Description

Hannah Settle Lappish

In the spring of 1846, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints were headed west, fleeing persecution and seeking a new home over the Rocky Mountains. The intent that year 46 had been to travel from Nauvoo, Illinois, all the way to the Rocky Mountains in the 1846 season. But rain, snow, hail, mud, and the like had significantly slowed the progress of the saints.

The arduous struggle across Iowa began to take its toll, and some were unable to go on. It was decided by brother Brigham and church leadership to establish waystations where the Saints could stop, rest, resupply and recruit their teams.

The first of these waste stations was named Garden Grove, and the second was located on the Grand River in Iowa farther to the east, (west rather) and was called Mount Pisgah. Well, it’s a Pisgah that I want to speak very soon, within a short time after its settlement. Two to 3000 saints called Pisgah home, was a beautiful place. But notwithstanding its beauty and appeal, within six years, the Latter Day Saints settlement of Mount Pisgah was abandoned.

The Saints had moved on to the mountains, leaving behind it is estimated some 150 of their loved ones. The little cemetery on the Hill that they left behind, was forgotten. The Pioneer road changed locations, never to pass that way again.

Supposedly, the end of the story.

Now, 40 years later, Hannah Settle Lappish, a Latter-Day Saint and herself a Handcart Pioneer from England, happened to be visiting family members in Montana. One day while visiting a neighbor of her daughters, she happened to be gleaming through a book, on the shelf, on the history of Union County, Iowa. As she did, she caught at a glance a reference to Mount Pisgah, a name she recognized from Church history. She was astonished to learn that the neighbor’s widowed mother and brother who lived in Iowa, owned the land on which Mount Pisgah’s Cemetery was located.

Now, although sister Lappish, who had come to America in 1860, had never been to Mount Pisgah, she felt that others might have an interest in it. So at Hannah’s suggestion, the owners of the land in Iowa, reached out to then Church President John Taylor, asking whether they might wish to in some way, mark the place. President Taylor asked Oliver Boardman Huntington, whose father was Pisgah’s first branch president in 1846, and is buried there. If all of her would inquire of the other descendants of those buried there, if there was an interest in marking the site, “The desire to remember and honor their loved ones, was strong.”

Accordingly, the land was purchased May 3,1886. And efforts then went forth to erect a monument to the saints interred there. That monument was dedicated in 1882, 42 years after the first burial at Mount Pisgah. It stands today as a tribute not only to those buried there, but also to the faith and sacrifice of those who passed through there. Today, the marble obelisk at Mount Pisgah may not be the most visited of Latter-Day Saint church history sites but it was the first to be marked and remembered for you see, as Jenny Lund phrased it, “It would be another two decades before church leaders again, turn their attention to the acquisition of sites important to church history. Places like Joseph Smith’s birthplace in Vermont, the Sacred Grove in New York, and Carthage Jail in Illinois, would be acquired in the coming decades. But it all began with this little pioneer cemetery on a windswept hill on the prairie of Iowa.

Source:

https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/memories/KWJX-46G