Wilford Woodruff ended the public practice of plural marriage among members of the LDS Church in 1890.
124 Facts About Wilford Woodruff
2.
Wilford Woodruff met Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement in Kirtland, Ohio, before joining Zion's Camp in April 1834.
3.
Wilford Woodruff stayed in Missouri as a missionary, preaching in Arkansas and Tennessee before returning to Kirtland.
4.
Wilford Woodruff married his first wife, Phebe, that year and served a mission in New England.
5.
Smith called Wilford Woodruff to be a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in July 1838, and he was ordained in April 1839.
6.
Wilford Woodruff served a mission in England from August 1839 until April 1841, leading converts from England to Nauvoo.
7.
Wilford Woodruff was away promoting Smith's presidential campaign at the time of Smith's death.
8.
Wilford Woodruff joined the advance company that traveled to the Salt Lake Valley without his family in 1847.
9.
Wilford Woodruff served in the Utah territorial legislature and was heavily involved in the social and economic life of his community.
10.
Wilford Woodruff worked as an Assistant Church Historian and as Church Historian from 1856 to 1889.
11.
Wilford Woodruff was married to three more wives between 1852 and 1853.
12.
Wilford Woodruff helped standardize the temple ceremony and decreed that church members could act as proxy for anyone they could identify by name.
13.
Wilford Woodruff ended sealings of members to unrelated priesthood holders.
14.
In 1882, Wilford Woodruff went into hiding to avoid arrest for unlawful cohabitation under the Edmunds Act.
15.
In 1889, Wilford Woodruff became the fourth president of the LDS Church.
16.
Wilford Woodruff died in 1898 and his detailed journals provide an important record of Latter Day Saint history.
17.
Wilford Woodruff was one of four sons born to Beulah Thompson and Aphek Wilford Woodruff.
18.
Beulah died of "spotted fever" in 1808 at the age of 26, when Wilford Woodruff was fifteen months old.
19.
Wilford Woodruff attended school until he was 18 years old, which was unusual at the time.
20.
At age 20, Wilford Woodruff left home to manage a flour mill for his aunt, and after three years, operated mills for other people until moving to Richland, New York, with his brother, Azmon, in 1832.
21.
Wilford Woodruff had his local Baptist minister, Mr Phippen, baptize him without making him a member of the local congregation.
22.
Wilford Woodruff joined Smith's original Church of Christ on December 31,1833.
23.
Wilford Woodruff was impressed with how the missionaries preached their message voluntarily and free of charge, and how they purported to heal the sick.
24.
Wilford Woodruff left his home in Richland after members recruited him to join Zion's Camp in April 1834.
25.
Wilford Woodruff was ordained as a priest in 1834 and volunteered to serve a mission.
26.
Wilford Woodruff was dedicated to the Latter Day Saint Church, which distanced him from his family, who did not believe in the church.
27.
Wilford Woodruff returned to Kirtland in November 1836, where he studied Latin and Greek grammar at the Kirtland School, a school for adult education, which met in the attic of the Kirtland Temple.
28.
In January 1837, Smith called Wilford Woodruff to join the First Quorum of the Seventy.
29.
Wilford Woodruff was married to ten women, but not at the same time.
30.
Six of Wilford Woodruff's wives bore him a total of 34 children, with three wives and 14 children preceding him in death.
31.
Wilford Woodruff met his first wife, Phebe Carter, in Kirtland shortly after his return from his first mission through Southern Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky.
32.
Wilford Woodruff came to Kirtland on November 25,1836, along with Abraham O Smoot.
33.
Wilford Woodruff was introduced to Phebe by Milton Holmes on January 28,1837.
34.
Wilford Woodruff was a native of Maine and had become a Latter Day Saint in 1834.
35.
Wilford Woodruff headed west with her husband shortly after the birth of their daughter, despite her reluctance to leave home.
36.
Wilford Woodruff frequently slipped into unconsciousness starting on December 2,1838.
37.
Wilford Woodruff's firstborn child died of a respiratory infection in 1840 while Woodruff was on a mission in England.
38.
Wilford Woodruff was a key figure behind the Indignation Meeting of 1870 that was an important step in the women of Utah being granted the right to vote.
39.
Wilford Woodruff's second marriage to Mary Ann Jackson ended in divorce a year after their son, James, was born in 1847.
40.
In 1852, Wilford Woodruff married Mary Giles Meeks Webster and Clarissa Henrietta Hardy, but Mary died that same year and Clarissa divorced him a year later.
41.
Wilford Woodruff served as a member of the Relief Society General Board from 1892 to 1910.
42.
Wilford Woodruff spent more time with Emma's children than his children from other wives.
43.
Wilford Woodruff corresponded most frequently with Emma's and Phebe's children, giving them advice on living a virtuous life and saving money.
44.
Wilford Woodruff built homes for his wives, and he sent money to his wives and children, probably based on their individual needs.
