Western Maine Saints [Part 1]: Mormon Missionaries in the 1830s

Western Maine Saints:

Mormon Missionaries in the 1830s

by Mary E. Valentine

Umbagog Lake from the highlands of Letter B Township, now Upton, Maine

Editor’s Note: The area discussed in this article, and subsequent installments, includes the present-day Maine towns of Andover, Bethel, Hanover, Newry, and Upton. Before being incorporated as a town in 1796, Bethel was known as Sudbury Canada because land grants established along the Androscoggin intervales were given to descendants of soldiers from Sudbury, Massachusetts, who served in the invasion of Canada in 1690. The southern portion of present-day Newry on the Sunday and Bear rivers was chartered as a town in 1805; the northern part of the town, along Bear River from the Branch Road at North Newry to the Grafton line, was part of Andover West Surplus, an unorganized territory, until 1836 when the settlers petitioned the Maine Legislature to allow them to join the town of Newry. This upper part of the "Bear River settlement" was also called by some “Head O’ Tide” or “Head of the Tide”—hence the name that was long applied to the first school in the area, and to the cemetery nearest North Newry. The town of Hanover was created in 1843 by taking that part of Bethel east of Newry Corner and north of the Androscoggin, and adding it to Howard’s Gore. Dr. William B. Lapham explains in his History of Bethel that a “gore” in this part of Maine is a piece of land left over when the town lines around it are run out.  The town of Andover was named for Andover, Massachusetts, when settlers came to Maine looking for a place to expand from the Massachusetts town. Col. John York of Bethel suggested they follow the Androscoggin River north from Bethel, past Sunday River and Bear River to the next river—the Ellis—and settle in the area several miles north of its outlet into the Androscoggin. North of Bethel and Newry were some tracts with letter names: Letter A, B, C, etc. Letter B was the area east of Lake Umbagog. It began as Letter B Township, then Letter B Plantation, then, in 1860, it was incorporated as the town of Upton. Among the sources consulted by the author for this article are the following: the memories recorded by Peter Smith Bean regarding Upton in the 1830s which appeared in the Oxford County Advertiser on 19 March 1893; Rev. Nathaniel Purinton’s letter to the editor of The Christian Mirror, published on 19 December 1833; the published diaries of Patty Bartlett Sessions and Perrigrine Sessions; the journals of William E. McLellen; the autobiography of Lucy Meserve Smith; the genealogy of Aaron Merean York; and John Henry Evans’ biography of Joseph Smith.

In June of 1832, two years after Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon, there came a young man to the home of Daniel Bean, Jr., in Letter B (now Upton), an unorganized territory in the western mountains of Maine, just east of Lake Umbagog. He introduced himself as Horace Cowan, and said another man would be coming from Colebrook, New Hampshire, the next day to join him. Cowan was looking for a place where the two men could get room and board for a few days, and he also wanted a place where he and his companion could preach the Mormon doctrine. Both Daniel Bean, Sr., and his son and namesake had, since coming to Letter B in the 1820s, welcomed clergymen representing various denominations—Baptist, Congregational, Methodist, Unitarian—and offered them a meeting room where they could preach. In that remote pioneer settlement, visitors “from away” were usually welcomed for the news they brought from the “civilized” world, and for many the preaching provided a change from the daily round of farm work and homemaking chores. So Daniel Bean, Jr., welcomed Horace Cowan and offered him the use of a space that had been used in the past for preaching and other meetings. The next day Hazen Aldrich arrived and the two Latter-day Saints (Mormons) began telling their story to anyone who had the time or interest to listen. One of Daniel Bean’s sons later reported that the preaching of Hazen Aldrich and Horace Cowan was so well received that the Mormons soon organized a church of a large number of members, entirely breaking up the Free Will Baptists and the Congregationalists. As Peter Smith Bean later recalled, “They took whole families . . . . Half the settlers left and were believers in the Mormon doctrine.”

At Thanksgiving, the following November, there was a family reunion of the Beans in Letter B; many of Daniel Bean’s sons and daughters came to Letter B with their spouses and children for the holidays. When they left, Daniel Bean, Sr., and Margaret Shaw Bean went home with their daughter, Dolly Bean Grover, to spend the winter in West Bethel; the next spring, on 16 March 1833, Daniel Bean, Sr., died at his daughter’s home in West Bethel. About a week later, Horace Cowan returned to Letter B and Daniel Bean, Jr., was baptized 23 March 1833 into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He became active as an Elder, missionary and leader of the LDS branch in the western Maine mountains.

Some former parishioners of a Rev. Nathaniel Purinton of Bowdoin, Maine, wrote to him about the visits of the Mormon missionaries to Letter B, and Nathaniel Purinton decided to visit the area in the fall of 1833, to see for himself what was happening in the religious life of the community there. In December, he wrote a letter to the Christian Mirror, a weekly published in Portland by the Congregational Church, telling of his visit to Letter B. He had attended a church service led by Daniel Bean, heard him preaching “in tongues,” and talked with him after the service, when Daniel Bean had told him that he expected to travel to Missouri, where Christ would soon make his second appearance.

