July 31, 2015 - Friday in Carthage

Mom and I were up bright and early this morning ready to begin the day here in Carthage.  We had our morning devotional and prayers and a nice early morning walk as we prepared for today's activities.  We had a great start to the day!

One of our visitors, today, was a man who was living in Quincy in the 1980's and was asked to come to Carthage to be available to be in the film we show here,  filmed in 1989, "The Impressions of a Prophet".  He was selected to represent a Senator from Illinois who commented about Joseph back in the 1840's.  He told us about his random selection and the thrill of playing the part.  I had to take his picture that shows him 26 years after the film we show here was made;

He had a soft way of talking to us and seemed like a very gentle man.  I got his name but did not write it down....  However, mom could see the resemblance in the 1989 picture on the movie screen.

Then, we hit another milestone here at the Historic Carthage Jail Visitors Center.  We had a record setting month of folks coming to Carthage.  I took this picture yesterday of the packed calendar we were following for July:

 Well, we had a little "Tearing up" party as the end of July was coming to a close this afternoon.  We gathered as many of the missionaries together as we could, and gathered around the calendar, and ripped off the page marked "July 2015"!

From the back of the picture and clockwise we have Mom, Sister Price, Elder Price, Sister Butler, Sister Mikoliski, and Sister Heninger.  The picture was taken in the History Room of the Visitors Center.  Missing in action were Elder and Sister Hansen, Elder Heninger, Sister Pugmire, Sister Kupfer, Sister Uata, Young Sister Heninger, and the photographer!

Look at those smiles!  Almost 25,000 guests came to Carthage in July!  This is over 800 visitors each day of the month of July 2015.  Our busiest days were Sunday's where we were open only 5 hours and had on each Sunday in July over 1,450 on the average.  Our busiest day during the week was Thursday July 9th where we had over 1,750 in a 10 hour day!  Is it any wonder why there were smiles during today's celebration?

Then I began a little research on the song "A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief and wanted to include this research in today's blog:

PROVO, Utah — October 2008
New research has recovered the more upbeat tune John Taylor used when he sang "A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief" to Joseph Smith just before the founder of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was murdered on June 27, 1844.
 
The tune had been lost to history. For 140 years, church members have sung the song to a different tune, one commissioned by Taylor himself.A year before President Taylor died in 1887, he sang the song for composer Ebenezer Beesley the way he sang it at Carthage jail in Illinois before a mob stormed the jail and shot and killed Smith and his brother Hyrum and wounded Taylor and Willard Richards.

Beesley recorded the tune in his choir book. Then he composed a different one for the song for a new hymn book commissioned for the church by Taylor, and Beesley's arrangement is the only one known to generations of Latter-day Saints.  A Taylor descendant recently uncovered the Beesley choir book, and historian Jeffrey N. Walker presented his arrangement of the song at a church history symposium on Taylor held Friday at Brigham Young University. A quartet that included Walker's son performed the song at the conference.

Taylor's tune wouldn't be completely unfamiliar to Latter-day Saints, but it is more upbeat and some notes have a distinct Irish-Celtic sound.  "We heard a hymn that changed us a bit," Walker said after the performance, "that transported us back to a day in Carthage, amongst the leaders of the church as they contemplated the role that the church would have through the world, and while that day (the mob) may have taken two of the greatest who have ever lived, John was there (as) more than just a recorder, he was there to capture the essence of the day."

The Smiths were in jail on a charge of treason based on the affidavit of two men whose word, according to Taylor, wasn't worth 5 cents. Taylor and Richards joined them for support, and on the afternoon the brothers died, Taylor sang "A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief."  Hyrum Smith so liked the song that he asked Taylor to sing it a second time. Taylor tried to decline because of the gloomy mood — he later called it "a remarkable depression of spirits" — in the second-story room of the jail but Hyrum Smith insisted, telling Taylor he'd get the spirit of it once he began.  Those facts endear the recovered tune to Walker. 

 "I like it because John Taylor sang it that way," Walker said. "I like it also that Hyrum liked it."  The song began as a poem written by English poet James Montgomery during two chilly, dreary trips in horse-drawn carriages in England in December 1826.  Titled "The Stranger and His Friend," Montgomery didn't expect the poem to become a hymn.  A New York preacher named George Coles set the poem to music, to a tune he named Duane Street after the address of one of his churches. Taylor learned the hymn in England on a mission and included it in a Mormon hymnal published there in 1840 under his direction and that of Brigham Young and Parley P. Pratt.

Pratt was the missionary who converted Taylor. Young would succeed Joseph Smith as church president, and Taylor would follow Young as the church's third president. The hymnal didn't include music or even the name of a tune, only Montgomery's lyrics. Taylor sang it to a different tune than Duane Street. The new song with Taylor's tune had been introduced in Nauvoo, Ill., before the martyrdom of the Smiths. The hymnal included all seven verses of the song, which settles the question for Walker of whether Taylor sang all seven verses at Carthage.

Taylor apparently thought the hymn's tune needed to be more elegant.  "He'd write he didn't like the tune," Walker said. "He thought it was quite plain."  Taylor asked Beesley to compose a new tune at the same time he launched a committee to create a new hymnbook for the church.  The result was the Psalmody, completed in 1889, two years after Taylor's death.

"The one we have in our hymnbook now is a little more elegant, a little more formal, a little more memorial," Walker said.  The church is celebrating the 200th anniversary of Taylor's birth next month, and Taylor descendants lauded Walker for presenting the song at Friday's conference.  "It's wonderful we now have that tune," Mark H. Taylor said. "We now have the tune as sung in Carthage jail."