45.
On May 30,1837, a month after his marriage to Phebe, Wilford Woodruff left Kirtland with Jonathan Hale and Milton Holmes to serve a mission in New England.
46.
In 1838, Wilford Woodruff led a party of 53 members in wagons from the Maine coast to Nauvoo, Illinois.
47.
Wilford Woodruff was ordained at Far West, Missouri, in April 1839 where the other members of the Quorum of the Twelve had traveled.
48.
Wilford Woodruff spent over a month in the Staffordshire Potteries and then traveled to Herefordshire, where he preached to members of the United Brethren.
49.
Wilford Woodruff met Phebe in Maine, and they traveled to Nauvoo together in October 1841.
50.
In Nauvoo, the Twelve Apostles assigned Wilford Woodruff to assist with the church's temporal matters in Nauvoo.
51.
Wilford Woodruff became co-manager of Times and Seasons in February 1842.
52.
Wilford Woodruff supervised the physical printing of the paper, and he and John Taylor published a general interest newspaper called Nauvoo Neighbor, starting in May 1843.
53.
Wilford Woodruff bought and sold real estate, helped clerk in a provision store, and farmed.
54.
Wilford Woodruff became a member of the Nauvoo city council and served as chaplain for the Nauvoo Legion, a local militia.
55.
Wilford Woodruff helped organize the Nauvoo Masonic Lodge and the Nauvoo Agricultural and Manufacturing Society.
56.
Wilford Woodruff took detailed notes on the King Follett discourse.
57.
Wilford Woodruff joined the other apostles in a trip to the East Coast to raise funds for a temple and hotel under construction in Nauvoo, setting out in July 1843 and returning in November 1843.
58.
In May 1844, Wilford Woodruff left on another trip to preach and promote Joseph Smith's presidential campaign.
59.
Wilford Woodruff worked to square the mission account books and visited wards and branches throughout the United Kingdom, establishing the authority of the apostles after Smith's death.
60.
Wilford Woodruff failed because of unrest in Nauvoo and problems in management.
61.
Wilford Woodruff picked up their daughter and brought some of his relatives with him to Nauvoo, but Wilford Woodruff's relatives decided to join James Strang's followers rather than move west.
62.
Wilford Woodruff oversaw 40 families, and they stayed at Winter Quarters.
63.
Wilford Woodruff joined an advance company that left in April 1847 to find a place to settle, leaving his family in Winter Quarters.
64.
Wilford Woodruff suffered various ailments, as did most of the other migrants.
65.
Wilford Woodruff learned to fly fish in England, and his 1847 journal account of his fishing in the East Fork River is the earliest known account of fly fishing west of the Mississippi River.
66.
The apostles assigned Wilford Woodruff to preside over the Eastern States Mission, centered in Boston.
67.
Phebe went with the children to visit her father in Maine while Wilford Woodruff organized church work on the East Coast.
68.
Wilford Woodruff led 200 members in traveling west, starting in February 1850.
69.
Wilford Woodruff initially focused on building cabins, farming, and grazing his cattle.
70.
Wilford Woodruff sold goods from outside of Utah in a retail store.
71.
Wilford Woodruff's efforts were not successful, and he focused on farming and herding in 1856.
72.
Wilford Woodruff adopted an orphaned Paiute boy named Moroni Bosnel in 1855.
73.
Wilford Woodruff purchased a 6-year-old Paiute boy; it is unclear if the boy was part of the household as a slave or a son.
74.
Wilford Woodruff was a member of the legislative house from its formation in 1851 until 1854, and then served in the legislative council from 1854 until 1876.
75.
Wilford Woodruff promoted public schools and noted attendance statistics when he traveled to southern Utah.
76.
Wilford Woodruff served as a member of the 1862 Utah Constitutional Convention and the committee that drafted the appeal to the US Congress to approve the constitution and grant statehood for Utah.
77.
Wilford Woodruff served as a member of the Provo City Council in 1868 and 1869.
78.
Wilford Woodruff was on the Board of Regents of the University of Deseret, where he chaired a committee to prepare spelling books in the Deseret Alphabet.
79.
Wilford Woodruff spent some time in 1854 educating his own children at home before public schools were established.
80.
Wilford Woodruff was president of a society for a lecture and discussion group called the Universal Scientific Society, founded in February 1855 and disbanded in November 1855.
81.
Wilford Woodruff attended meetings of the Polysophical Society, a literary group including Lorenzo and Eliza Snow.
82.
Wilford Woodruff was president of the Deseret Horticultural Society, founded in September 1855, which sought to find the most productive trees and bushes.
83.
Wilford Woodruff led the Deseret Agricultural and Manufacturing Society from 1862 to 1877.
84.
Wilford Woodruff sometimes led ceremonies in the Endowment House after it was built in 1855, officiating every Saturday in sealings and endowments in 1867 to 1868.
85.
