you were young I thought & prayed that I might live to see you grown then I would be satisfied, if you wer[e] a faithful L[.]D[.] Saint . . . when thinking of the many things I had passed through hard & unpleasant how happy it makes me now that I never complained . . . not even to my sister. I knew she would feel bad. I can talk about them now without cairing.” Clearly her outward serenity had often been a mask. [53]

After fighting for a week with pneumonia which brought little actual suffering, Rachel died on 27 January 1909 at 1:10 A.M.—with “absolute and perfect confidence” in what lay ahead. She was almost eighty-eight. Heber, who would justify his mother’s faith by becoming the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was at her bedside. Through him and his administration of almost three decades, her personality would touch yet another generation of Saints. [54]

Notes

[1] Lucy Grant Cannon, “A Few Memories of Grandma Grant” undated manuscript, Heber J. Grant (hereafter cited as HJG), Letterpress Copybook, vol. 65, 182, 185 (hereafter cited as LC by volume and page), Heber J. Grant Papers, Library-Archives, Historical Department, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, Utah; hereafter respectively cited HJG, LC, and Church Archives. Annie Wells Cannon, “Rachel Ivins Grant,” Improvement Era 37 (November 1934): 643. I am indebted to Marlena Ahanin and Peggy Fletcher for their assistance in researching this paper.

[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.

[6] 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.

[7] RRG, “How I Became A ‘Mormon,’” 1; and RRG, “Joseph Smith, the Prophet,” Young Woman’s Journal 16 (Dec. 1905): 550–551.

[8] 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.

[9] 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.

[10] 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.

[11] RRG, “How I Became a ‘Mormon,’” 2; Journal History of the Church, 30 April, 27 June, and 14 August 1842, Church Archives. Nauvoo Trustees Land Book, Part B (29), Church Archives; Nauvoo City Tax Assessments Books, Wards 1–4, 1841–1844, Church Archives; and Nauvoo Restoration, The James Ivins-Elias Smith Printing Complex (Nauvoo, IL: Nauvoo Restoration, Inc., n.d.), 1–4. Visitors in present-day Nauvoo identify the Ivins buildings as belonging to John Taylor and used for the printing of the Times and Seasons, an early Church periodical.

[12] Emmeline B. Wells as quoted by Mary Grant Judd, “Rachel Ridgway Ivins Grant,” Relief Society Magazine 30 (Apr. 1943): 229.

[13] Their intimate friendship is repeatedly mentioned in the HJG Papers; see for instance HJG to Harold A. Lafount, 24 April 1924, LC 61: 839; Sarah Kimball’s life is sketched by Jill C. Mulvay, “The Liberal Shall Be Blessed: Sarah M. Kimball,” Utah Historical Quarterly 44 (Summer 1976): 205–21.

[14] RRG, “How I Became a ‘Mormon,’” 2; and RRG, “Joseph Smith, the Prophet,” 551.

[15] RRG, “Joseph Smith, the Prophet,” 551; HJG, “Remarks Made at a Sunday School Union Board Meeting,” 7 Jan. 1919, draft in LC 54:348; RRG to Edith [Grant], 17 September 1904, Family Correspondence, HJG papers; and Thirteenth Ward Relief Society Minutes, Book B: 1898–1906, 17 March 1902, 100–101, Church Archives.

[16] Thirteenth Ward Relief Society Minutes, Book A: 1868–1898, 11 February 1897, 611, Church Archives. In several letters to Brigham Young, Ivins steadfastly maintained his innocence. “I can say that I never to the best of my recollection persuaded the first person to join either Law or Sidney [Rigdon]—all I have bin guilty of is believing the doctrine of Mormonism as it was taught me in the beginning,” Charles Ivins to Brigham Young, July 1845, Brigham Young Papers, Church Archives.

[17] Lucy Grant Cannon to Truman G. Madsen [?], 15 April 1960, quoted in Truman G. Madsen, The Heritage of Heber J. Grant (Salt Lake City: privately published, 1969), 12, 30; RRG, “How I Became a ‘Mormon,’” 2; and HJG to Ray O. Wyland, 12 December 1936, LC 74:530–31. Erdman, Israel Ivins, 5–6, claims that Joseph Smith actually proposed to her.

[18] RRG, “How I Became a ‘Mormon,’” 2; and RRG, “Joseph Smith, the Prophet,” 551.

[19] HJG to Heber M. Wells, 28 April 1904, and HJG to E. S. Tainter, 25 August 1926, LC 38:590 and 64:611; and HJG and Anthony W. Ivins, “Remarks at a Birthday Dinner for Heber J. Grant,” transcript in HJG Typed Diary, 22 November 1924, 314–15, HJG Papers.

