Part of a series of articles titled People of the Mormon Pioneer Trail.
Article
Zina Huntington Young, the Mormon Pioneer Trail
Zina Huntington Young– Mormon Pioneer Trail[1]
By Angela Reiniche
Zina Diantha Huntington, an early convert to the Mormon faith and wife to both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, was born in Watertown, New York, on the last day of January 1821. Her youth largely informed by the Great Awakening and her education typical for her gender and class status, Zina excelled in the domestic arts and developed a talent for the cello. As an adult, she reflected on her youth, recalling that it was a “pleasant childhood” and recounted how she had learned to churn butter, spin wool, draw milk, and sew from watching her mother. The Huntingtons belonged to the Presbyterian faith and spent most evenings reading from the Bible. After Mormon missionaries traveled to New York in 1835 and became acquainted with the Huntingtons, the entire family (excepting the eldest brother) joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints movement. The fourteen-year-old Zina Diantha was baptized by Hyrum Smith on 1 August 1835. A year later, the family packed up all of their possessions and moved to Kirtland, Ohio—Zina Diantha rode the distance at the back of the wagon. In Kirtland, the teenaged Zina attended school at the temple, joined the choir, and connected with a community of religious women that became central to her life.[2]
The Huntingtons left Kirtland for the Mormon encampment at Far West, Missouri, during a time of heightened tensions between Mormons and Missourians. After Missouri’s governor, Lilburn Boggs, issued the official order for all Mormons to leave the state in 1838, Zina’s father helped organize their exodus to Illinois.[3] Not long after their April 1839 departure from Missouri, a number of Saints, including Zina and her mother, struggled with illness—most likely cholera. Zina recovered, but her mother succumbed, leaving her eldest daughter to manage the household.[4] That winter, Zina and one of her brothers spent three months being nursed back to health by Emma Smith, the wife of the movement’s leader, Joseph Smith. During her stay, Zina learned from Joseph Smith about the doctrine of plural marriage, which he had shared in confidence among select members of the church community. Before she left his home, Smith proposed that she become his plural wife. Zina avoided answering him then and at least two more times before she married Henry Bailey Jacobs, a popular preacher and missionary with the church, on 7 March 1841. Despite her civil marriage, however, Zina felt that her failure to accept Smith’s proposal might be akin to rejecting the will of the Lord.[5] While Henry was away on a church mission, Smith continued to pressure Zina to join him in what he termed “celestial marriage,” and in late October 1841, at age eighteen, she acquiesced, becoming his fifth wife.[6] Henry evidently submitted to the prophet’s authority and accepted the spiritual marriage of his wife to Smith.[7]
Zina continued to live with Henry and never had any children with Smith. During Henry’s frequent absences from home while on missionary work, she turned to her female kin for companionship and help. Zina joined the Nauvoo Female Relief Society, which performed various acts of charitable work for the sick, poverty-stricken, and neglected members of the Mormon community. Zina mourned Smith’s death in 1844 but remained married to Henry. The couple built a home for their family in Nauvoo and worked side by side on various community projects. Zina was seven months pregnant with her and Henry’s second child when she was sealed (married) on 2 February 1846 to Brigham Young, who had assumed a number of Smith’s spiritual wives along with leadership of the church. Henry witnessed the ceremony. The ordinance bound Zina to Joseph Smith in the afterlife, to Brigham Young for her earthly life, and— from the church’s perspective—dissolved her civil union with Henry Jacobs (although Henry may not have understood that at the time).[8] Two weeks later, Zina, Henry, and their son Zebulon left Nauvoo to join the Mormons who had started to gather in Iowa in preparation for their mass migration to the Salt Lake Valley.[9]
Twenty miles from Nauvoo, at the crossing of the Chariton River, Zina gave birth to Henry’s son, whom they named Henry Chariton. Two days later, the wagons were packed and ready to move on. Unlike most of the travelers, the recovering Zina rode inside the wagon with her new baby and young son. While in Iowa, Brigham Young sent Henry to England to do missionary work, and although the distraught Henry continued to profess his love for Zina, they never lived together again.[10] From that point forward, Zina lived with Young in an open polygamous relationship, along with his other plural wives. They arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in September 1848. In Utah Territory, she would raise her two sons and a daughter (also named Zina), who was born to her and Young in 1850, and the four children of Brigham Young and his deceased plural wife Clara Ross.[11] They lived in Young’s personal residence, the Lion House, which still stands and is open to visitors in Salt Lake City.
