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Queensland Conference

[p.688] QUEENSLAND CONFERENCE, or District, of the Australian Mission, consists of the northwest province of Australia, with headquarters at Brisbane. The total membership of the Queensland District on Dec. 31, 1930, was 294, including 34 children.

Quincy

QUINCY, the principal city of western Illinois and the county seat of Adams County, was founded in 1822 and incorporated in 1839. The site is naturally one of the most beautiful in the state, the principal part of the city being built on a lime stone bluff having an elevation of 150 feet and overlooking the Mississippi River for a long distance. Its location is 120 miles west of Springfield, 264 miles southwest of Chicago, and 50 miles southeast of Nauvoo. The city is regularly laid out and the streets intercepting each other at right angles are lighted with gas and electricity. The town is a great agricultural center.

When the Latter-day Saints were expelled from Missouri in 1839 they met with a friendly reception on the part of the citizens of Quincy and were relieved from want and possible starvation in the cold winter of 1838–1839. Most of the saints who fled from Missouri that winter under the cruel exterminating order of Lilburn W. Boggs made their way as best they could into the state of Illinois, and a majority of them crossed the Mississippi River at Quincy, then a small city of a few thousand inhabitants. The distance from Far West, Caldwell Co., Mo., from where most of the exiles came to Quincy, was about 150 miles in a straight line, but the way the roads ran it was nearly 200 miles. When it is remembered that the roads were bad and heavy and the weather extremely cold, it is no wonder that a number of the exiles succumbed to their privations and sufferings and found untimely graves before they could travel that distance and reach the land that would give them temporary shelter. It is not known how many of the saints died on the journey or died afterwards in consequence of their sufferings. The saints, who had been stripped of nearly all their earthly possesions, were necessarily in a deplorable and destitute condition when they, bleeding and broken-hearted, arrived at Quincy. Their condition excited the sympathy of the citizens of that town, who took in the situation at once and by the calling of meetings and appointing of special committees, the exiled saints were provided with food, shelter and other necessities, until they, somewhat better in condition, settled at Commerce, afterwards Nauvoo, about 50 miles north of Quincy, in June, 1839.