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Conversion and Transformation: Brigham Young's
New York Roots and the Search for Bible Religion

Ronald K. Esplin

Brigham Young's New England heritage and his youth and young adulthood in Western New York were the foundation for his later success as a powerful religious leader. Though his family left New England before Brigham was three, their Puritan mores vitally influenced his upbringing and character. The agrarian and frontier culture of Western New York, along with Brigham's own reactions to the fires of religious revival that seared the region, modified this Puritan heritage. Tracing his religious roots and his conversion to the Restored Gospel in New York, allows us to see his profoundly religious nature, and to understand that, despite having exceptional practical skills and successes, he was fundamentally a religious leader.

Brigham Young's New England roots ran deep. He numbered among his ancestors several generations of New England Youngs, Brighams, Howes and Goddards. His parents, John and Nabby Howe Young, were both natives of Massachusetts, he a poor orphan and she the daughter of an established and respected family. One of these took the family briefly to Vermont, where Brigham Young, the ninth child, was born in Whitingham on 1 June 1801. Before Brigham's third birthday, the Youngs moved to the beautiful Finger Lakes country of Western New York where Brigham grew to manhood.

John Young settled his family on new land in communities still without their first decent road or access to market. Forced to labor on and live off this land, predictably, it influenced young Brigham deeply. Rather than formal schooling, his education consisted of clearing, planting, plowing, and learning to work with his hands. Speaking later of the background he shared with his New York friend Heber C. Kimball, he said:

We never had the opportunity of letters in our youth, but we had the privilege of picking up brush, chopping down trees, rolling logs, and working amongst the roots, and of getting our shins, feet and toes bruised.

"I have been a poor boy and a poor man, and my parents were poor," he said later. While that description fits most of Brigham Young's childhood, the hardest years came after the death of his mother soon after his own fourteenth birthday. Without mother keeping house, the older children moved on, and the family was divided. Brigham and younger brother Lorenzo accompanied their father, breaking land for a new farm and harvesting sugar maple on isolated acreage near the southern tip of Seneca Lake. During this difficult period they barely had enough to eat.