Eliza R. Snow

[4] Greatly respected within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints, she was a poet, chronicled history, celebrated nature and relationships, and expounded scripture and doctrine.

[4] When she was two years old, her family left New England to settle on a new and fertile farm in the Western Reserve valley, in Mantua Township, Portage County, Ohio.

His daughter, Eliza, being ten years the senior of her eldest brother, was employed as secretary, as soon as she was competent, in her father's office as justice of the peace.

In appreciation, the building committee provided her with the title to "a very valuable [lot]-situated near the Temple, with a fruit tree-an excellent spring of water, and house that accommodated two families."

[9] In the 1930s, Alice Merrill Horne wrote in her autobiography that when she was a girl she overheard a conversation that in Missouri during the 1838 Mormon War, Eliza Snow was brutally gang-raped by eight Missourians, which left her unable to have children.

[10] Later, according to Horne, Joseph Smith offered her marriage as a plural wife "as a way of promising her that she would still have eternal offspring and that she would be a mother in Zion."

After Smith's death, Snow swore in an affidavit recorded by a notary public that she had secretly wed him on June 29, 1842, as a plural wife.

[11] However, Snow had organized a petition in that same summer of 1842, with a thousand female signatures, denying that Smith was connected with polygamy and extolling his virtue.

[12] As secretary of the Ladies' Relief Society, she organized the publishing of a certificate in October 1842 denouncing polygamy and denying Smith as its creator or participant.

Brigham Young led a migration of LDS Church members to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847, and for the next twenty years attempts were periodically made to reestablish the organization.

The Relief Society sent women to medical school, trained nurses, opened the Deseret Hospital, operated cooperative stores, promoted silk manufacture, saved wheat, and built granaries.

Her first published poem was a requiem she was requested to write for John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, in light of their simultaneous deaths July 4, 1826.

[8] A number of Snow's poems were set to music and have become important Latter-day Saint hymns, some of which appear in the current edition of the Church's hymnal.

She continued to write poems as she journeyed to the Salt Lake Valley, documenting the pioneer trail and life in Utah, and in 1850 she penned a humorous riposte regarding visiting United States officials who had not impressed the Saints.

Signature of Eliza R. Snow
Engraving of Eliza Roxey Snow