Maria Louisa Patten Lemmon

Maria Louisa Patten was born on the 4th of October 1816 in Herkimer, Herkimer County, New York. She and her twin brother, William Wallace Patten, were the second and third children born to John and Abigail Stiles Patten. Maria Louisa’s older brother Charles was a month shy of his fifth birthday when she was born. When she and her brother William were just 22 months old, their mother gave birth to their younger sister, Polly Angerona. Then, about two years later, their sister Abigail was born and also died. So, it was with four children, ranging in age from eight to one and a half, that the Patten family left New York sometime before the summer of 1820 to settle in southwestern Indiana, first in Vigo County and then the neighboring Greene County. It was here that Maria Louisa’s mother Abigail died on September 21, 1821.

Two and a half years later, on the 25th of April 1824, John Patten married a young woman from the area by the name of Hannah Ingersol. In the next ten years Hannah had six children (the youngest of whom died as an infant), putting Maria Louisa in the position of oldest daughter in a family of nine children. She was fifteen years old when the Mormon missionaries, Reynolds Cahoon and Samuel H. Smith (the Prophet’s brother), came through southern Indiana and baptized John and Hannah. She was certainly old enough to have listened to the elders preach, but she probably was not baptized then, as it was unusual to baptize minor children in those first few years of the new church organization. It’s likely that she was also present for the gospel discussions her father and uncle, David W. Patten, had when her Uncle David came to visit from Michigan the following summer of 1832. In the fall of 1832, Maria Louisa’s six-year-old sister Hannah died, and the following spring of 1833 the family prepared to join other members of the Mormon Church in Missouri.

When the Patten family moved to Missouri, Maria Louisa was a young woman of marriageable age and was perhaps already being courted by the young James Abbot Lemmon, whose family was originally from Tennessee but had also lived in southern Indiana. The two were married sometime in 1837 in the area of Adam Ondi Ahman, Daviess County, Missouri. Just two weeks after their first child, Mary Elizabeth, was born (4 October 1838), Maria Louisa’s Uncle David was killed at the Battle of Crooked River and the LDS Church members immediately started to leave Missouri.

Some records indicate that the Patten family was still in Missouri when Maria Louisa’s second child, Louisa Algerona, was born on the 2nd of December 1840. Whether before or after this child was born, Maria Louisa and her husband James eventually found their way to Lee County, Iowa (across the river from Nauvoo), where they settled near her parents, John and Hannah Patten. Here they had at least two more children and her sister Polly died in 1845. On Friday, January 2, 1846, Maria Louisa and her husband James participated in LDS temple ordinances in the still unfinished Nauvoo temple, and sometime that spring the Lemmons and the Pattens crossed Iowa and settled in and around what became known as Winter Quarters.

James and Maria Louisa finally traveled west on the Mormon Trail the summer of 1851 with the small William McPherson company. The time period in between was a sad one for the Patten family. Maria Louisa’s father died the spring of 1847, and in the next four years she experienced the sorrow of the deaths of her brothers, Charles and William, as well as at least one of her own children (possibly two or three) and at least one of her brother Charles’s children. Hannah Patten and four of her children went west before Maria Louisa and her husband and were already settled in the San Pete area, where the Lemmons and their three children (Mary Elizabeth, John James and Deborah Lerona) joined them. It is also evident that one of Charles and Peggy Patten’s children, toddler David Patten, came west with either Hannah or Maria Louisa and spent most of the rest of his childhood with Maria Louisa and her family.

In 1861 the James Lemmon family joined a group led by Orson Pratt that went south to explore and settle along the Virgin River in what is now Washington County, Utah. The Lemmons, along with the Isaac Behunin and William Black families, established the settlement of Northrop, where the two branches of the river meet. Within a few months, the Behunin and Black families moved further up the river and established the settlement of Springdale, but the Lemmons stayed in Northrop, where they continued to raise their family and where Maria Louisa died just three years later on the 29th of August 1864. Her husband James lived another eighteen years, had at least one other wife and fathered several more children.

Maria Louisa Patten and her husband James Abbot Lemmon are buried side by side in the old pioneer cemetery in Springdale, Utah. Situated at what is now the entrance to Zions National Park, Springdale is accessible only by a narrow winding road, barely passable in some weather even now. It is cold there in the winter, with a very short growing season in the summer, and the Virgin River regularly floods in the early spring. But standing next to the grave of Maria Louisa Patten Lemmon last October, awed by the surrounding mountains and rock formations, it seemed a fitting and peaceful place for the end of such a tumultuous and difficult life.

References:
Douglas D. Alder and Karl F. Brooks, A History of Washington County: From Isolation to Destination (Springdale, Utah: Zion Natural History Association, 2007), p. 32.

Devery S. Anderson and Gary James Bergera, The Nauvoo Endowment Companies: 1845-1846 (Salt Lake City, Utah: Signature Books, 2005), pp. 282-284.

Catherine Wheelwright Ockey, Not Just Keeping House: My Pioneer Mormon Mothers (Helena, Montana: Wheelwright Publishing, 2009).