Born: 13 Jan 1842 in Southport, Lancashire, England
Mary was the daughter of William and Jeannette Carr Barton, the youngest of seven children. Mary’s mother died shortly after her birth. William Barton was a plasterer and paperhanger by trade and made a fairly good living. Mary’s older sisters helped to raise her until her father remarried. Mary later wrote: “At the age of six I went to school but had to stop when I reached my tenth birthday. At twelve I went out to work for my living, and when fourteen years old I left England to come to Utah for the Gospel sake.”
Mary sailed from England in May of 1856 aboard the Horizon with her father, William (47), step-mother, Mary Ann (33), and step-sisters, Francis (3), and Elizabeth (1). Her older siblings apparently did not join the Church as they are reported to have persecuted the rest of the family for so doing. Even after coming to America, Mary was saddened many times by the unkind things said to her in letters from her relatives in England. Mary recorded many interesting things about her journey. She wrote, "One day while on the ship, I was up in the cooking room cooking dinner. It was so crowded there was hardly standing room. The people were all cooking their dinner, one man was boiling soup in a milk can. When he took the soup from the stove, he lifted it over my head in order to carry it through the crowd. While doing so somebody knocked him and it fell out of his hand on my back. My father stood outside waiting for me to come with the dinner. I ran out to him and he said, ‘Come downstairs and let’s get some oil.’ So we ran down the steps and got one of the Elders to administer to me. It was better in a few minutes, the pain had entirely gone and I never felt any more of it. Some of the soup went on the hands of the man who had spilled it on me. He ran and put his hands in a bucket of cold water and wasn’t administered to. He, not being a convert, wouldn’t hear to having the Elders pray for him. His hands were blistered and they didn’t get better until two weeks."
The Martin Company arrived by train in Cleveland, Ohio, amidst parades and fireworks. They stayed in a large warehouse overnight, during which time there was a great rainstorm. They were also pestered by a mob with stones and bats all night. Although Mary did not write about it, her baby sister, Elizabeth, died.... Mary wrote: "We had been five weeks on the sea when we landed in Boston. We were very glad to walk on land again. We left Boston for Iowa and were eight days on the train. When we arrived in Iowa, we had three miles to walk to the camp grounds. It rained all the way, and we were soaking wet when we reached camp that night...
We had to stay on the camp grounds five weeks waiting for the handcarts to be made. When everything was ready we started. Traveling through Ohio and Council Bluffs (Nebraska), we had to cross the Missouri River which was about a mile from Florence. … So many of our company took sick that we had to camp at Florence for two weeks. Then we started on a journey of [one thousand] miles across the plains. The people began to get sick and died from drinking muddy water. We had to drink pools of rain water most of the time. While traveling, one of the wagons split and let flour out. The Indians who were nearly starved to death came along behind picking it up and eating it, dirt and all. One day while we were camped an Indian came to me and asked me to give him my shawl which I had on my shoulders. I told him it was all I had to keep me from freezing to death. He turned and walked away.
While crossing Nebraska, both William and Francis became very ill, leaving only Mary Ann and Mary to pull the handcart. Francis rode in the cart, and William hung onto the back for support as he plodded forward. Mary's historical sketch relates her father's decline: "After dragging on the rear of the handcart for days and nights, one night came when he could only creep. A captain came along and gave him a push with his foot, telling him to get up, not to give up, and to be brave. That night, late in September... [father] died."
It was a pathetic scene in the Bartons' tent that night near Chimney Rock, Nebraska, 472 miles from Florence. Mary was doing her best to care for her father as he was dying. Nearby her stepmother was caring for little Francis, who also lay near death. How alone Mary must have felt on that vast prairie. Her mother had died when Mary was a baby, her father was dying beside her, her six older siblings had turned against her when she joined the Church, and she was far from home with so much unknown still ahead. Before the journey's end, the other three men in her tent would die. More trials were to come for this grieving young girl, her stepmother, and her only little sister.”
After reaching Devil’s Gate, the company was moved to a cove in the nearby mountain for five days. Mary wrote: "After pitching our tents we lay down on the ground to get some sleep and rest. In the night the tents all blew over. It was all ice and snow where I was laying, and when the tents blew off I didn’t wake up I was so tired. One man (Mary Barton – Page 2) came and looked at me. He called some more men over saying, “I wonder if she is dead?” He patted me on the head and just then I opened my eyes. He jumped back. I tried to raise my head but found that my hair was frozen to the ground. They chopped the ice all around my hair, and I got up and went over to the fire and melted the large pieces of ice that were clinging to my hair. The men laughed to think that I could lie there all night with my hair frozen in the ice, but were very glad that I wasn’t dead. This same night the handcarts all blew away, and some of us had to walk until we met some other wagons. Mrs. Unthanks [Ellen Pucell, then age 9, later married William Unthank] got her feet frozen and had to have them taken off, but when we met more wagons we could all ride. There were four men in our tent, and all of them died."
Mary reached the Valley on November 30, 1856. The family was taken first to the tithing yard to receive food and supplies. Mary first stayed with a King family and then with the Allen family in Spanish Fork. Mary married John Allen the next spring. She became the mother of twelve children, seven girls and five boys.
Mary derived a lot of pleasure from singing. She led the choir in her hometown of Summit for many years. Her granddaughter, Molly, remembers Mary’s later years, being confined to her sickroom, and sharing stories and singing songs to her:
She often sang to me, and one of her favorites was the ‘Handcart Song.’ She seemed proud to have lived through such harrowing experiences and that she had been strong enough to surmount so many difficulties, but in later years she would not talk of these things.
I was struck today with the thought that so many of these pioneers were like Mary in that they may have felt alone. Many left family behind, never to see them again, and others, while they may have begun their journey with their family, lost their loved ones along the way. But while they may have felt alone, they were surrounded by their brothers and sisters in the gospel, and they had the love of the Savior to comfort them. They are such stalwart examples to us of how to find peace in troubling circumstances. It reminded me of a talk that Elder Jeffery R. Holland gave at a fireside at BYU. He said, "As we think on these things, does it strike us that spiritual experience, revelatory experience, sacred experience can come to every one of us in all the many and varied stages and circumstances of our lives if we want it, if we hold on and pray on, and if we keep our faith strong through our difficulties? ...tonight’s message is that when you have to, you can have sacred, revelatory, profoundly instructive experience with the Lord in any situation you are in. Indeed, let me say that even a little stronger: You can have sacred, revelatory, profoundly instructive experience with the Lord in the most miserable experiences of your life—in the worst settings, while enduring the most painful injustices, when facing the most insurmountable odds and opposition you have ever faced...every experience can become a redemptive experience if we remain bonded to our Father in Heaven through that difficulty. These difficult lessons teach us that man’s extremity is God’s opportunity, and if we will be humble and faithful, if we will be believing and not curse God for our problems, He can turn the unfair and inhumane and debilitating prisons of our lives into temples—or at least into a circumstance that can bring comfort and revelation, divine companionship and peace."
I believe that this is true. We see it over and over again in the examples of these amazing pioneers, and I have seen it in my own life as well.
Have a great week!
Sister McHood
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