Stillman Pond (October 26, 1803 – September 30, 1878) – a farmer, harnessmaker, and land speculator by trade, and a native of Hubbardston, Worcester, Massachusetts – was a Mormon pioneer and church leader recognized for the great personal sacrifices he made in the Mormon exodus from Nauvoo, Illinois, to the Great Basin's Salt Lake Valley (September 1846 – September 1847), in what would later become Utah Territory.
Time in Massachusetts and Conversion Stillman Pond was the descendant of colonial New England progenitors of the Puritan persuasion, many of whom served as ministers and selectmen of various townships.Helene Holt (1987). EXILED: The Story of John Lathrop, 1584–1653, Appendices A-E, Paramount Books, New York; and Truman G. Madsen (1989), Joseph Smith the Prophet, pp. 107–108, and (2004) Presidents of the Church, Deseret Book, Salt Lake City – Predominantly via matriarchal lines, Stillman Pond was a sixth-generation direct descendant of the Reverend John Lathrop (1584–1653) – the stoic 17th-century separatist minister from England (and a contemporary of Shakespeare) who for his determined faith endured inhumane persecution and imprisonment by Archbishop William Laud of London, but who fled to America to achieve religious freedom for his family and followers. Lathrop fathered a most distinguished and impressive American progeny – that is to say, he stands preeminent among the ancestors of the Prophet Joseph Smith himself (Lathrop is Smith's fifth great-grandfather), Hyrum Smith (and Hyrum's own LDS Prophet-progeny of Joseph F. and Joseph Fielding Smith); several U.S. Presidents, including U.S. Grant, FDR, and the Bushes; LDS Church leaders Wilford Woodruff, Frederick G. Williams, Oliver Cowdery, Orson and Parley P. Pratt, W. W. Phelps, Orson F. Whitney, Zina Huntington Young (Smith), George Albert Smith, Harold B. Lee, Spencer W. Kimball, Ezra Taft Benson, Gordon B. Hinckley, N. Eldon Tanner, M. Russell Ballard, and Marion G. Romney; high-profile citizens, including the Utah Romney and Huntsman families (including Governors George and Mitt Romney and Governor Jon Huntsman, Jr.), Governor Sarah Palin, Stephen R. Covey, Hyrum Smith (Franklin Quest/Franklin Covey founder), and a great swath of other American historical, cultural, and literary figures, such as poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, romantic novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, chief justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, banker J. P. Morgan and investor Henry Sturgis Morgan, educator Benjamin Spock, inventor Eli Whitney, actors Clint Eastwood and John Lithgow, and fiction writer Orson Scott Card. John Lathrop's story is that of a highly principled religious reformer and tireless community and nation builder, whose many descendants have strongly influenced the development of American government, law, medicine, science, industry, culture, and religion. The Massachusetts native was born only two years before the birth of the prophet Joseph Smith, Jr., with whom he shared a common ancestry (in separatist minister John Lathrop, 1584–1653) and whose fledgling American religion he would one day embrace.
While Stillman's paternal grandfather, Joseph Pond (b. 1756) was a Revolutionary War soldier, his great-great-grandfather Ezra Pond (b. 1692) was a pastor of a local Franklin, Massachusetts congregation. In the Puritan spirit of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, Ezra refused to comply with the orders of the community elders, and he was forced to leave town, moving with his family to Hubbardston. Stillman's maternal great-great-grandfather was Lt. Paul Moore (b. 1711), an American army commander at the Battle of Bunker Hill.Pond, Leon Y. & H. Ray Pond, Stillman Pond, a Biographical Sketch, ed., Sterling Forsyth, Histories, LDS Historical Department, Salt Lake City.
Marrying Almyra Whittemore in 1825, he moved to Westminster, Worcester, Massachusetts, where he purchased several tracts of land. There he remained until 1832, when he moved to Templeton. Almyra bore him 5 children (four girls and one boy), but at age 33 she died in the yellow fever epidemic that swept through New England in 1833 and was buried at Hubbardston.A young widower now with five children, Stillman Pond would ultimately marry four more times. Marrying again in 1834 to Maria Louisa Davis, Stillman settled again at Hubbardston, but moved his family in 1837 to New Salem, Massachusetts, purchasing there three tracts of land over the next five years. There, he and his family fostered new friendships, including with the Haskell family (later reuniting with them at Nauvoo).Haskell, 'Letters of a Proselyte: The Hascall-Pomeroy Correspondence' (letters of Irene Haskell Pomeroy and her mother Ursula B. Haskell, 1845–1854), Utah Historical Quarterly 25, four quarterly installments (Jan–Oct 1957). Most significantly, it was at New Salem in 1841 that Stillman and his family welcomed into their home travelling Mormon missionaries and were converted, through their efforts, to the new faith that Smith had founded a decade earlier. The family was baptized on December 28, 1841 under the hand of Elder Elias Harris.
The Mormon message, spurred Pond to join the Missouri-driven Latter-day Saints at Nauvoo, Illinois. Pond and his family, having embraced 'the New Covenant' and sold their land, made their trek in the fall of 1843.
Nauvoo merchant, Elder and Seventy In the would-be refuge of the 'City Beautiful' Stillman built a two-story red brick home (in the front part of which he established a store) a few blocks southwest of the Nauvoo Temple on Munson Street (block 106).
Their new neighbor, as Stillman soon discovered, was a latter-day Apostle of the Lord, for not only did the edifice lay but 'a few rods' west of the homes of friends and fellow converts Winslow Farr and his son Lorin,Haskell, 'Letters of a Proselyte': 'I [Irene] am now at Lorin Farrs nursing his child, a little boy named Enoch. His wife has a broken breast. It is only a few rods from brother Ponds [January 23, 1846],' p. 142. Waterford, Vermont native Lorin Farr (1820–1909) was a bodyguard-scribe to the Prophet Joseph Smith and, later, father-in-law to Apostle and First Presidency member John Henry Smith, and the maternal grandfather of LDS Church President George Albert Smith. After the arrival of the Latter-day Saints in Utah, Farr became the first mayor of Ogden City. Farr's sister Diantha was married to the Prophet's clerk and Council of Fifty member William Clayton, who, as a clerk also to Brigham Young, went West when he did. Diantha was expecting and stayed at Nauvoo until after her baby was born; when word reached William in Iowa that Diantha had born a healthy baby, he penned words to a hymn for the Mormon people called 'Come, Come Ye Saints.' but also just east of the historic red-brick residence of Mormon Apostle Heber C. Kimball – confidante and councilor to the Mormon Prophet of the Restoration, Joseph Smith, Jr. Another apostle, moreover, resided on the same block – Wilford Woodruff – whose red-brick home stood just north of the Farr homes on Durphy Street.
The Pond family home & store (1843–1846) was thus situated west of the intersection at Durphy and Munson Streets (its site excavated in 1970 by Nauvoo Restoration Inc.) – on the same 4-acre 'lower city' lot where, in their restored incarnations, the historic Kimball, Woodruff, and Farr homes can be seen today (the Winslow Farr home is at the intersection's northwest corner).
Ordained an Elder of the church in July 1844 (only weeks after the Prophet Joseph's martyrdom), Stillman received his patriarchal blessing under the hands of the Prophet's uncle, John Smith, on January 1, 1845, and that same year (17 May) became a member of the church's 2nd Quorum of Seventy, receiving also with his wife (and his first wife by proxy) the ordinance of the holy Endowment in the still unfinished Nauvoo Temple on December 30.