However, he considered the conditions in Nauvoo dangerous and volatile at the time, and instead settled in Crow Creek, Illinois under the spiritual leadership of Gladden Bishop.
At a May 1863 conference of these branches, Page ordained Hedrick, David Judy, Jedediah Owen, and Adna C. Haldeman to the priesthood office of apostle.
At a conference in July 1863, it was proposed that the members of the unaffiliated branches nominate a person to be president of the high priesthood of the church.
Thereafter, Hedrick repudiated his 1863 ordination to these positions, holding that the true Church of Christ was to be headed only by a presiding elder, an office which was done away with by a vote of apostles in 1925.
On April 24, 1864, Hedrick produced a revelation[1] directing his followers to return to Independence in Jackson County, Missouri in 1867 to initiate a re-gathering of Latter Day Saints to the region.
Hedrick's followers were the first group of Latter Day Saints to return to this area where they had been driven out in the late 1830s by the Missourian "extermination order".
Records show that on May 29, 1868, Granville was still in Illinois when he executed a “Power of Attorney” in behalf of his brother John Hedrick..." [3] By 1877, the Hedrickites had purchased the most prominent portion of a plot of land which Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon had dedicated in 1831 as the future location of a temple headquartering a "New Jerusalem",[4] a sacred city to be built preparatory to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.