Daniel Bean seems to have remained active as a leader of the local LDS branch for the next three years. In the spring of 1834, Daniel Bean and John F. Boynton (one of the first quorum of the Twelve Apostles) visited the home of John and Hannah Knight Libby Carter in Newry. Eliza Ann, one of Hannah’s daughters, later wrote of this visit, “. . . my mother lay very sick. The doctors had given her up. The Elders told her they were preaching a new doctrine and that she could be healed if she could have faith.” They laid hands on her and prayed that she would be made whole; she arose and dressed and walked about half a mile to Bear River, where she was baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This healing led to six of the Carter’s nine children joining the LDS Church. Most of them were baptized in June 1834. Hannah’s daughter, also named Hannah, who had married Aaron Merean York, was baptized with her husband by Daniel Bean.

On 2 July 1834, Daniel Bean baptized Patty Bartlett Sessions, the first of her family to join the LDS Church. She had heard the preaching of Horace Cowan when he traveled south from Letter B to Andover West Surplus (now North Newry) in 1833 and had believed, but waited until her husband agreed to her being baptized the next summer. In August 1835, Daniel Bean traveled for a period of time with the LDS missionary William McLellin, who had been appointed at one time to the quorum of Twelve Apostles. Elders Bean and McLellin blessed children in Errol, New Hampshire; McLellin accompanied Daniel Bean back to Letter B, where McLellin preached and broke bread with the Letter B Saints. Bean and McLellin also traveled together to Rumford Point, where they heard Elder David Patten preach; then back to Andover West Surplus, where McLellin visited the home of David and Patty Bartlett Sessions, and preached. The next week Daniel Bean received word that William McLellin was expected to attend the conference in Farmington, Maine, the next weekend; Daniel escorted him to Farmington from whence he traveled back to the West. The next summer (1836) at a conference in Maine, Daniel Bean was appointed clerk and represented the LDS branches in Errol, New Hampshire, and Newry, Maine.

Who was this Daniel Bean, who served as an Elder and missionary for the LDS Church from his baptism in the spring of 1833 through the summer of 1836, and then disappeared from the local scene? Lucy Meserve Smith, a cousin of Daniel’s wife and daughter of Lucy Bean Smith, a cousin of Daniel, identifies him as Daniel Bean, Jr., son of Daniel Bean and Margaret Shaw Bean, and grandson of the Jonathan Bean who came to Sudbury Canada (later Bethel) from Standish in 1781 with three sons and settled beside the Androscoggin River in the Middle Intervale section of Bethel. Daniel, Jr., was born in 1796 in Bethel and married, in 1821, Betsey Smith, daughter of Ithiel and Lucy Littlehale Smith of Newry. After his marriage, he worked for a time as a cabinetmaker in East Bethel. His father, Daniel Bean, Sr., at an age when most men would be thinking of retiring to a more leisurely life, sold his Bethel farm and moved to the unorganized territory of Letter B. His grandson later wrote that he was attracted to this wilderness area by the tall pines waiting to be cut, the abundance of fish in Lake Umbagog, and by the multitude of ducks and fur-bearing animals that could provide food for a family. After Daniel Bean, Jr.’s, third child was born, Daniel and Betsey and the children traveled to Letter B to visit Daniel’s parents, liked what they saw there and moved to Letter B, probably between 1826 and 1829.

Perhaps it was the hard frost in Letter B, early in August 1836, that finally persuaded Daniel Bean to leave that locality. By the time of the 1840 census, the Bean family had left the area. It is difficult to know precisely when they left or what route they followed, but in 1844 their daughter was married in Cold Springs, Wisconsin, and their oldest son married in the same location in 1849. According to the Bean genealogy, the remaining members of the family were living in Iowa in 1850. Betsey Smith Bean died in October 1868 in Iowa. Daniel Bean went back to Wisconsin, where, in 1879, he married Elizabeth Johnson in Little Falls. He died in Cataract, Wisconsin, in 1882.

Why Wisconsin? Perhaps he had heard from Mormon friends on the frontier that when the Mormons were driven from Missouri, it was suggested that they settle in Wisconsin, which had just been made a new Territory in 1836.

In addition to the LDS missionaries previously mentioned who had contact with Bethel’s Daniel Bean, Brigham Young and Lyman Johnson held a conference at the Sessions family home in Andover West Surplus in August 1835, and crossed the Androscoggin to preach in the Middle Intervale Meetinghouse in Bethel, which was without a settled pastor at the time. Brigham Young returned in 1836 and a number of Bethel and Newry families heeded his urging to sell their farms in Maine and travel to Ohio or Missouri to establish a home for the Saints where they could live together according to their religious beliefs without fear of persecution. In future articles in this series, there will be stories of some of these families, their lives before leaving Maine, the hardships they endured crossing the plains, and their contributions to the settlement of Utah.