[20] Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 151, 153; and Ellis, History of Monmouth County, 639. The school described here was probably Rachel’s, for John Horner, as cited in Ellis, recalled attending his early grammar studies with her.

[21] Cannon, “A Few Memories of Grandma Grant,” 181; and RRG, untitled and undated memorandum, HJG Papers, Box 147, folder 9.

[22] William Appleby Journal, 17 November 1845, 26 October and 1 November 1848, Church Archives.

[23] RRG, untitled and undated memorandum, HJG Papers, Box 147, folder 9; and Jeppson, “With Joy Wend Your Way,” 8.

[24] Jeppson, “With Joy Wend Your Way,” 9; and [Toms River] New Jersey Courier, 9 November 1934.

[25] Sharp, “The Latter-day Saints or ‘Mormons’ in New Jersey,” 2–3; Theodore McKean, “Autobiography,” unpublished draft, 2, Church Archives; and [Toms River] New Jersey Courier, 9 November 1934.

[26] Jeppson, “With Joy Wend Your Way,” 9–10.

[27] Cannon, “A Few Memories of Grandma Grant,” 181; and Wayne L. Wahlquist, “Population Growth in the Mormon Core Area: 1847–90,” The Mormon Role in the Settlement of the West, ed. Richard H. Jackson, Charles Redd Monographs in Western History, no. 9 (Provo, UT.: Brigham Young University, 1978), 116–24. Wahlquist found the female imbalance to be most significant during the years of marriageability—a tendency which plural marriage must have heightened.

[28] Gene A. Sessions, Mormon Thunder: A Documentary History of Jedediah Morgan Grant (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 265.

[29] Caleb Ivins, Jr., Group Sheet, Archives, The Genealogical Society of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City, and HJG, “Remarks at a Birthday Dinner for Heber J. Grant.”

[30] Israel Whitney Sears to HJG, 20 February 1919, General Correspondence, HJG Papers; and Susan and Rosetta Grant to Jedediah M. Grant, 7 January 1855 [1856?] photocopy of holograph, Grant Family Correspondence, Church Archives. Another wife complained that the frequently writing Rachel monopolized all the news.

[31] HJG to Florence [Grant], 8 June 1905, LC 39:832; RRG, Thirteenth Ward Relief Society Minutes, Book A, 7 July 1870, 70; and Jedediah M. Grant to Susan Grant, 14 October 1856, photocopy of holograph, Grant Family Correspondence.

[32] HJG to Claus [?] H. Karlson, 28 October 1885, LC 6:203–4; Jeppson, “With Joy Wend Your Way,” 9. Eventually only four of the Grant wives participated in the distribution of their husband’s property- those who left the Grant homestead and remarried elsewhere were excluded.

[33] Cannon, “A Few Memories of Grandma Grant,” 182–83.

[34] George Goddard Journal, 27 August 1858, Church Archives; HJG to Junius F. Wells, 30 March 1905, LC 39:502; and Cannon, “A Few Memories of Grandma Grant,” 183.

[35] Jeppson, “With Joy Wend Your Way,” 12.

[36] “Two Octogenarians,” Improvement Era 39 (November 1936): 667; HJG, “Faith-Promoting Experiences,” Millennial Star 93 (19 November 1931): 760; Cannon, “A Few Memories of Grandma Grant,” 183; and RRG, Thirteenth Ward Relief Society Minutes, Book B, 13 February 1903, 95.

[37] [Toms River) New Jersey Courier, 9 November 1934; HJG, “Faith Promoting Experiences,” 760. Her refusal of aid was categorical. “I . . . told him [Brigham Young] that persons had said to me I was a fool for working as I did when your father [Jedediah] killed himself working in the kingdom. I told him I did not wish to be supported by the church. I was too independent for that.” RRG to HJG, 19 October 1901, Family Correspondence, HJG papers.

[38] Cannon, “A Few Memories of Grandma Grant,” 183.

[39] HJG, An Address Delivered by Invitation Before the Chamber of Commerce, Kansas City, Missouri (Independence, MO.; Zion’s Printing and Publishing Co., 1924?), 15; HJG, Press Copy Diary, 20 August 1887, HJG Papers; HJG, Remarks, “President Grant’s Seventy-first Birthday Party,” memo in Box 177, folder 23, HJG Papers. Heber was explicit on Hawes’s effect upon the Grant household: “I may say the turning point in my mother’s life came when Colonel Hawes entered our home as a boarder,” HJG to Elizabeth L. Peltret, 19 March 1914, LC 49:363.

[40] Alexander W. Hawes to HJG, 28 December 1912, LC 48:151–52; and Joanna H. Van Rensselaer to HJG, 21 January 1925, General Correspondence, HJG Papers.

