Adding to a Good Name: The Life of Wilford Woodberry Warnick (1880 to 1944)

by Dale W Adams June 25, 2011

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Adding to a Good Name: The Life of Wilford Woodberry Warnick (1880-1944)

by Dale W Adams1

One‟s character is mostly the result of their own efforts, but it is also conditioned by the habits, beliefs, and support inherited from ancestors. The recognition one garners later for their accomplishments also depends on the amount others write about them. Wilford Woodberry Warnick was blessed on both accounts: he was raised in a remarkable family and had several relatives who wrote extensively about him and his kin.

Four dimensions of his life stand out. He dedicated most of it to spiritual matters, including filling numerous church leadership positions. He also spent large amounts of time in community service. Along the way he succeeded in his occupations, first as a teacher, and then as a farmer. With all this, and with the help of his wife, he raised an outstanding family. Looking back, he excelled in all four of these dimensions, and in doing so added to the luster of the family name.

******************* On the eve of Wilford‟s birth his father, Charles Peter, accepted a call to serve an LDS mission in Sweden. He sold a wagon and team, his primary sources of income, to finance the trip. He left his wife, Christine, in Pleasant Grove with two toddlers and $5 in cash. A little over a week after Charles left, Wilford was born on April 23, 1880 into humble circumstances. Many years later Wilford recalled his father and mother relating spiritual experiences they both had when he was born.

(Father told) this remarkable instance: “I was on the Atlantic Ocean on my way to Sweden. I felt very worried about things at home, wondering if I had done the right thing to leave my wife in her delicate condition. One night I thought I was home. I entered the house through the front room and went into the bedroom and saw my wife lying on the bed with a babe on her arm. She looked up

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I drawn extensively from “The Life Sketch of Wilford Woodberry Warnick and Jeanette Isabelle Wadley” written by Effie W. Adams in 1966.

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and smiled. I was just going to speak to her when I awoke and found myself still on the ship. This dream, or manifestation, was a great comfort to me. I went on my mission without too much worry about things at home….

The remarkable thing about this event was that Mother saw him enter the room and stand at the foot of the bed for an instant, but before she could speak to him, he passed on out the other door.”

With help from relatives and neighbors, Wilford‟s mother, Christine, scratched out a living, and managed to send her husband money occasionally for over two years to support his mission. One of her money-making activities was picking and drying fruit.

Wilford‟s Birthplace in Pleasant Grove WWW, 1880

Christine drew the name „Wilford‟ from Wilford Woodruff the LDS apostle who blessed and set Charles apart for his mission. The source of the name Woodberry, however, is a mystery. It is not found among the ancestors of either Christine or Charles, and it was not a common name in Utah at the time. There were only a few Woodberrys in southern Utah and in Salt Lake Valley when Wilford was born, with no obvious connection to the Warnicks. Perhaps Christine, who had an artistic bent, picked Woodberry out of thin air to give her third son an alliterative name.

Decades later Christine and Charles looked back on the arduous missionary years as the refiner‟s fire that formed a foundation for their future life of hard work, dedication to family, and religious commitment. Nonetheless, one needs to go further back in the history of the Warnick family to fully understand the experiences that honed the family‟s qualities and added to the starch in Wilford‟s character.

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ANCESTORS

His progenitors immigrated to Sweden from what is now northern Germany.

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They left their first tracks on Swedish church records in Stockholm in 1760 where information can be found on the Petter Adolph Warnicke family, who was described as being a sugar master. Later, Petter‟s son, Christian Adolph Warnicke, moved west to an area located between two large lakes: Vanern and Vattern. His occupation was listed as a wagon master. Wilford‟s grandfather, Anders Petter Warnicke, was born there in the village of Varsas, and later became a modest tenant farmer.

The decline in the fortunes of the Warnick family mirrors what was happening to many other Swedish families. A rapid growth in population pressed against limited farm land, forcing increasing numbers of the poor into working as landless laborers or, only slightly better, being virtual serfs who were given small plots of land for their use, with the obligation of providing labor to the landowner as compensation. Anders Petter fell into this latter group. His first patron allowed him to use a one-room cottage and to work for his own account about three acres of marginal land. This “privilege” obligated Anders to give the landowner four days of labor each week. Twenty-seven years later he moved his family to a larger house with the use of six acres, but he was required to give the new landowner eight man-days of labor each week, four by him and four by his oldest son.

