| 560 one half of our time is now given to church work (which we do not propose to relinquish), and the other half is given to just such cares as Martha complained of, and which for the sake of the church we are willing to lay down.-The Saints' Herald, vol. 34, p. 183.
On March 13 a Saints' chapel was dedicated in Armstrong, Kansas, by President Joseph Smith, assisted by Elders Alexander H. Smith and F. C. Warnky. While President Smith was in the vicinity of Independence, Kansas City, and Armstrong he took occasion to visit the old jail at Liberty, Missouri, where his father and others were incarcerated in 1838-9. Of this visit President Smith writes as follows:
On Friday, the 18th, we availed ourself [ourselves] of an opportunity to visit the historic town of Liberty, in Clay County, and see the jail in which the men who escaped the order to be shot were confined, about which so much of interest among the Saints must ever center. A little party consisting of Brn. Alexander H. Smith, Stephen Maloney, Frederick C. Warnky, John W. Brackenbury, and the editor, drove across the country in an open buggy, crossing the Missouri River at the Blue Mills Ferry, on a primitive flat boat propelled by horses treading an endless chain power. The day was pleasant, the company was congenial, all being fully in accord in gospel bonds; the occasion was an auspicious one, and the ride and its incidents will always live in the memory of those who participated in them. We reached the town at a little after eleven o'clock, and at once inquired for the jail. A gentleman, whom we met at a turn of the square, kindly showed us to it. We found that the original blockhouse, made of large squared logs, had been inclosed [enclosed] with an outer wall of hewn stone, almost obliterating the identity of it, as it was when the brethren were confined there. The western wall had succumbed to the pelting of the storms and had tumbled outward leaving the logs exposed to view; the roof had rotted away at its supports, and had fallen inward leaving the eastern gable standing without support, and liable to fall at any time; indeed, so precarious seemed the standing of the whole stone structure that one or two of the brethren thought that we ought to be very wary lest we were caught in the fall of it. After we had examined it at some length we went to the Arthur House, the leading hotel of the place, and had a most excellent dinner, for which our ride in the raw eastern wind had given us a good appetite. We then visited the college hill, where there is a seminary and a college for the purpose of educating men for the ministry, we think of the Baptist order, over which we were shown by two of the students, very kindly and pleasantly. From the cupola of the college there is a view surpassed for beauty by none that we ever saw; south, east, and west, the undulating landscape gave rise to the thought that it was one of the fairest portions of God's heritage to man. From
(page 560) |
