29 Facts About Brigham Young

1. Brigham Young believed in the importance of education and wanted women to get the right to vote in Utah.

2. Brigham Young was president of the Church and wanted to protect the power of the Mormon community.

3. Brigham Young stopped to spend the winter in Nebraska, and then started traveling again in 1847.

4. Brigham Young became the leader of the Church and focused on finding a safe place for the Mormons to live.

5. Brigham Young started learning about the Mormon Church, established by Joseph Smith, and decided to become a Mormon in 1832.

6. Brigham Young was born in 1801 in Vermont to a large, poor family.

7. Brigham Young was a leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, called the Mormon Church, which started around 1830.

8. Brigham Young was an initial member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and was ordained as an apostle in 1835.

9. Brigham Young was interested with Mormonism after he read Book of Mormon in 1830.

10. Brigham Young involved in various controversies in Mountain Meadow massacre, the Utah War, Priesthood and black people.

11. Brigham Young was a pragmatic leader who sought to strengthen the Church by cooperative means.

12. One of his wives, Zina Huntington Brigham Young, served as the third president of the Relief Society.

13. Brigham Young was a polygamist, marrying a total of 55 wives, 54 of them after he converted to Mormonism.

14. Brigham Young is buried on the grounds of the Mormon Pioneer Memorial Monument in the heart of Salt Lake City.

15. Brigham Young eventually relented and agreed to step down as governor.

16. One of the more controversial teachings of Brigham Young was the Adam–God doctrine.

17. Brigham Young was involved in temple building throughout his membership in the LDS Church and made temple building a priority of his church presidency.

18. Brigham Young was the longest-serving President of the LDS Church in history, having served for 29 years.

19. Brigham Young supported slavery and its expansion into Utah, and led the efforts to legalize and regulate slavery in the 1852 Act in Relation to Service, based on his personal beliefs on slavery.

20. Brigham Young organized a Board of Regents to establish a university in the Salt Lake Valley.

21. Brigham Young organized the first legislature and established Fillmore as the territory's first capital.

22. Brigham Young was one of the first to subscribe to Union Pacific stock, for the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad.

23. Brigham Young arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, a date now recognized as Pioneer Day in Utah.

24. Brigham Young organized the journey that would take the Mormon pioneers to Winter Quarters, Nebraska, in 1846, then to the Salt Lake Valley.

25. Brigham Young was ordained a member of the original Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1835, and he assumed a leadership role within that organization in taking Mormonism to the United Kingdom and organizing the exodus of Latter Day Saints from Missouri in 1838.

26. Brigham Young officially joined the new church in 1832 and traveled to Upper Canada as a missionary.

27. Brigham Young was first married in 1824 to Miriam Angeline Works.

28. Brigham Young founded Salt Lake City and he served as the first governor of the Utah Territory.

29. Brigham Young was an American religious leader, politician, and settler.