[41] Cannon, “A Few Memories of Grandma Grant,” 184; RRG, Thirteenth Ward Relief Society Minutes, Book A, 7 March 1872, 106–7; and W. H. Harrington to HJG, 1 December 1897, HJG Papers.

[42] Thirteenth Ward Relief Society Minutes, Book A, 18 April 1868, pp, 1–2.

[43] RRG, Thirteenth Ward Relief Society Minutes, Book B, 17 March 1902, 100–101; Cannon, “A Few Memories of Grandma Grant,” 184. Thirteenth Ward Relief Society Minutes, Book A, 7 August 1873, 29 June 1876, and 26 October 1887, 154, 260, and 466. Sister Emma Goddard, the secretary, discreetly crossed out Woolley’s remarks and replaced them with a more grammatical sentence, see Relief Society Minute Book 1875, Thirteenth Ward, 3 June 1875, 25–26.

[44] RRG to HJG, 8 January 1891, 12 October 1901, and HJG to RRG, 12 October 1907, Family Correspondence, HJG Papers; Hannah C. Wells to HJG, 28 February 1907, General Correspondence, HJG Papers; Cannon, “A Few Memories of Grandma Grant,” 187; Woman’s Exponent 37 (Apr. 1909): 52; HJG, “Address at BYU Centennial,” 16 October 1925, in LC 63:553–54; Thirteenth Ward Relief Society Minutes, Book A, 15 April 1875, 227; Relief Society Minute Book 1875, Thirteenth Ward, 1 April 1875, 9–10; Thomas G. Alexander, “An Experiment in Progressive Legislation: The Granting of Woman Suffrage in Utah in 1870,” Utah Historical Quarterly 38 (Winter 1970): 20–30.

[45] RRG, Thirteenth Ward Relief Society Minutes, Book A, 5 March 1874, 4 June 1874, 2 September 1875, and 13 January 1898, 175, 188–89, 244, and 633; RRG, Thirteenth Ward Relief Society Minutes, Book B, 13 March 1902, 97–98; Lucy Grant Cannon, “Recollections of Rachel Ivins Grant,” Relief Society Magazine, 25 (May 1938): 293–98; RRG to HJG, 7 May 1905, Family Correspondence, HJG Papers.

[46] RRG, Thirteenth Ward Relief Society Minutes, Book A, 4 December 1873, 164; “Rachel Ridgway Grant,” memorandum dated 28 March 1903, Box 176, folder 22, HJG Papers; Woman’s Exponent 4 (1 Dec. 1875): 98, 5 (1 June 1876): 5, and 14 (15 June 1885): 13–14; and Cannon, “A Few Memories of Grandma Grant,” 184.

[47] Cannon, “A Few Memories of Grandma Grant,” 187; Jeppson, “With Joy Wend Your Way,” 13; Susa Young Gates, “Relief Society Beginnings in Utah,” Relief Society Magazine 9 (April 1922): 189; and Woman’s Exponent 31 (1 and 15 Dec. 1902): 53.

[48] Mary Grant Judd, “Rachel Ridgway Ivins Grant,” Relief Society Magazine 30 (May 1943): 316; and May Booth Talmage, “Coronets of Age: Rachel R. Grant,” Young Woman’s Journal 19 (Apr. 1908): 182–85. The Woman’s Exponent occasionally recorded Rachel’s visits among the outlying areas, see 9 (15 June 1880): 13; 12 (1 and 15 Sept. 1883): 55, 60; 14 (1 Oct. 1885): 70; and 15 (1 Apr. 1887): 164.

[49] HJG to Lucy Grant, 17 April 1892, Lucy Grant Papers, Church Archives. Her parenting provided the classic conditions which often produced an entrepreneurial type of personality, see Everett E. Hagan, On the Theory of Social Change (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1962), 93; and David C. McClelland, The Achieving Society (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1961), especially 353–76.

[50] Jeppson, “With Joy Wend Your Way,” 17; Cannon, “A Few Memories of Grandma Grant,” 188.

[51] Susa Young Gates, “A Tribute to Rachel Ivins Grant,” Young Woman’s Journal 21 (January 1910): 30.

[52] Jeppson, “With Joy Wend Your Way,” 17–18; RRG to HJG, 28 June 1903, Family Correspondence, HJG Papers.

[53] Woman’s Exponent 31 (Mar. 1903): 77; Cannon, “A Few Memories of Grandma Grant,” 181; and RRG to HJG, 27 November 1904, Family Correspondence, HJG Papers.

[54] HJG Manuscript Diary, 27 January 1909, HJG Papers; and HJG to Mrs. S. A. Collins, 12 February 1909, Family Correspondence, HJG Papers.