Mary Turpin Bennion Table and Chair

The Mary Turpin Bennion, her parents and her historic table and chair:

Mary Turpin was born January 25, 1841 in Birkenshaw, Yourkshire, England of William Turpin and Elisabeth Tidwell Turpin.

William was a skilled carpenter and wheelwright.

While Elizabeth had no formal schooling, she was educated by her father. At age 16 she went out to domestic service and lived for seven years in the cultured and wealthy family of Edward Acroid.

William earned a good living, building a home and had several cottages to rent.  He married Elizabeth May 14, 1838.

During the early years of this marriage, the Mormon Elders brought the gospel to the family which was baptized in May or 1842.

While they had a comfortable living, the call to “Gather to Zion” put the family on the ship, Norfolk the fall of 1844 on the way to the mouth of the Mississippi River.  Mary was just three and a half years of age.

That fall, a steamboat took them up the Mississippi  to Nauvoo.

With the Prophet Joseph already dead and the Saints being driven from Nauvoo, the family was asked to stay in Nauvoo so the father could help fix wagons for those fleeing the area. 

The fall of 1846, with nothing to show for his most productive years, the family set out to cross Iowa to rejoin the Saints.  In later years, Mary said her five-year-old memories of those days are the first to stick in her mind. 

Through sickness, birth and family death, they traveled to Bonaparte, not being able to make it to Winter Quarters arriving at Winter Quarters late the next spring.  They stayed in the general area of Winter Quarters for three years.

Their four month journey across the plains to Salt Lake City started in June 1851 when Mary was ten years old.  With family sickness, Mary was practically the only one to help drive the wagons, the extra teams and keep track of loose cows that traveled with them for the four month journey.

They reached the Salt Lake Valley in October 1852 and settled “over Jordan” about ten miles south of the city.

On April 19, 1857, at age 16, Mary became the third wife of John Bennion. 

For the next ten years, she lived “Over Jordan” in the area where Taylorsville now is, and 1861 she lived in a dugout in Rush Valley, west of the Oquirrh mountains.  She returned once from Rush Valley because of problems with the Indians.

During her life, she had seven sons and one daughter, Zina with whom she chose to live beginning in 1897 for the last 16 years of her life after the death of her husband and the university graduation of her sons.

A table and chair that travelled with Mary and her family across the plains and found their way into her daughter Zina Bennion Cannon’s home.

Beatrice Cannon Evans, the eldest of eleven children of Zina Bennion and lived 16 years with her grandmother and her table and chairs.

If the table could speak, what stories it could tell.

I now have the table and chairs to be passed on in the family.

For more detail consult Bennion Family History Volume 1.

Mary Turpin Bennion by BCE

Mary Turpin Bennion’s later life As written by Beatrice C. Evans

Including Zina B. and John M’s wedding and Beatrice Cannon’s birth

 Mary and her family continued to live in the same place for a time.  Just when they moved from there is not clear to me, but when father and mother used to take us young children on the summer evening drives to Taylorsville, mother (Zina

B. Cannon) pointed out a brick cottage across the street north from the old John Bennion home as her birthplace on July 2, 1873. 

Mother lived there until they moved to Salt Lake for her to attend what was then called the L. D. S. College but later known as LDS High School and for her older Brother Milton to attend the University of Utah.

There was in a small log cabin near the cottage which had been known to accommodate convert families which were brought into that church by Bennion missionaries.  Tradition has it that a spiritualist family once occupied this cabin and that, after their departure, furniture could be heard moving about.

Grandma, Effie and mother lived at 137 Oak Street from where mother was married on July 18, 1893.  This building still stands on Capitol Hill across the street west from the State Capitol.  I have an engraved invitation to their wedding supper held there.

 After their marriage, mother and father lived in the second story apartment of this house and it was there that I was born on May 8, 1894.  When I was six weeks old father and mother moved to a home they had already built at 2381 South Seventh East in Forest Dale.

When I was a few years old, grandma and her adopted niece, Effie Turpin Cooper, later the wife of Frank Russell who was about 12 years younger than mother, followed us to a cottage built for them immediately south of our place in Forest Dale.  Their house was later enlarged and occupied by mother’s older Brother, Milton and family.

Grandma had been a semi invalid for many years, due to strains of her hard pioneering life. Effie Was young and not physically strong.  Keeping house alone proved too much for them.  It was then that my father, John M. Cannon, insisted that grandma and Effie live in our very large house.  This they did near the time of the birth of mother’s third child, John, until after father’s death.  Mother always had hired household help and grandma and Effie became great baby sitters.

When mother’s fourth child, Paul, was born, Milton, our third child, was only 14 months old and grandma practically took him over.  Grandma and Effie were a blessing in our home in more ways than one.

Grandma’s  educator philosopher son, Milton, wrote of his Mother Mary: “My mother’s disposition was firm, but very gentle, kind, and well balance.  Because of this, she had great influence with her sons and daughters throughout her life.  I say “daughters” because when I was 15 years old, her sister Hannah Turpin Cooper died, leaving a large family which included a very young infant, Effie Lenore Cooper.  Hannah’s deathbed request was that her Sister Mary “take the baby.” And she did.

Rush Valley Cabin by WCE

 I knew Kenneth Bennion  in my teens when he told me stories of the Family’s experiences in Rush Valley.

He told me the story of how his grandmother learned to read “up-side-down.”

He remembered on occasion when he entered a room where she was reading, that she would quickly turn the paper or book from upside-down to the normal reading position.

He also told of the Rush Valley cabin where those taking care of the livestock would keep their food in one corner of the room plus a place to sleep over night.

He said that family members using the cabin would keep all of the food in one corner of the floor.  But when  “do-gooders” would enter the cabin this person would sweep the floor causing the dust to get all over the floor and the food.. “What they didn’t understand” he said “was that at some point there was as much dirt carried out on their shoes, as that that coming in.”

Wayne Evans