Emily Hill Woodmansee was the youngest of eleven children and was fortunate to be educated as a child. Her cousin Miriam brought the twelve-year-old Emily and her family news of a new religion, and the two girls, accompanied by William Bowring and a young Edward Tullidge, walked the five miles to a neighboring village to attend a Sunday meeting of Latter-day Saints. Emily was converted, but her family’s opposition compelled her to wait until she turned sixteen to be baptized. She and her sister Julia, who had also joined the Church, determined they would leave England to gather to Zion. The young women sailed with the James G. Willie Company, and Emily pulled their handcart across the country from Iowa until the ill-equipped and starving group met with a disastrous snowstorm on the frozen plains of Wyoming. They took shelter in Martin’s Cove until they were miraculously rescued by Saints from Salt Lake City. Deserted by her first husband with whom she had one child, Emily married Joseph Woodmansee in 1864 and had eight children with him. The blessing she had received early on which promised that her writing would comfort thousands of hearts saw fulfillment in her poetry. Many of her pieces were published in the Woman’s Exponent, Young Woman’s Journal, and Improvement Era, and she was awarded a gold medal for the Sunday School Jubilee Prize Poem in 1899. She is recognized as one of a handful of foundational Mormon writers by contemporary scholars who have anthologized her work. Her poem, “As Sisters in Zion,” was set to music in recent years by Janice Kapp Perry and is included in the current Latter-day Saint hymnal.
LDS
LDS (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)
Wrote a poem that was originally published in the December 15, 1880 Woman's Exponent and later republished in the Fall 2001 Exponent II.