Ann Victoria Spendlove Hopkins

 OF Dignity and Dreams

Ann Victoria Spendlove

As Ann Victoria Spendlove prepared to sail to America we can imagine the conversation she had with her sisters who had raised her.

 “Forget this dream of going to Zion. The United States is in a civil war, and the church has gone astray.” 

” You will loose your dignity in that barren waste land where people are so destitute and poverty ridden.”  

A little niece piping up, “There will be no place to wear the fancy dresses with satin and lace you so like to wear.” 

“You watch me!”  The audacious Ann must have replied. “I can dress anyway I like wherever I like. I believe in the dream.”  

Ann's older brother William had gone to Utah in 1849. William’s letters home caused serious doubt about the truth of the LDS church in the Spendlove family. Before he went off to the gold mines in California he wrote a letter back saying that the church had gone astray. Their father renounced his membership until a few days before his death. Others of the children had serious misgivings, but the oldest brother John who had helped pay for Williams passage never wavered.  Before John left for the land of Zion he did all that he could do to prevail upon their father to change his mind.  

With the help of their oldest brother, John, Ann, and her brothers James and Joseph stayed true to the faith. At the age of 27, Ann, set sail for New York. (On the ship “General McCellan” on Jun 23rd 1864 out of Liverpool.)

Ann made her way to Utah in the William S. Warren Company arriving in Salt Lake City Oct. 4, 1864.  

On the trail the wagon train dodged the Indians who seemed to be at war with the settlers.   Stott Edwin of that company recorded, “The country was being settled ... men were coming out and taking up ranches and building homes. Indians, feeling like their hunting grounds were being over run were killing the settlers and setting fire to their homes and stealing their belongings…As we were traveling along at night we could see the homes burning on the horizon."

Traveling with a covered wagon company was hard, tiresome and taxing on mind and soul.   The last half of the journey rations were so tight it seemed that their stomachs were always empty and their energy drained. As the wagons rolled along Ann had plenty of time to think of her homeland and the family members she had left behind.

Ann Victoria Spendlove was born in a two room adobe house in Stanion England in 1835 the youngest of 13 children. Her father was a thick, stout man about 5 ft. 6 inches tall with gray eyes and a stern disposition. Ann could not remember her mother because she passed away when Ann was only a year old.  Her father never remarried.  She was loved and raised by her older brothers and sisters.  They often played games such as Tag, Ring Around the May Pole, Toss Over and Hide and Seek. Watching three sisters 8, 10 and 15 years older than her, Ann must have learned about style and dress.  With 6 older brothers to tease her she learned to fend for herself.

All the family looked up to their oldest brother John. He was always considerate to his brothers and sisters and did much to help the family.  Ann went to stay with John and his wife Elizabeth after they married.  

Elizabeth had something almost no one had in those days. Elizabeth had a family bible that was very old.  It is written of Elizabeth by one of her sons, "She was a good reader . . . she would take the old Bible down after we children had gone to bed and read to us …The Bible was very old; not less than 100 years old and had been passed down through the family for years…Bibles were very scarce in those days and not many families had them." 

While reading the bible they talked about the dream of Grandma Susanna Mossindew. Their Grandmother related that she had seen, in her dream, her son reading the old bible to his family when two young men came into the room. They took the old bible out of his hands and gave him another book that had a shinny cover. After reading from this book, for a while the family got up and went with the strange men. When she awoke she wondered what the new book was.  She told her son about the dream, saying that something very important would come into his life some-day and he should prepare himself to receive it.

In her brother Joseph's  journal is the story of finding strange men and the new book.

“While (our oldest brother) John was working on the railroad …he heard the men talking about a new religion that was being preached in the countryside and that some strange men were going two by two saying there had been raised up a prophet in America that had restored the new church as of old with apostles and all the gifts as then.  John wanted to find these men and learn more about their teachings.” 

“The idea of a church with apostles, prophets and the authority struck me with conviction,” John told his brother Joseph. 

            John also had a dream before he was converted. “ Mother appeared to me and she stood before a large curtain.  She was dressed in white and had a look of distress on her face.  She did not smile but motioned for me to come and look behind the curtain.  This I wanted to do but waited for her to pull it aside so I could see.  As I continued to hesitate she shook her head and vanished.” (In Mar. of 1849 John was baptized.)  After his conversion to the gospel John came to understand the meaning of the dream.

            There is no record that John's wife Elizabeth ever joining the church and her daughter remembered that she did not like the missionaries coming to their home and wanted them to leave John alone. 

One day, according to one record, Elizabeth was found head long on a hill.  She had taken a fall and did not survive. It was a very sad day for Ann and the dear children of John and Elizabeth.   Ann and her sisters helped care for the children after that.

As a missionary John preach the gospel, going door to door.  He stated that he had read the bible so much that he felt like the Apostle Paul was near him every time he went out.   

After a few years John married again.  John and his new wife Mary immigrated to America on a ship called the Amazon.  Before they set sail Charles Dickens entered the ship to get a first hand look at the Mormons.  

“I went on board their ship,” he said, “to bear testimony against them if they deserved it,” Of the people themselves Dickens wrote that had he not known they were Mormons, he would have described them as, … “the pick and flower of England”.

            Ann desired to follow her brother John to Utah.  Travel was made possible by the Perpetual Emmigration Fund.  Records show that Ann traveled in the William S. Waren Company arriving in Salt Lake City on Oct. 4, 1864.  After arriving in Salt Lake City she found her way down to Virgin, Utah where John and his wife Mary lived in a dug out.  Life was hard.

Ann, small in stature, with dark wavy hair and very good looking, was dignified and proud.  She met the spunky Joe Hopkins who had just lost a wife in childbirth. It did not take Joe long to talk Ann Victoria into becoming his wife. 

            Two children Joseph Walter and Ann Elizabeth were born in Virgin and then the family moved to Toqueville about 1867 where two more children were born. Joe and Ann had 6 children in all.  They endured many hardships and happy times as they helped settle southern Utah.  They ended up in Glendale Utah. 

Ann always believed in the dream and the book of Mormon. She also found times to dress in her beautiful dresses of satin and lace. 

Her granddaughter Lucy remembers, “Grandpa and Grandma Hopkins made a trip to Virgin, to visit old friends, where they were married and lived some length of time before moving to Long Valley… Grandma wore a lovely little fine straw and silk bonnet (she had more than one for she showed them to me many times). She had lovely black silk dresses other women didn't have. She had a brother in England who was a goldsmith who sent her lovely earrings, broaches and rings so she was really a lady when in full dress. … I was old enough to see the poverty of those fine people and tried to understand why Grandma could do such a thing to old friends.

Surely these old friends understood Ann Victoria Spendlove; A woman of poise and dignity with unyielding faith.  Ann did not have to give up her fine dresses of satin and lace to follow the Savior and believe in the dream.