William Sisson Champlin

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William Sisson Champlin: Blacksmith, Soldier, Survivor of Hawn's Mill

A Vermont Boy Named for His Grandfather

William Sisson Champlin was born on 16 April 1794 in Shelburne, Chittenden County, Vermont, the son of Joseph Champlin and Mercy Sisson. Vermont had been a state for only three years, and Shelburne sat in a stretch of country along Lake Champlain that was still being cleared and fenced by families who had come up from southern New England after the Revolution.[1][2][3]

His parents were part of that movement. Joseph Champlin had been born in 1762 in Westerly, Rhode Island, and Mercy Sisson in 1771 in nearby Stonington, Connecticut, where both of William's grandmothers had also been born. The Champlins, Sissons and Noyeses had lived for generations along that short stretch of coast where Rhode Island meets Connecticut, so Joseph and Mercy's move north to the Vermont frontier was a real break with the old family country. Their son would take that habit of leaving much farther than they ever did. The boy carried his maternal grandfather's name whole, since Mercy's father was William Sisson. It was likely a tribute, and an apt one: the grandfather died in 1798, while his namesake was still small.

William was the third of nine children. Two brothers came before him, Robert in 1790 and Frederick P. in 1792, and a sister, Lucy, followed in 1796. After a long gap came Laverna Sophronia in 1807, Anna Maria in 1809, Erastus in 1810 and Alonzo in 1812. The last, Sarah C., was born in 1821. By then William was married with children of his own, which meant his youngest sister was younger than several of his own sons and daughters. Large families like this were ordinary in rural New England, where every child became another pair of hands for a farm or a trade.[4][5] As one of the three eldest, William would have been working beside his father long before the younger ones arrived.

The names of these brothers and sisters are worth remembering. Decades later they would reappear, one after another, among William's own children.

A Young Soldier in 1812

William served in the War of 1812, which lasted from 1812 to 1815. He was about 17 or 18 when his service began. For Vermonters the war was close and divisive.[6][7] Many in the state opposed it, and trade across the Canadian border, legal or not, was the lifeblood of the Lake Champlain country.[6][7][8] Yet the northern frontier was also one of the war's main theaters.[9][10][11] British forces moved down the lake in 1814 before their defeat at Plattsburgh, within sight of the Vermont shore, and Vermont men served in both the militia and the regular army.[12][13][14] For a young man from a farming family, service likely meant drilling, marching, garrison duty, and the camp sickness that killed more soldiers than battle did.

The war would turn out to be William's first experience of armed conflict, and it would not be his last. When he next faced men with rifles, a quarter of a century later, he would be unarmed, and his own countrymen would be doing the shooting.

Marriage in Hartland

On 28 March 1816, at the age of 21, William married Molly Ring at Hartland, Windsor County, Vermont. Molly was the same age as her husband, born in 1794 in Salisbury, Essex County, Massachusetts. Hartland lies in the Connecticut River valley on Vermont's eastern edge, far from Shelburne.[15][16] Joseph and Mercy Champlin would both end their lives in Windsor County, Joseph at Quechee in Hartford and Mercy in Pomfret. That suggests the Champlin family had moved there by the time William married.

They married at the start of a year Vermonters never forgot. The summer of 1816 brought snow in June and killing frosts in July and August, the famous "Year Without a Summer," when crops failed across New England.[17][18] That disaster pushed thousands of families to give up on Vermont and move west.[19][20] The couple's first child, Maria Laverna, was born that year. Her name joined those of two of William's sisters, Anna Maria and Laverna Sophronia.

The Blacksmith and His Growing Household

William Champlin was a blacksmith. No trade was more needed in a rural community.[21][22][23] A smith shod horses and oxen, made and mended plows, chains, hinges, nails and wagon fittings, and could set up an anvil and forge wherever iron and charcoal could be had.[24][25][22] It was heavy, hot, skilled work, and it was portable. A man with that skill and a set of tools could start over in almost any settlement that needed him, which may help explain how readily the Champlins moved in the years ahead.

Around 1820 the family was living in Salisbury, Essex County, Massachusetts, Molly's birthplace. The children kept coming: Reuben Alonzo in 1818, Sophronia Ann in 1819 and Angelina Avilda in 1820. William Jefferson followed in 1823, Joseph Albert in 1825 and Alonzo Jefferson in 1827. The children's names show how much the family mattered to their father. Sophronia echoed his sister Laverna Sophronia, and Alonzo, used twice, echoed his youngest brother. Jefferson, also given twice, was among the most popular names in the young republic.

By 1830 the Champlins had moved to Brooklyn, Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania. Mary Jane was born that year, Margaret Emma in 1833 and Sarah Jane in 1835. The last of these carried the name of William's youngest sister. With ten children by the mid-1830s and Molly running the house, the household must have been crowded and noisy. The older girls would have helped care for the babies, and the older boys were likely learning their father's trade at the forge or working the family's land.

In 1834 William's brother Erastus died, aged about 24. When William and Molly's last child was born in 1837, they named him Erastus. It is hard not to see in that name a brother remembered.