In these cramped quarter Anders and his wife Anna Helena Andersson raised seven children and occasionally sheltered their children‟s families. The family exercised their religiosity in the Lutheran Church where the children received a rudimentary education, mostly in the form of Bible studies. The family‟s daily grind of eking out a living was forever altered in 1860 when Adam Swenson, a Mormon elder from Mt. Pleasant, Utah, knocked on their door.

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He brought a stirring religious message and told the Warnickes stories about the frontier in America where even the poorest people owned land. The family quickly accepted Swenson‟s message and soon set the goal of migrating to Zion. It took them six years of scrimping and savings to finance the migration of most of the extended family. This communal effort set a pattern the Warnick family practiced for more than a half century.

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Most Elder of this early family history is drawn from the Warnick Family History, Vol. 1.

Swenson was born in Norway in 1834, married his wife Annie there in 1859, briefly lived in Pleasant Grove, and for a time made his living as a carpenter in Mt. Pleasant, Sanpete County. He died in Salt Lake City on February 1, 1908.

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Adam Swenson‟s Grave Salt Lake City Cemetery

Although well into their sixties, Anders and his wife were the driving forces in the family‟s migration. At a time when other people their age were thinking about retirement, Anders and his wife Anna were diligently preparing for an arduous trip to a new country. In 1866 they gathered eight other members of their family and set off for America.4 Two members were left behind: son Adolph Fredrick who was serving an LDS mission in Sweden, and daughter Inga Maria who was married to a non-Mormon. Perhaps it is more accurate to say the group included 11 members, since a daughter-in-law, Mari, was expecting at the time. The Warnicks joined a wave of 3,300 LDS converts who left Europe in 10 vessels that year. Their small ship was the Cavour that left Hamburg and took more than two months to make the passage to New York. The voyage was slow and rough, the food was atrocious, the air below deck was rank, and the drinking water was limited and barely potable. A hint of what was to come occurred when two members of the L. Larson family died, possibly from cholera. Son Charles Peter also lost all of his hair from some unknown malady. Nonetheless, the family members were elated to put foot on firm ground in New York, although they had to take cold showers. They most certainly thought the worst of their journey was behind them. A few days later they climbed into cattle cars for a trip north through Canada and then on to St. Joseph, Missouri. Although the train cars were dirty, the first day of travel north to Montreal was relaxing and the family enjoyed viewing a countryside that looked much like Sweden.

Their tranquil interlude was broken when some of the passengers on the train became violently ill with cholera, with an increasing number of them succumbing to the virulent disease.5 Victims were ignominiously left on the platforms of train

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For more details on the family‟s trip see Reed W. Warnick and Ryan S. Warnick, The Warnick Family Emigration: Anders Peter Warnick and Anna Helena Andersson, www.lulu.com, 2008. 5

The source of the cholera that struck the emigrants is a mystery. Cholera was raging throughout Europe in 1866. Since the drinking water on the Cavour was likely dipped out of the Elba River, this could have been the source of the infection. The gestation period for cholera, however, is quite short, sometimes only a few days. Given this, it is puzzling that only two people

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stops over the next two weeks. The matriarch of the family, Anna Helena, was the first of the Warnicks to contract the disease and she suffered terribly for about two days before passing away, about the time the train crossed the border between Canada and Detroit. The distraught family could only say a brief prayer and leave her frail body wrapped in a flimsy blanket on the train platform in Marcellus, Michigan.6

Words fail in describing father Anders‟ feelings as the train pulled away from the small station. What had been a loving wife, mother, and co-partner in the emigration enterprise was now an indigent bundle that someone later begrudgingly dumped into an unmarked popper‟s grave. Anna‟s death initiated a game where death played tag in the family between the ill and their tenders. Three days after Anna‟s passing, her grandson, John Gustaf died, and the Patriarch Anders and his daughter Christine soon exhibited symptoms of cholera. By the time the dwindling group reached St. Joseph, Missouri, Anders and Christine were near death. They were left at death‟s door on the train platform as the remainder of the Warnick family sadly struggled on to meet their waiting wagon trains in Wyoming, Nebraska.7 Three more in the Warnick group succumbed to cholera as they trekked west to Utah. Only the onslaught of cold weather in Wyoming finally tamed the cholera monster.

