Louisa Carritt Enderby

Life of William and Louisa Enderby Halls

By Florence Hall Bell, Granddaughter, Daughter of George Halls

My paternal grandfather, William Halls, was born in the parish of Orsett, County of Essex, England, on May 25, 1834. His parents were John Halls and Susanna Selstone. He described himself as a farm laborer. Whether his father owned his own farm on which Grandfather worked, or whether they both worked for someone else is not clear. The family were members of the Episcopalian church.

At the age of fifteen, he heard the gospel as taught of the Latter-day Saints. He believed it was true, and in answer to earnest prayer received a positive testimony of the divine mission of Joseph Smith. On January 26, 1851, at the age of seventeen, he was baptized. Through his testimony, his mother, his sister Mary Ann, and his three brothers, Thomas, James, and George were also baptized. At eighteen, he was ordained a priest and baptized his father. At nineteen, he was ordained an elder and called to preside over the Orsett branch of the Church. In October 1854 when he was twenty, he was called on a mission and labored in his own conference of Essex until 1858, when he was called to preside over the Lincolnshire conference.

Now my Grandmother, Louisa Carritt Enderby, was living in Lincolnshire. She was a dainty young lady of considerable refinement and culture, and her family was much more affluent than was Grandfather’s. She made the fatal mistake of happening by one day as he was preaching on the street. She fell in love with him at first sight, or so the story goes. I find it rather hard to believe, but then, of course, I didn’t know Grandfather when he was young. I have always questioned whether Grandma was converted to the gospel or just to Grandpa. There was no question that she was converted to him. It was her good fortune that she stayed in love with him to the end of her days, or possibly, in the light of future events, it may not have been good fortune, who can say? However, in the spring of 1861, he was released from his mission, and they were married on April 15, 1861 by Elder Joseph F. Smith, then on a mission to England. Grandma was twenty-one, Grandpa almost twenty-seven at the time of their marriage. Immediately, they set out for America and Zion. They crossed the sea on the Underwriter, and upon arriving in America, crossed the plains in Ira Eldredge’s company, arriving in Salt Lake City, September 15, 1861. In his autobiography, Grandfather made no mention whatever of the hazards and hardships of crossing either the sea or the plains, only that these events occurred.

They settled in Kaysville, where that first winter of 1861-62 Grandfather taught school. On July 12, 1862, they received their endowments and were sealed in the Endowment House in Salt Lake City. It was in Kaysville that they met and were befriended by my mother’s family, the Grandison Raymonds, who had emigrated to Utah in 1852.

With considerable difficulty, they managed to build a nice, warm cabin. Grandma had brought with her from England, lovely clothing–nice woolens and other fine materials. One day just before the birth of her first child in March 1862, she had hung some washed clothes to dry by the fireplace. Her little dog dragged the clothes into the fire and he made short work of the cabin and its contents, and even singed himself. So up in smoke had gone all Grandmother’s beautiful things. It broke her heart. But Grandfather–bless him–comforted her with the healing thought that she had been too worldly. I have heard her say: “Poor little Mosiah, ‘e came into the world with noothin’ to coover ‘im.”

They remained only a short time in Kaysville, for in the fall of 1862 they moved to Huntsville, Weber County. It was there that we children knew them. When we first knew Grandpa, he looked a lot like Moses. He wore a great, fluffy, flowing beard. If he had a mouth, we never saw it. My husband’s grandfather washed his beard every morning with homemade soap and kept it snow white; but my Grandfather’s beard was tattletale gray. I recall that his hair was heavy and his eyebrows, too, grew out of all proportion. In his later years in Colorado in his capacity as Patriarch, he went on long trips with horse and buggy over his vast district. When his hair and eyebrows grew until he could no longer see out, he came home for a trimming. There’s no place like home to get trimmed! On his visits to Huntsville, he usually arrived in this same hairy disguise, and before Papa could get him trimmed he always felt called upon to kiss Mother and us children. Kissing Grandpa was more of a privilege than a pleasure. It was like nothing else you’ve ever known. You went into the beard flying blind, and came out with the firm conviction that now you had seen everything. Mother and we kids always held it against Papa that he didn’t have to kiss Grandpa.

But I must get back to his history. In 1864, he again crossed the plains with ox teams for emigrants. 

For several years, he taught school in the winter and worked as a carpenter in the summer. He acted as Postmaster of Huntsville for several years. For nine years, which was its entire existence, he was Secretary of the Huntsville Co-op. I have heard numerous references to the Co-op Farm. It is my impression that it was a dairy business. It may have included other cattle and farming–I am not sure. But if my memory serves, my youthful father got his first experience in the school of hard knocks working on the old co-op Farm. I think it must have been there, too, that he first learned the “value of a dollar.” He spent his life trying to teach that essential lesson to his children, but we were slow to learn.

Later, Grandfather took up land under the Homestead Act to the south of Huntsville, which he pretty much turned over to his sons to clear and develop. This enterprise in time resulted in a thriving farm, producing cattle and farm crops of exceptional quality. It remained in our family for many years but is now owned and operated by the Ogden Stake of the Latter-day Saints Church as a cattle-producing welfare farm project. Sometime in the late 1800’s, Grandfather also acquired excellent ranching property in Bear Lake County, Idaho, at Thomas’s Fork, east of Montpelier. He was no doubt influenced in this endeavor by the fact that my Grandfather Raymond had taken up land in that vicinity and had established a cattle business there, and was most enthusiastic about its possibilities. This, too, Grandfather turned over to his boys to develop. The boys formed a partnership to operate the farm in Huntsville and the ranch in Raymond, Idaho, this town having been named for my Grandfather Raymond. Some years later, when the partnership was dissolved, my father took the ranch in Idaho and Uncle John Halls took the farm in Huntsville.

On June 26, 1871, just a little more than 10 years after Grandfather’s marriage to my Grandmother, an event occurred which shattered Grandma’s life: Grandfather took a second wife, Johanna Maria Frandsen. Grandma was not converted to polygamy, nor was she converted in the slightest degree to sharing her beautiful William Halls with anyone. I don’t like to ponder in my own mind what her feelings may have been on this occasion. I can only judge by outward appearances. From this time on, she became sad, embittered, critical. At thirty-one, it was obvious to those around her that her happiness had taken flight. Johanna was 21 years Grandpa’s junior. She was not quite sixteen years of age and he was thirty-seven at the time of their marriage. Rumor has it that Johanna had a boy friend of whom she was very fond, and wasn’t sold on marrying a friend of her father’s, no matter how solid a citizen. But Johanna’s father knew what was best for her. To marry her to a fine, upstanding Latter-day Saint, a pillar of the community and already well established, was surely an improvement on taking a chance on a callow youth who had not yet proven himself. In those days, girls were not encouraged to do their own thinking, and certainly not to defy the good judgment of their fathers, and so the marriage took place. Johanna gave Grandfather twelve children, Grandmother only six, and she had no intention of giving him any more after he made his decision to board and bed with another woman. Others might bear him children if they wished, but not she. In the years that followed, after he had left Huntsville and came back on visits, it was observed that she made him a bed on the couch in the living room, while she herself kept to her own bedroom. She could never quite conquer her English pride, nor the deep hurt of his divided love.