Winter Quarters (Florence, Nebraska)

After my frightening experience with the storm in Omaha last Tuesday evening, I was ready to leave the city and its state on Wednesday morning. However, I really wanted to visit the Winter Quarters cemetery in Florence (now part of north-central Omaha). I had been to this site once before, in September of 1965, when I went to Chicago with Mom and Dad and we drove home in the new Mercedes they had purchased in Germany that summer. As I drove up the hill to the cemetery last Wednesday, it all looked very familiar to me, until I rounded the corner and saw the new Winter Quarters temple. I was amazed at how the (very small) temple backs right up next to the cemetery and yet holds a place of its own on the small hillside. The temple is beautiful, with narrow vertical stained glass windows that you can almost reach out and touch through the cemetery's wrought iron fencing. It seems fitting in this historic setting.

The entire site is significant for two main historical events (or time periods). First, this is where the main body of Saints gathered in the summer and fall of 1846, after leaving Nauvoo and crossing Iowa. For that winter and the next, Winter Quarters was a bustling settlement of people preparing to go west. It was on Indian land, with an agreement that the Mormons could be there for only two years. Even that first winter, many of the Saints were spread out in small settlements to the north, south and east, especially across the river in Iowa. But Winter Quarters was the jumping-off point for the first two years of the Mormon movement west, and this is where the Billings, Patten and Ockey families spent at least part of that winter of 1846-1847. It is here, in this cemetery, that John Patten is buried, along with his granddaughter Rachel Patten (daughter of Peggy and Charles), who died of measles at only two years of age. Isaac Morley's first wife, Lucy Gunn, is also buried here, as is Eliza Ockey (spelled Oakey on the memorial), first wife of Edward Ockey. Their names are listed with the many others under the statue (by Avard Fairbanks) of pioneer parents peering into the grave of a young child. It is a moving tribute to those who died and those who had to go on without them.

The second time period that gives this site historical significance is that of the handcart pioneers. Florence, Nebraska served as the jumping-off point for a number of these groups, including the company in which Catherine Farrar (Wheelwright) and her sister Sarah traveled. An almost-life-sized statue of a family with a handcart stands in front of the visitors' center, across the street from the cemetery and the temple. The visitors' center itself has a nice exhibit explaining both the Winter Quarters settlement and the story of the handcart companies. (Unfortunately, I was unable to spend very much time in the visitors' center because one of the young sister missionaries was wearing heavy perfume.)

This is a beautiful spot, and I am glad for the hour I spent here, but because it sits in the middle of what is now a big city, it is a little hard to imagine what it must have been like as wilderness. It wasn't until I got out of the city and headed west across Nebraska that I could really appreciate how wild it really was at that time.