Seven in the Warnick family group died on the way and only four survived to enter the Salt Lake Valley on October 22, 1866: John August, his wife Mari, their daughter Caroline, and John‟s 16 year-old brother Charles Peter. Years later, recalling his feelings near the end of the trip, Charles wrote:

When I now look back and think of that awful scene, I wonder how we could do it, and I can only think that we saw so much suffering and death that our sense of feeling and sympathy must have been paralyzed. We thought that we were all doomed and nothing mattered – the sooner (death happened) the better.

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Soon after arriving in the Salt Lake Valley the Warnicks continued south in the wagon train, led by Abner Lowrey, headed to Sanpete Country where many new LDS converts from Scandinavia were settling. On the way south they stopped overnight at a campground on the west edge of the small community of Pleasant

died on the Cavour from what may, or may not, have been cholera during a two month voyage. This 6

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Marcellus With hints their that is two southwest the dying group relatives, of was Kalamazoo; exposed the Warnicks to the the name lethal abandoned of bacteria the railroad a after substantial was they the arrived part Michigan of in their America.

Central.

luggage in St. Joseph, including the family‟s Bible. 8

“Sketch of the Life of Charles Peter Warnick,” as told to his wife and written by her.

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9 Grove.

At the time, it was common for those in local communities to mingle with groups passing through seeking news and friends from the old country. Paul Anderson, originally from Sweden, happened to meet the Warnicks during their brief stopover, and convinced them that Pleasant Grove was a better place to settle than Sanpete County.10 The Warnicks readily accepted Anderson‟s hospitality. John‟s wife, Mari, was near the end of her tether after losing a son and helping to nurse unto death six other members of the family. It was through the chance kindness of Paul Anderson that a large segment of the Warnick family later called the north end of Utah Valley their home.

Paul Anderson‟s Grave Samuel Savior‟s Grave

In Pleasant Grove Cemetery

The Andersons took the Warnicks in and helped them locate shelter in an abandoned dugout owned by Samuel Savior located east of Locust Avenue. The brothers husked corn and stripped sugar cane to earn food for the winter. Charles also found a job making adobes that earned him pay in the form of a cow. The family‟s fortunes reached a nadir when a storm caused the dirt roof of their crude shelter to cave in on Christmas day. Through the kindness of neighbors the Warnicks found other shelter and managed, somehow, to survive their first dreadful winter in Utah.

Over the next few years August and Charles worked wherever they could, including cutting wood, digging canals, building railroads, and doing miscellaneous farm work. They used some of their railroad earnings to pay the passage to Utah of their sister Inga Marie, her four children, and a friend, L. John Swenson. The two brothers also bought small parcels of land and repaid their

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This campground was about where the Mahogany Elementary School is now (2011) located on the west edge of Pleasant Grove. 10

Later, Anderson was a lifelong friend of the Warnicks.

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debt to the Perpetual Emigration Fund. August also built a brick house, the first of its kind in Pleasant Grove.

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The brothers were hardworking, frugal, and typical of many other early Utah setters. Eventually, Charles earned enough money to purchase a team and a wagon that he used in the timber business.

The C. P. Warnick Family

By 1874 Charles, mostly known later as C. P., had a house and a Danish bride, Christine Marie Larsen. The couple later had ten children, nine of whom lived to maturity. In addition to making a living and raising a family, Charles displayed a leadership trait that was passed to his children. He was elected president of the Pleasant Grove Scandinavian Organization and served in that position for ten years. In 1883 and again in 1891 he was elected to the Pleasant Grove City Council and also served in the Pleasant Grove Ward Bishopric. After moving his family to Manila in 1895 he helped to build the church house there and later served as bishop of the ward for nine years, before his deteriorating hearing forced him to retire.

