January 1877

EVENTS IN EMMELINE B. WELLS’S DIARY FOR 1877

1 January: St. George Temple was partially dedicated.
30 July: Copies of Women of Mormondom arrived in Salt Lake City.
29 August: President Brigham Young died.
12 September: Wrote a poem titled “Mizpah.”
13 September: Visited Relief Society in Grantsville, Utah Territory.
9 November: At this point in her diary, made notes of talks given by women leaders at the Weber Stake Relief Society Conference in October.

Source Note

Vol. 3, 1 Jan.–30 Oct. 1877; Jan. 1878

Emmeline B. Wells, Diary, vol. 3, 1 Jan.–30 Oct. 1877; Jan. 1878, L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah (Vault MSS 510).

Pocket-size diary measuring 5 × 3¼ × ⅜ inches. This is a softcover Excelsior diary made of burgundy-colored leather with a fold-over tab closure; it is quite worn. The diary has preprinted dates for 1877, with three entries per page. It includes preprinted reference material in the front and formatted pages in the back for memoranda and financial records. Inside the back cover is a sleeve for a writing instrument and an expanding pocket. Diary includes cash account information for January 1878; that information can be found in the Memoranda section for 1878 on this website.

Introduction, 1877

This was a year of growing prominence for EBW. She became sole editor of the Woman’s Exponent beginning with the 1 August issue, and she continued to promote the church’s grain-saving movement. For the Relief Society, she began making visits to outlying ward and stake Relief Societies. For the suffrage cause, she led a local petition drive favoring a federal constitutional amendment on women’s suffrage.

EBW also used this volume as a notebook for recording various types of information in addition to traditional diary entries. Her inscriptions in the 1877 journal fall into three categories: (1) regular diary entries that began in January and continued irregularly through mid-September; (2) lists of names and addresses, including notes on exchanges with editors of suffrage publications; and (3) notes of speeches given at church meetings, including the 30 October Weber Stake Relief Society conference (found under the 9 November entry).

¹1 January 1877 • Monday

I had all my children and grand-children home to dinner, we did not receive calls yet of our friends there were 37 called, no refreshments. St. George Temple dedicated in part.

2 January 1877 • Tuesday

Mary Ann [Hallock] Foote²

925

3 January 1877 • Wednesday

Geo. E. Snyder

Chapman

Dickinson Co

Kansas [p. 25] {p. 28}

4 January 1877 • Thursday

W. [William] C. Hendrie

331. Montgomery St

Room 16.

San Francisco, Cal.

5 January 1877 • Friday

Mrs. Elizabeth [Baum] Bean

Richfield

Sevier Co. 6. month

begin Aug. 15

[p. 26] {p. 29}

13 January 1877 • Saturday

Jane [Allen] Hughes, Nephi

father’s name William [W.] Allen, expects to be confined soon and wants help [p. 29] {p. 30}

Cite This Page

January 1877, The Journal of Emmeline B. Wells, accessed November 17, 2024 https://chpress-web.churchhistorianspress.org/emmeline-b-wells/1870s/1877/1877-01

Footnotes

[1]text: The first twenty-four pages of the diary contain preprinted historical, geographical, and other data. EBW began writing on the page hand-numbered 25.
[2]Mary Ann Hallock Foote (1847–1938) was an author of western stories and an illustrator; she was married to Arthur D. Foote, a mining engineer. As they moved to work projects in California, Colorado, Mexico, and Idaho, she wrote letters; sent illustrated articles to Scribner’s, Harper’s Weekly, and the Century; and eventually published fiction. (Thurman Wilkins, “Foote, Mary Anna Hallock,” in James et al., Notable American Women, 2:643–645; Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Mary Anna Hallock Foote,” accessed 3 Mar. 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Anna-Hallock-Foote.)