the daughter of Kenyon and Esther Traywick
Taylor written by Elizabeth Jennett Smith
Jennett Burton Taylor was born in South Carolina, May 2, 1826. and was baptized in the Mormon Church, March 1846, at Nauvoo, Illinois, and stayed with the saints in Winter Quarters one winter. Drove team for Mr. Flake from there to Salt Lake City, Got in Salt Lake in 1847. She worked for Amasa Lyman till she hired by Allen Smithson to keep house having lost his wife and being left with five small children. On Dec. 16, 1849 she married Allen Freeman Smithson in the old Endowment House in Salt Lake City.
In 1851 she went with her husband to San Bernadino California. In 1857 they were called back to Utah, first settling at Beaver, Utah. Stayed there a short time then they were called to Dixie, in 1858 to help settle the Country. Her husband was called to Pahreah to help settle that country. Her husband Allen F. Smithson was made Bishop of that place till he died September 27, 1877.
A short time afterward Jennett Smithson took her family into Arizona, first settling in Woodruff they stayed there a few years. They had a very hard time trying to make a living there as their dam was took out by floods. So they went on to Safford, Arizona, and with the help of her son and son-in-law, Robert A. Smith, they built her a nice adobe house consisting of two rooms and later they added more rooms.
There she lived comfortable and her boys had plenty work freighting. Hauling coke one way and copper the other way to the railroad at Boie, Arizona. The coke went to Globe where they took the copper from the mine. Jennett Smithson, died May 29, 1912, and was buried in the Layton Ward Cemetery.
My mother, Jennett Taylor told me the first she ever knew of the Mormon Elders was back in the Southern States. They heard that some Mormon Elders were coming to preach to the people, that a man by the name of Joseph Smith had seen an angel, and had talked with him, and he Joseph was to start a church, the name was to be the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and the people were all stirred up over it. So mother, and her mother Ester Taylor decided to go to the meeting. They had to walk sixteen miles. They wanted their father to go but he did not go with them but later on he did go but did not like the meeting the way the people did.
They made a long table and sat the food on it, and ask everyone to come up and help themselves. Her and mother ate but the father would not go up to the table, so he went back home before the preaching was over. Mother said her mother said if she lived she intended to join the Mormon Church as she believed every word that the elders said that she knew it was the Word of God. They both received a testimony at the meeting. But her mother died in a few months. But her oldest sister Louisa, and her husband soon started for Salt Lake City, and mother and a younger sister Gillead started to come with their brother in law, Mr. Wormic, But his team soon gave out. They had to empty their feather beds right out on the ground and they walked most of the way to Winter Quarters. They stayed there one winter and in the spring she drove a team and did chores for a man by the name of Flake to get away to come to Utah.
She said the first time she saw my father (it was before they got out to Utah). One day the throat latch came undone on the harness. She was getting out of the wagon to fix it, and my father rode up on a horse and told her he would fix it and when he got it fixed he said. "There that will stay until the cows come home."
She came on to Salt Lake in 1847, and worked out for her living. She worked for the family of Amasa Lyman, when my father lost his first wife, she went to work for him. And on Dec. 16, 1849, she married Allen Freeman Smithson and helped him raise his five children by his first wife. She was the mother of 14 children. Eleven boys and three girls.
My father was called to the Dixie Country. There he raised cotton and mother carded and spun it into thread, and wove it into cloth on a hand loom, and made all the clothes that her family wore. She wove Janes that made fathers coat and pants and the cloth for the children's clothes. The warp would be of cotton and the filling would be of wool that they would call linsey. What she made the boys shirts out of she called Hickory, a good firm cloth that would stand lots of wear. She made some linsey petticoats when I was a little girl and colored them red. I can remember that day how proud I was of them.
Mother worked very hard never having a minute to spare. She
was bothered with Arecipilis. I have seen her head and face
swollen many times until she didn't look natural. When her first
son was born in Salt Lake City in 1850 she had this disease and
was very sick. She said one Sunday morning the children were all
out of the house and my father was attending to the house work.
There was a knock came at the door and my father went to the door
and there was a queer looking man, and he ask him in. And he
looked back at the bed where mother was lying and ask my father
if she was sick, and wanted to know if he could administer to her
and father ask her what about it, and she did not like his looks.
But father insisted she would let him. He laid his hands on her
head and Blessed her and told her she would never die with
araciplis, and would soon be well, and he went. My father said
afterward he thought he was one of the old ancient prophets. When
Mother died at the age of 80, she died with a bowel complaint, so
the old gentlmens word came true.
She died May 29,1912.