Wilford Woodruff served a "home mission" to reactivate lapsed members and call them to repentance, preaching for a renewed commitment to religion throughout the Mormon Reformation.
86.
In 1868, Wilford Woodruff was elected to be part of the city council in Provo; Delight moved to Provo to facilitate his work there.
87.
Wilford Woodruff was the founding director of Zion's Cooperative Savings Bank in August 1871.
88.
Wilford Woodruff was on the board of directors for ZCMI.
89.
When Brigham Young set up United Order communities in 1874, Wilford Woodruff helped organize United Orders in Provo, Pleasant Grove, American Fork, and Lehi, but did not enroll in the communalist program himself.
90.
Wilford Woodruff started keeping bees in 1870, and founded a society for beekeepers in Utah territory that year.
91.
Wilford Woodruff bought new mowers and rakes, which he used at both Randolph farm and his Salt Lake City farm in 1873.
92.
Wilford Woodruff built a house for Delight in 1876 in Salt Lake City.
93.
Under the direction of Brigham Young, Wilford Woodruff was key in implementing endowments for the dead in the temple, in standardizing the ceremonies, and in giving various sermons to encourage broader understanding of the program.
94.
In February 1877, Wilford Woodruff received a revelation that church members could act as a proxy in the temple for not only their own relatives, but for anyone they could identify by name.
95.
Wilford Woodruff spent his 70th birthday working in the temple in 1877.
96.
Two years earlier, in 1875, Wilford Woodruff performed baptisms for the dead on behalf of 141 of his relatives in the Endowment House and for over 900 more in that same year.
97.
Wilford Woodruff accepted Brigham Young's daughter Eudora as a plural wife in 1877; their union produced a son who died shortly after birth.
98.
Wilford Woodruff sealed five single women to his recently deceased son Brigham.
99.
Wilford Woodruff was baptized on behalf of the signers of the US Declaration of Independence and other Founding Fathers.
100.
Wilford Woodruff stated in a September 16,1877, discourse that he had been visited by the departed spirits of these men.
101.
Wilford Woodruff compiled lists of notable men and women, for whom he performed vicarious temple work with the help of Lucy Bigelow Young.
102.
Wilford Woodruff chaired the committee to separate Brigham Young's personal property from church property, finding that Brigham Young owed the church almost $700,000 in real-estate and other expenses.
103.
Prosecution of polygamous men began in earnest in 1884, and Wilford Woodruff went into hiding in St George during 1885 and often wore a dress and sunbonnet as a disguise.
104.
Wilford Woodruff was able to visit Phebe before her death on November 9,1885, but fearing arrest, did not attend her funeral, instead watching it from the president's office.
105.
Wilford Woodruff asked leaders to stop preaching the practice of plural marriage.
106.
On behalf of the church, Wilford Woodruff courted the favor of businessman Alexander Badlam Jr.
107.
Wilford Woodruff issued the 1890 Manifesto, which officially ended the church's support of plural marriage.
108.
Historian Thomas Alexander stated in his biography of Wilford Woodruff that Wilford Woodruff's decision to stop polygamy was a significant transition "from isolation to assimilation, from extremism to respectability".
109.
Wilford Woodruff encouraged members to "trace their genealogies as far as they can".
110.
Wilford Woodruff helped found the Genealogical Society of Utah to help church members complete generational sealings.
111.
Wilford Woodruff stated that this change in practice was not a change in doctrine, since Joseph Smith had referred to a welding link between fathers and their children.
112.
Wilford Woodruff encouraged presidents of the four temples in the Utah Territory to coordinate their temple procedures in 1893.
113.
Wilford Woodruff tried to promote economic development with various ventures, including the Utah Sugar Company at Lehi.
114.
Wilford Woodruff was not successful and created over $300,000 in debt for the Church.
115.
Wilford Woodruff said that any Melchizedek priesthood holder ought to have permission from his church leaders before pursuing a political office.
116.
In December 1895, Wilford Woodruff said that Thatcher and Roberts would not be presented for the traditional vote of approval at April's general conference until both repented.
117.
Wilford Woodruff died in San Francisco, California, on September 2,1898, after a failed bladder surgery.
118.
Wilford Woodruff was succeeded as church president by his son-in-law, Lorenzo Snow.
119.
Wilford Woodruff's journals are a significant contribution to LDS Church history.
120.
Wilford Woodruff kept a daily record of his life and activities within the LDS Church, beginning with his mission to the southern states in 1835.
121.
Matthias F Cowley, editor of his published journals, observed that Woodruff was "perhaps, the best chronicler of events in all the history of the Church".
122.
Roberts wrote that Wilford Woodruff's record was a "priceless" documentary of the discourses of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young.
123.
Wilford Woodruff was an Assistant Church Historian from 1856 to 1883 and was the church's eleventh official Church Historian from 1883 to 1889.
124.
Wilford Woodruff believed that the United States would disassemble by 1890.