Susan Adeline (Holman) Johnson
7 October 1841–5 February 1918
Susan Adeline was born 7 October 1841, in Nauvoo, Illinois. She was the fifth child of James Sawyer and Naomi Roxana (LeBaron) Holman.
Her parents were Englanders and early members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her father was born on the 17 September in 1805 in Templeton, Worcester, Massachusetts, and her mother was born on the 7 October in 1816 in LeRoy, Genesee, New York. They were married on the 24 March in 1833. Six children were born to them before the exodus from Nauvoo and one child was born in Iowa. Five more children were born after arriving in Utah.
The Holman family suffered persecution, as did other faithful Latter-day Saints of that day. They experienced mob violence and were driven from place to place. They were living in Nauvoo at the time the Prophet was martyred. To escape further trouble, they moved to Mt. Pisgah, Iowa where their father stayed long enough to put together a log house and to get his family settled. Then, he left his wife and six children and started, in the summer of 1847 with the first herd of sheep, to cross the desert to reach Salt Lake. He walked the entire way and was assisted by a young boy who rode a horse.
During that summer, Naomi Roxana and some of the children were sick with chills and fever. In the summer of 1848, with the help of the good brethren and sisters, she prepared to start across the plains with other Saints. They left the Elkhart on 1 June in 1848, in the first division in the charge of President Brigham Young. This division included 1229 souls, 397 wagons, an assortment of animals including 411 sheep and one crow. Think of a six-year-old girl walking barefoot beside the wagon, playing with brothers and sisters, listening at night to the stories told by the campfires, and probably joining in at the edges of the dances.
They arrived in Salt Lake between 20 and 24 September in 1848,where their father met them.
On her first sight of ―The Place, Susan Adeline later wrote, I was only seven years old the fall we arrived in Salt Lake and how well I remember as we came over the mountains, what a barren looking place it was with the little Fort down in the valley and perhaps a few houses.
Then came the real test for Susan, as she and her young brother herded their father‘s sheep over the hills in their bare feet, glad to have a bucket of Sego Lilly bulbs for their supper when they got home. She never forgot seeing her father go off to work in the morning, to be gone all day with nothing to eat and only a drink of milk to sustain him until he returned at night. She vividly remembered seeing her mother trudging up and down on her spinning wheel all day and often into the night with the tears streaming down her cheeks because of her fatigue and hunger.
Around the year 1850, Susan‘s father built a house on a city lot in the Sixteenth Ward belonging to Benjamin Franklin Johnson (BFJ). The two men joined their interests and labors together. This was the beginning of a close association of the Holman and Johnson families, as three of the Holman daughters became the wives of BFJ. In the summer of 1852, the Holman family moved to Summit (later called Santaquin), along with BFJ, his brother George Washington Johnson, and others, to colonize that place.
In the summer, Santaquin was like a paradise. The landscape included broad, smooth lands sloping away to the west, mountains with rose and willow patches here and there, the morning sun upon a clear sky, air fragrant with the spring odors, and trees alive with singing birds. It was a place of beauty where the air was pure. There was plenty of firewood close at hand.
Here in this lovely situation, Susan Adeline grew and developed into a capable and beautiful young woman, making herself very useful among older members of the family whenever the occasion arose. Susan‘s father, James Sawyer Holman, was the first Bishop of Santaquin. Susan spent a lot of time with her two married sisters, Harriet Naomi and Sarah Melissa, and the rest of the Johnson family.
Life was not easy, but there were pleasant times. Picture a pretty teenager riding into the nearby canyons for wild berries and choke cherries, enjoying family outings, and dances and parties with friends. Of course, we also need to picture her learning the household duties of those days. Besides knowing how to transform clothing starting with the wool of the sheep to ending with completed dresses and shirts, she also learned to knit, cook, keep a clean house, make butter and cheese, and make candles from tallow. Think of the way laundry was done: stirring the white clothes with a stick in a tub of boiling water, scrubbing on a washboard, ironing with flatirons heated on the wood-burning stove, starched shirts, dresses and petticoats. Orchards were beginning to be productive, and there was the drying and preserving of fruit to be done.
On 8 February in 1857, she married Benjamin Franklin Johnson in Salt Lake City. She was just four months past her 15th birthday when she was sealed to BFJ in the Endowment House. He was 38
years old. Two months after their wedding, BFJ married his seventh wife, Sarah Jane Spooner.
BFJ and Susan lived at Santaquin, and on the 9 January in 1858, their first child, Susan Celestia, was born. She truly must have been a Celestial spirit though because she was crippled from birth and had to be fed, washed, and carried from her bed to a chair and back every day of her life. What a trial this must have been to the young mother, Susan, who herself, was only 16 years old, even with the support of a loving husband, the other wives and her own parents. A second daughter, Zina Susetta, was born the following year on the 3 August in 1860.
In 1865, BFJ sold his Santaquin property and bought land in Spring Lake. He also bought property in Fountain Green in partnership with Susan‘s father. Susan and her sister Harriet, with their children,
went there to live with their parents until homes could be arranged for them in Spring Lake.