Into a New Faith

Susquehanna County had a particular place in the early history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.[26][27][28] Joseph Smith had lived at Harmony in that same county from 1827 to 1830, and much of the Book of Mormon was translated there. Latter-day Saint preachers were active in northern Pennsylvania and southern New York through the early 1830s.[29][30][28] When and how William first heard their message is not known. But at some point in these years he and his family joined the Church, and the rest of his life would be bound up with the fortunes of the Latter-day Saints.

Joining the Church in the 1830s meant gathering with other believers, first in Ohio and then in western Missouri.[31][32] For a blacksmith in his forties with a house full of children, it meant uprooting everything for a frontier where the Saints were already meeting hostility. That he made this choice says a great deal about how seriously he took his new faith. By the autumn of 1838, William was in northern Missouri.

Playing Possum at Hawn's Mill

By October 1838, tension between the Latter-day Saints and their neighbors in northern Missouri had turned into open violence.[33] After a clash at Crooked River on 25 October, Governor Lilburn W.[34][35] Boggs issued an order on 27 October declaring that the Mormons "must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State."[36] Hawn's Mill was a small settlement on Shoal Creek in Caldwell County, built around Jacob Hawn's gristmill.[37][38] It held a few dozen Latter-day Saint families, along with emigrant families who had stopped there on their way to Far West.[39][37]

William Champlin was at Hawn's Mill on 30 October 1838, at the age of 44. A family account drawn from the published history of the massacre tells the story of that day. At about four in the afternoon, roughly 240 Missouri militiamen rode into the settlement. David Evans, a community leader, ran toward them waving his hat and calling for peace. Most of the women and children fled into the woods to the south, while most of the men ran to the blacksmith shop. The shop's widely spaced logs let the attackers fire straight in, and about a hundred rifles poured shot into the building, upwards of 1,600 rounds in an attack that lasted thirty minutes to an hour.

The militia gave no quarter. Wounded men and men who surrendered were shot dead. Thomas McBride, a 62-year-old justice of the peace, gave up his gun and was killed with it, then hacked with a corn knife. Three boys hiding under the blacksmith's bellows were found and shot. Ten-year-old Sardius Smith was killed at point-blank range, and nine-year-old Charles Merrick died of his wounds later, while seven-year-old Alma Smith survived.

William Champlin survived by "playing possum." He lay still and heard the militiamen talking around him. He was eventually discovered and held captive for a few days, then released. He was one of only a handful of men to come through the attack unhurt, along with Ellis Eames, Rial Eames, David Lewis and David Evans. Seventeen Latter-day Saints died and fifteen more were wounded.

What William lived through cannot be softened. To survive, he had to stay motionless while men and boys were killed nearby and their killers talked among themselves. Then he spent days as a prisoner of those same men, with no certainty that he would be released. There is also a grim irony in a blacksmith surviving the day a blacksmith shop became a deathtrap.

The next morning fourteen of the dead were slid from a plank into an unfinished dry well and covered with straw and a thin layer of earth. Houses were robbed, wagons, tents and clothing were taken, and horses and livestock were driven off, leaving the surviving women and children destitute. The youngest of William's own children, little Erastus, was then a toddler. Wherever Molly and the children were that day, the family would now have to leave Missouri with whatever it could save.

Refuge and a Claim for Justice

Through the winter of 1838–39, thousands crossed the state and the frozen Mississippi to Illinois, where the people of Quincy, in Adams County, took them in.[40][41]

On 9 May 1839, at Adams, Illinois, William filed a claim for redress, stating that he had lost $105 because of the Missouri extermination order. The sum may look modest, but for a working blacksmith in 1839 it was serious money. It could have represented tools, stock, crops or a season's earnings, the stuff of a family's livelihood. His claim was one of hundreds the Saints gathered that year.[42][43] Joseph Smith carried their petitions to Washington, where President Martin Van Buren is remembered as saying, "Your cause is just, but I can do nothing for you." Congress declined to act, and the Missouri claims were never paid.[44][45][42] Still, William put his loss on record, which was itself a refusal to let what happened in Missouri go unrecorded.

Building Nauvoo

From 1839 to 1846 the Champlins lived in Nauvoo, Hancock County, Illinois, and the 1840 census found William in Hancock County. The Saints had bought swampy land at a bend of the Mississippi called Commerce and renamed it Nauvoo.[46][47][48] In a few years it grew into one of the largest towns in Illinois.[49][47][46] A city built that fast needed blacksmiths constantly, for wagons, tools, building hardware, and the endless shoeing of horses and oxen.[50][51] William's trade would have kept him busy.

William also belonged to one of the Church's quorums of Seventy. The Seventies were priesthood holders organized to carry the Church's message abroad.[52][53][54] In Nauvoo their numbers grew so large that they built their own meeting hall.[55][56] Belonging to a quorum marked a man as committed and ready to serve.

Nauvoo also brought grief. In 1841 William and Molly's youngest child, Erastus, died at about the age of four. The early Nauvoo years were deadly, especially for small children, as fevers spread through the river bottoms.[57][58] The boy who had carried the name of William's lost brother was now lost too.

