Carthage, Illinois

We have been without internet service for several days, but we've been very busy visiting Carthage and Nauvoo, stopping at Church history sites and attending the first day of the Mormon History Association conference. It will take me several posts to catch up, so I'm going to start with a short post about our visit to Carthage, Illinois.

We drove from Charlottesville to Bloomington, Illinois on Monday (a very long day). Tuesday morning we drove to Carthage to see the Carthage jail, where Joseph and Hyrum Smith were killed on June 27, 1844. Carthage is the county seat of Hancock County and sits about 25 miles southeast of Nauvoo. Joseph and Hyrum, along with John Taylor and Willard Richards, were in the upper bedroom of the jail house when a mob of men stormed the jail, killing Joseph and Hyrum and seriously injuring John Taylor. Willard Richards was unharmed.

The above pictures are: 3) the original door to the room with the hole from the bullet that killed Hyrum Smith; 2) Rand looking out the window through which Joseph Smith fell to his death after being shot (not the original window, of course); and, 1) a handsome man standing next to the statue of Joseph and Hyrum in front of the jail building.

After taking the tour of the jail, we went across the street (to the south) and spent an hour in the Kibbe Museum, a project of the Hancock County Historical Society. This museum is well worth the time to stop. The exhibits are very well done and have much significance to the Mormon settlers in the early 1800s.

A real surprise at Carthage was running into couple missionaries (the Dicksons) from Arlington, Washington (in our former stake there). It is a small world in the Church.

An interesting family connection to Carthage is that we learned that Edward Ockey (Rand's great, great grandfather) owned farmland not far from here during the early 1840s.