Things didn‘t go well and the Holman‘s sold their home in Fountain Green to move back to Spring Lake.
BFJ purchased a two-story, adobe-brick, whitewashed house in Spring Lake in 1866. The house was surrounded by orchards, vineyards, gardens, fields and pastures. Here, each of the Holman sisters, as well as Mary Ann Hale and Sarah Jane Spooner had their own apartment.
Life in Spring Lake was eventful and filled with joys as well as sorrows. It was in Spring Lake that the following children were born to BFJ & Susan: Frank Carlton, Winifred, Leofwin, Adeline Estella, and Nancy Lillian. Justus would have been born in Spring Lake except for some unusual circumstances. Susan was expecting her 6th child and decided to visit her mother. She took Winnie and Lee with her. They had a pleasant visit at their grandparents‘ home, but before they got back to Spring Lake, they stopped at a home in Chicken Creek where the woman who lived there assisted in the birth of a baby boy on the 6 January in 1873. This lady had a little boy about two years old, and during the few days they stayed in her home, Winnie and Lee had a good time playing with him. Their own new brother wasn‘t much good for playing with so they tried to get the woman to trade babies so that they could take their new playmate home with them. Of course, the trade wasn‘t made, and when they returned to Spring Lake,t heir father named the newcomer Justus Wanderus because his mother had been wandering in the wilderness when he was born.
Susan shared her nursing skills and helped supplement their income by caring for the sick and those who needed her services, leaving daughters Zina and Winnie to care for the younger children. Benjamin bought sewing machines for each of his wives when they first became available in Utah, and Susan became an accomplished seamstress.
She had the responsibility of looking after her own family. Each wife had her own apartment and her own garden, cows and chickens, as well as a pig for butchering each year. Lush gardens provided
ripening fruit in the fall; grapes were harvested from the vine and grain fields furnished their flour for bread. Cattle and sheep, gave the family meat and clothing to wear, and BFJ‘s ability to grow anything and everything was amazing. Every day was a busy day; clothing to prepare, canning, spinning, making sorghum, brooms, running a sawmill; and there was work for all, young and old.
In this wonderful atmosphere of family life, Susan Adeline raised her children in close association with her sisters and their children, where there was never a mention of half sister or brother, and all the children played together and learned to share in the work as well as the fun and laughter—loyal to one another, loving each other, even dancing and singing together. There were probably some disagreements at times, and disciplinary problems, which are always part of rearing a family. Come evening though, all the day‘s cares and problems were laid aside, and all family members joined in special and fun times together. Nothing was as wonderful as the Home Evenings, when the husband and father gathered his wives and sons and daughters together in the big downstairs room for stories by Pa, as he was affectionately called. Then there would sometimes be dancing and singing together to their own music.
In 1882, the Johnson family received a call from the First Presidency to colonize Arizona and open up the way for colonization in to Mexico. BFJ and his family moved to Tempe, Arizona. Some of the
family traveled to Arizona by team and wagon. With an invalid daughter, Susan came by train. She left Utah with Celestia and her three youngest children on 17 October in 1882. They were met in Maricopa by her husband. They lived in tents under the cottonwoods down by the Salt River until her son Carl made adobe bricks and built her a home.
Because of the persecution against polygamy at this time, Susan was now on her own with her son Carl to look after her and the other children. Some of her children were married by now, and those who could find work had to go to work, while others attended school. Celestia died in Mesa on the 26 December in 1882 after nearly 25 years as a helpless invalid.
In 1886, Susan took up a homestead about three miles east of Tempe, where she began pioneer life again. She and her youngest daughter Lillian lived at the homestead until about 1888.
One Sunday, her daughter Lillian was sitting on the back of the buggy. Due to the roughness of the road, she was bounced off the back. A sudden gust of wind caught her open umbrella, and she was deposited in the soft dust of the road. It was so deep she was just about smothered. She was barely distinguishable when the others came back to look for her.
In 1888, her son Carl bought 40 acres of land near Mesa. Susan sold the homestead and she and Carl improved the ranch until she had an orchard, a vineyard, pastures, horses, cows, calves, pigs and chickens. She lived there quite happily until 1894, when drought threatened to ruin the country.
In 1895, Susan went with other family members by team and wagon to Provo, Utah. Here, she ran a boarding house for students of the University and made her living that way. Her daughter Lillian attended BYU for two years. The boarding house was run efficiently and Susan had strict house rules. Family prayers were held daily and all residents were expected to kneel and join in. A blessing on the food was always given. She raised a garden to help supply her table. She did temple work with her sister, Emma in the Salt Lake Temple.
All who knew her looked on her as a wonderful mother, neighbor and friend. She helped many aspiring youth to find careers and to keep straight in their actions and attitudes. Self-sacrificing and unselfish, she reared her children according to the Gospel teachings. Her exemplary influence was for good and she always maintained her personal standards and great qualities of character.
Susan Adeline returned to Mesa, Arizona and after a short illness passed away there on the 5 February in 1918 at the age of 76. She is buried in the Mesa City Cemetery.
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