In June 1844 Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were killed by a mob at Carthage, and pressure on the Saints soon became impossible to withstand. Church leaders agreed to leave Illinois, and through the winter of 1845–46 they hurried to finish the temple and give its ordinances to as many members as possible before the exodus.[59][60] On 6 February 1846, at the age of 51, William received his endowment in the Nauvoo Illinois Temple. The first wagons had crossed the Mississippi only two days earlier.[60][61] Seven years after hiding among the dead at Hawn's Mill, William entered the temple that he and his fellow Saints had sacrificed to build. It must have felt like a promise kept just before the doors closed.

Years on the Missouri

Like thousands of other Saints, the Champlins could not go straight to the Rocky Mountains.[62][63] Many families settled for a time on the Iowa side of the Missouri River, around the town that became Kanesville, building cabins, planting crops and gathering supplies for the trek ahead.[64][65][66] By 1850 William and Molly were living in Pottawattamie County, Iowa. There was plenty of work for a blacksmith in a staging ground full of wagons.

These were years of loss reaching back across half a continent. William's father, Joseph, died in 1848 at Quechee, Vermont, and his mother, Mercy, in 1849 at Pomfret, when William was in his mid-fifties. He had left New England long before, and news of their deaths likely reached him by letter, long after the fact. His sister Laverna Sophronia died in 1851, and in 1852 his eldest daughter, Maria Laverna, died at about 36. By then William had buried a brother, a young son, both parents, a sister and his firstborn child, and he was about to set out for the West.

West to Utah

In 1852 William and Molly crossed the plains to Utah Territory with a wagon company. William was in his late fifties. That year Brigham Young urged the Saints still in Iowa to come west, and 1852 became one of the busiest emigration seasons of the period, with thousands on the trail.[67][68] The journey of more than a thousand miles took three to four months of walking beside wagons, along the Platte, over South Pass and down through the mountains into the Salt Lake Valley.[69][70][71] Cholera traveled the Platte route that year, and dust, river crossings, broken axles and exhaustion were constant companions.[72][73][74] A blacksmith in a wagon company would rarely have been idle. Iron tires worked loose, hubs cracked and oxen threw shoes, and a man who could fix them was worth a great deal.[75][76]

The Smith of Lehi

By 1860 William and Molly were living in Lehi, Utah County, Utah Territory. Lehi was a new settlement at the northern end of Utah Lake.[77][78] It was founded around 1850, took its name in 1852, and was walled as a fort during the tense years of the mid-1850s.[77] Like most new Utah towns it depended on irrigation, cooperation and whatever skills its settlers brought.[79][80] William's trade would have been welcome there, with plows to mend, wagons to repair and animals to shoe as the town grew.

The large household of the Pennsylvania years had thinned by now. Most of the children were grown, and several had families of their own.

On 12 March 1860, at the age of 65, William received a patriarchal blessing at Lehi from John Murdock. In the Latter-day Saint faith, a patriarchal blessing is a personal blessing of counsel and promise, often treasured and handed down in families.[81][82][83] John Murdock had joined the Church in its first year and had lived through the Missouri troubles himself.[84][85][86] The blessing passed between two men who had seen the faith's hardest years firsthand. For William it came late in life, as a kind of summing up.

Death in Lehi

William Sisson Champlin died on 29 January 1861 in Lehi, at the age of 66. His death was noticed in the Deseret News on 6 February 1861, where he was remembered as "Brother Champlin." He was buried in Lehi, on ground now known as the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers Park.

He died at a historic moment. That winter Southern states were leaving the Union, and within months the country would be at war with itself.[87][88] The man who had served as a teenager in the republic's second war with Britain did not live to see it break apart.

Molly outlived him by a decade, dying in 1871 in Brigham City, Utah. They had been married nearly forty-five years. Together they had moved from Vermont to Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa and finally Utah, raising eleven children along the way.

Legacy

William Champlin's life began in a Vermont town on Lake Champlain and ended in a Utah fort town on Utah Lake, two thousand miles west. His grandparents had barely left their stretch of the New England coast, and his parents went only as far as Vermont. William kept moving, partly through the restlessness of his age and partly for a faith that cost him dearly and that he never gave up.

A few details hold his story together. He was a blacksmith, whose trade could be carried anywhere and rebuilt anywhere, and whose skill likely served every settlement he lived in. He was a soldier at seventeen or eighteen and a survivor at forty-four. At Hawn's Mill he lived because he lay still among the dead, endured days as a prisoner, and then wrote down his loss and asked for justice he never received. Seven years later, in the last days before the exodus, he entered the Nauvoo temple, and at sixty-five he received a blessing in a Utah town that had not existed when he crossed the plains.

The most tender thread may be the names. Laverna, Sophronia, Maria, Alonzo, Sarah and Erastus first belonged to the brothers and sisters of his Vermont childhood, and then he gave them to his own sons and daughters. When his brother Erastus died, a new Erastus followed three years later, and when that small boy died in Nauvoo, the name passed into memory with him. Through all the moving and losing, William kept carrying his family's names forward, and his descendants carry his.

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