And finally, I have had so wonderful and amazing moments here in Carthage as I have studied and pondered and taught about Joseph Smith.  The man I thought I knew before our call to serve in the mission field here in the Illinois, Nauvoo Mission, was so under appreciated.  The books and articles I have read have strengthened and reinforced my testimony of Joseph and Hyrum.  Joseph as the Prophet of the Restoration and all he went through from Vermont to Palmyra and from Palmyra to Carthage.  It was an absolutely incredible life of struggles, sacrifices,  Heavenly visits and training sessions, persecutions and glorious visions.  However, what I think was most remarkable in Joseph's life was his great ability to make the most of each opposition he faced in his pathway to becoming the Prophet of the Restoration.  He was placed in some tremendously awful situations and  then showed us how to copy.  Liberty Jail is the most profound teaching platform that I can see.  Here he is in a terrible situation for six months while he waited for a trumped up trial.  But he didn't just "wait" there in jail!  He made the most of every minute he spent there while receiving  Heavenly guidance in his pathway to fulfilling his role as Prophet of the Restoration!

Let's be honest, he could have become depressed and obsessed with his "bad luck and persecution" and just lived out the sentence.... Instead, he took full advantage of the time "given him" to complete several necessary assignments on his way to his ultimate and final assignment in Carthage.  Here is some research that supports how well he used his time under such maligned circumstances;

Liberty Jail

Liberty, Missouri

10 September 2013

Introduction

Joseph Smith was unjustly confined in Liberty Jail from December 1838 to April 1839 along with several other Church leaders. Joseph suffered helplessly, knowing that the Latter-day Saints were being driven from Missouri under an "extermination order" from the governor. The Prophet and his companions were imprisoned in a rough stone dungeon measuring 14 by 14 feet, with a ceiling just over 6 feet high. Only two small barred windows allowed light and air into the cell. The six prisoners suffered from winter weather, filthy conditions, hunger, and sickness.
While in Liberty Jail, the Prophet wrote letters to his family and the Saints. His correspondence contains some of the most poignant revelation found in scripture. In this miserable jail, Joseph learned that his sufferings were still not comparable to those of the Savior, as the Spirit whispered to him: "The Son of Man hath descended below them all. Art thou greater than he?" He was taught that in the end "all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good." 1
In early April 1839, Joseph and the other prisoners were allowed to escape, and they fled to safety in Illinois.
The jail was eventually torn down, though some of the dungeon floor and walls remained. The property was purchased for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1939. President Joseph Fielding Smith dedicated a partial reconstruction of the jail housed within a visitors' center in 1963.

Quotes

Joseph Smith Quotes

Hell may pour forth its rage like the burning lava of Mount Vesuvius . . . and yet shall "Mormonism" stand. . . . God is the author of it. He is our shield. . . . It was by Him we received the Book of Mormon; and it is by Him that we remain unto this day; and by Him we shall remain, if it shall be for our glory; and in His Almighty name we are determined to endure tribulation as good soldiers unto the end. (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, sel. Joseph Fielding Smith (1976), 139.)

The Savior said, . . . "Blessed are ye when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake; rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is your reward in heaven, for so persecuted they the Prophets which were before you." Now, dear brethren, if any men ever had reason to claim this promise, we are the men; for we know that the world not only hate us, but they speak all manner of evil of us falsely, for no other reason than that we have been endeavoring to teach the fullness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, sel. Joseph Fielding Smith (1976), 124; paragraph divisions altered.)

Witnesses

Hyrum Smith, Church Patriarch, 1841–1844 

I was innocent of crime, and . . . I had been dragged from my family at a time, when my assistance was most needed; . . . I had been abused and thrust into a dungeon, and confined for months on account of my faith, and the "testimony of Jesus Christ." However I thank God that I felt a determination to die, rather than deny the things which my eyes had seen, which my hands had handled, and which I had borne testimony to, wherever my lot had been cast. ("To the Saints Scattered Abroad," Times and Seasons, Dec. 1839, 23.)

Mercy Rachel Fielding Thompson, Early Member of the Church 

"It would be beyond my power to describe my feelings when we were admitted into the jail by the keeper and the door was locked behind us," wrote Mercy Thompson of her visit to the prisoners in Liberty Jail. "We could not help feeling a sense of horror on realizing that we were locked up in that dark and dismal den, fit only for criminals of the deepest dye; but there we beheld Joseph, the Prophet . . . confined in a loathsome prison for no other cause or reason than that he claimed to be inspired of God to establish His church among men." ("Recollections of the Prophet Joseph Smith," Juvenile Instructor, July 1, 1892, 398.)

Key Events

Revelations Received

• D&C Section 105  —  June 22, 1834. Shortly before the arrival of Zion’s Camp in Clay County, Missouri, the governor rescinded the aid he had promised. Hence, the goal to restore the Saints to their inheritance was frustrated.
  

• D&C Section 121  —  Mar. 1839. The persecutions against and the sufferings of the Saints led the Prophet Joseph Smith to plead with the Lord in their behalf while he was in Liberty Jail.
  

• D&C Section 122  —  Mar. 1839. The persecutions against and the sufferings of the Saints led the Prophet Joseph Smith to plead with the Lord in their behalf while he was in Liberty Jail.
  

• D&C Section 123  —  Mar. 1839. The persecutions against and the sufferings of the Saints led the Prophet Joseph Smith to plead with the Lord in their behalf while he was in Liberty Jail.

What an example for me!  We, too, have many opportunities to find out for ourselves, "who we really are, and who we can become".  My favorite quote from Charles DuBois!

This was a long post, but, it was a great day here in Carthage!

Thank you for joining me tonight!