After raising her children, Zina became increasingly involved in public service. She became a schoolteacher and studied obstetrics, having learned midwifery from her mother in New York. She delivered a number of babies, often blessing and anointing them at the request of their mothers. In 1872, Young established Deseret Hospital in Salt Lake City and served on its Board of Directors for twelve years; she also organized a nursing school. In 1876 she was appointed president of the Deseret Silk Association for her tireless attempts to cultivate silkworms and mulberry trees for the local production of cloth. She was also active in the temperance and woman suffrage movements, having attended the Women’s Conference in Buffalo and the National Woman Suffrage Association convention in New York. She became the first counselor of the LDS Church’s Relief Society in 1880 and served as the right hand of the organization’s president; in 1888, she became the third president of the Relief Society. Zina Diantha Huntington Jacobs Smith Young later became vice-president of the Utah National Council for Women and Matron of the Salt Lake Temple, positions she held until her death on 28 August 1901 at age 80.
[1] Part of a 2016–2018 collaborative project of the National Trails- National Park Service and the University of New Mexico’s Department of History, “Student Experience in National Trails Historic Research: Vignettes Project” [Colorado Plateau Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit (CPCESU), Task Agreement P16AC00957]. This project was formulated to provide trail partners and the general public with useful biographies of less-studied trail figures—particularly African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, women, and children.
[2] Martha Sonntag Bradley and Mary Brown Firmage Woodward, 4 Zinas: A Story of Mothers and Daughters on the Mormon Frontier (Signature Books, 2000), 22, 33, 41, 45, 53, 60.
[3] Kenneth H. Winn, “The Missouri Context of Antebellum Mormonism and Its Legacy of Violence,” in Thomas Spencer, ed., The Missouri Mormon Experience (University of Missouri Press, 2010), 19–26.
[4] Ibid., 104.
[5] Ibid., 107.
[6] Ibid., 114. For more on the movement’s introduction and implementation of plural marriage, see Merina Smith, Revelation, Resistance, and Mormon Polygamy: The Introduction and Implementation of the Principle, 1830–1853 (Utah State University Press, 2013).
[7] Bradley and Woodward, 4 Zinas, 109–115.
[8] Ibid., 132,133.
[9] Winn, “The Missouri Context”, 145.
[10] Bradley and Woodward, 4 Zinas, 152–154. At Young’s orders, Zina eventually stopped responding to Henry’s love letters, though she kept them all her life. Brigham Young died 29 August 1877. Henry took other wives, one of whom nursed him at their home in California as his health declined from kidney disease in the late 1870s. According to family tradition, when the wife could no longer care for Henry, his sons Zebulon and Henry Chariton brought him to Salt Lake City, where Zina allowed him to stay in her private home with a hired nurse until his death on 1 August 1886. Bradley and Woodward note, however, that “there is no documentary record that Zina…saw or spoke to [Henry] after 1846….The entire episode represents one of the most heart-wrenching in the annals of Mormon polygamy,” 202.
[11] Smith, Revelation, 72–73. For an account of Zina’s ordeal of giving birth on the trail see Donna Smart, Mormon Midwife: The 1846–1888 Diaries of Patty Bartlett Sessions (Utah State University Press, 1997), 39 and Janet Peterson and LaRene Gaunt, Elect Ladies (1946, repr.; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1990), 49–51.
Last updated: March 3, 2023