Over the next few years the family developed a thriving farm, bought additional nearby acreage for the older brothers, and gained some notoriety for raising purebred Berkshire pigs (Salt Lake Herald, May 3, 1920). C. P. also had a love for horses that included frequent horse-trading, and participating in horse pulling contests. In addition to farming, the family also harvested timber in the West Mountains and also in American Fork Canyon, and they ran cattle in the same canyon and behind Mt. Mahogany. Besides working a lot in the canyon, the family also recreated there, eventually building a small cabin on what is now called “Warnick Flat” in the North Fork of the canyon.12 Near the end of his life, C. P. stated he hoped he could pass on two traits to his offspring: dependability and punctuality.

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The brick house was located in the vicinity of 2

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North and 4

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East in Pleasant Grove. 12

The cabin was built in the summer of 1919 (Salt Lake Herald, August 10, 1919).

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C. P. Warnick Family, 1920 C. P. and Christine Warnick, 1920

Several features of C. P.‟s family stand out. All of his children, except one, went to college, something that was extremely uncommon at the time. In addition, all of the children filled numerous leadership positions in both church and civic organizations. C. P. and three of his sons were LDS bishops, and another son was an LDS branch president. Two of his daughters married men who would also be bishops, and two of his sons later became stake presidents. All of the family served in various church positions virtually all of their adult lives. While doing this, they also found time to serve in a variety of civic and professional organizations: the Farm Bureau, the Republican Party, various commodity and livestock organizations, 4H, Daughters of the Pioneers, etc. Two of the sons were elected to the state legislature, along with one son-in-law. One son was elected president of the National Dairy Federation, another was principal of two high schools, and one daughter was appointed a department head at BYU. Given this background, it isn‟t surprising that Wilford would be heavily involved in church leadership positions along with other types of public service. It was deeply embedded in his genes.

EDUCATION

A large part of Wilford‟s education occurred in the family, working on the farm, and helping his father harvest timber from American Fork Canyon. Most of his formal schooling was in Pleasant Grove. In his journal he says: “While in the 8

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grade we organized the „Seekers League Society‟ for which I was elected 1

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vice president and afterwards President. How it used to frighten me to call the meetings to order. During the same year we organized the Pleasant Grove Alumni Association. I was chosen 2nd Vice President, Burdett Smith, 1st Vice President, and Hermes Peterson President.”

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His family mostly moved to the farm in Manila in 1895 when he was 15. He returned to town to complete his primary education, and later attend the first high school there. At the time, it involved a year of so extra education, beyond the customary 8 years of schooling. The high school was organized by D. H. Robinson. Wilford says in his journal: “In 1897-1898 I attended the 9th Grade. During the summer I worked on the farm. During the winter of 1897-98 I was chosen secretary of Young Men‟s Mutual Improvement Association of Manila Ward.”

Ben, Effie, Wilford

University of Utah

With a year or so of education beyond the 8

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grade, in the fall of 1898 Wilford enrolled in the University of Utah, after his parents agonized over how to support him there. In a letter to his brother Louis, who was serving an LDS mission in Samoa, Wilford mentions the decision to attend was made at the last minute.

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To reduce costs he boarded with a Warnick relative, Huldah Habish, and her husband David, and walked the mile or so to his classes. Room-and-board was “paid” for by Wilford‟s father regularly dropping off farm produce at the Habish‟s residence at 503 East 2nd South in Salt Lake City. Since Dave Habish was a barber, Wilford likely also enjoyed free haircuts.

His classes were in University Hall, located on Union Square, in the area where West High School was later located.

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There were about 400 students attending the university and it offered two career tracks. One led to a baccalaureate degree and the other was the Normal program for individuals planning to become teachers. About half of the students were enrolled in each track. Following his older brother Louis‟ career choice, Wilford wished to become a teacher and entered the Normal program.15

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If he had enrolled a year earlier in 1897 he would have been classmates with David O. McKay, Howard R. Driggs, and Nettie B. McKay. His future wife‟s nickname, Nettie, may have come from her 14

The relative university Nettie did B. not McKay.

move to its current location near Ft. Douglas until the fall of 1900.

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