Every Ward Has a Garland. Will You Find Them?

Somewhere in your ward’s past is the family who opened the door first. The sister who taught Primary in her living room before there was a building. The missionaries nobody remembers anymore, who knocked on the right door on a hard day and kept going.

Their stories are still out there: in the memories of your oldest members, in a shoebox of letters, in a missionary’s journal sitting in a descendant’s closet two thousand miles away, in the records of the Church History Library. But memories fade, and the people who hold them won’t be here forever.

We just finished telling one of those stories, the first Latter-day Saints of Blount County, Tennessee, in a new interactive page: Blount County by the Numbers. At the center of it is one man the missionaries could not stop writing about.

Joe Garland first took in Elder Robert Young and his companion on November 3, 1892, after a hard climb down into Millers Cove with the water up: “We stopped overnight with Joe Garland and we were treated well. We sang songs and spoke on the principles of the gospel.” That was more than a year before Joe was baptized. Thirty years later, elders were still writing his name.

A knock on a door in 1892

In the summer of 1892, Blount County had no branch, no chapel and no names yet in its record of members. Eight years earlier, on the other side of the state, a mob had burst into a Sunday meeting at Cane Creek and killed two missionaries and two young men who tried to protect them. Elders kept coming to Tennessee anyway.

One of them was Robert Young. He had joined the Church only two years before. His wife had just died, and he left their baby son with friends and family to answer the call. On August 30, 1892, he stepped off the train in Maryville, met his companion and walked four and a half miles to the first house that would take them in. That night he wrote:

“I was so tired, I thought I could not stand it.”

He kept walking for sixteen months. By December 30, 1893, his own running tally reached 3,293 miles.

Not everyone wanted them there

The elders were turned away far more often than they were welcomed. Some neighbors went further. On January 14, 1894, on the way to Sunday dinner after a meeting, Elder Young and his companion found a note stuck on a stick in the road. He copied it into his journal, misspellings and all:

And one by one, families opened their doors. By 1939, 100 people had been baptized in and around Blount County.

The man on the doorstep

Joseph John Calvin “Joe” Garland was 42 when Elder Young baptized him in Abrams Creek on November 30, 1893, alongside his 70-year-old father, Alexander, and his wife, Sarah. In 1895, the Chilhowee Sunday School was organized in his home in Millers Cove. For more than three decades, Joe and Sarah fed and housed the elders, and Joe worked beside them: cutting oats, hunting cattle in the mountains, fixing the molasses mill. In 1908 he traveled to the mission office in Chattanooga to ask the elders to come back and teach his neighbors. In 1909 he and Sarah received their endowments in the Salt Lake Temple.

One elder, arriving at the Garland home in 1895, summed him up in his journal: “A good Saint and has a heart like an ox.”

Every corner of the world has a Joe Garland

The Church has never arrived anywhere fully grown. It arrives as two missionaries and one family willing to say yes. In 1892, those missionaries were elders on foot. Today, more and more often, they are sisters. Then that family opens its home, feeds the next missionaries, teaches the neighbors and holds on through the hard years until there is a branch, then a ward, then a stake. The pioneers are not only the ones who crossed the plains. They are the first to be baptized wherever they live, and they lead the Church forward from there.

How one county’s story survived

Blount County’s story survived because a few people decided it mattered. Families held on to the journals. Then someone sat down and transcribed them, word by word. Others added photographs, names and dates until a list of a hundred names became a hundred people. None of them were professional historians. They were members who loved the people who came before them.

The Lord told the early Church to keep “a history of all the important things” concerning His Church (Doctrine and Covenants 69:3). The General Handbook calls it “a spiritual work that will strengthen the faith of those who write and read it.”

Four ways to start your ward’s history

You can do this for your ward. Not all at once. One conversation, one name, one story at a time.

1. Start with a visit. Sit down with your ward’s longest-serving members. Ask who brought the gospel to your area, who taught them and where the first meetings were held. With permission, record it.
2. Find the first names. Search the Church History Catalog and the library’s local unit records for your ward, branch or the mission that first served your area.
3. Look for the missionaries’ own words. Many missionary journals survive with descendants or in the Church History Library. The Blount County project found thirteen. Look up the elders and sisters who served your area, and reach out to their families.
4. Write it down and share it. Write one story for a lesson, a ward newsletter or family home evening. Leaders can add it to the Unit History tool, so it stays with the ward.

“And he shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers.” (Doctrine and Covenants 2:2)

Explore the story

• Blount County by the Numbers: walk with Elder Young day by day on a map, read what the elders wrote on any date of the year and meet the first hundred members. Free.
• Smoky Mountain Saints by the Numbers: six chapters of maps and charts on the free history site, with every journal transcribed.
• On This Day in the Missionary Journals: one entry for 364 days of the year.
• All the By the Numbers projects: nineteen free stories counted from the records.

Write their stories while the people who remember them are still here to tell you.