Mill Creek Press
P.O. Box 9801   Springfield, Illinois 62791

Publishing history, biography, fiction, poetry, criticism & mixed media 
for the mills of the mind

For lovers of local history,
Letters to Mollie from Her Mormon Past: 1860-1912 is a special publication. It is a book of transcribed private letters - primarily from people in and around Pleasanton and Lamoni, Iowa, nearby northern Missouri and parts of Illinois. They were written to Miriam "Mollie" (Works) McNutt, the orphaned niece of Brigham Young.

Mollie fled from pressure to join the Mormon church in Iowa and came to Illinois during the Civil War.  While her friends and family worked to establish the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints — opposing the polygamy of the Utah “Brighamites”— Mollie received letters. Some were from Union soldiers; some from their wives, at home worrying. Most were from young women like Mollie who grew from being a hired girl to become the wife of an Illinois farmer, or a Missouri laborer, or an Iowa minister and legislator.

 There are 111 letters, fully annotated, cross-referenced within the text, and end-indexed by name and topic. A Chronology of Past Events, leading up to the first (1860) letter, allows readers to understand history as Mollie would have. Researchers —including genealogists and historians — will value the book for its insights into late 19^th Century Midwestern family life. 

 As one reviewer said: “[It is] a remarkable discovery [of a] trove of letters...and a terrific job selecting and annotating them... [T]he corpus of letters and introductory and contextual texts for them...make good reading and touch on such larger issues as Mormonism, the Civil War, and Missouri’s ambivalence as a border state. Clearly, a labor of love...”*

Letters to Mollie is 6X9 inches, printed on acid-free paper, Smythe-sewn in case-bound leatherette - a handsome addition to any library shelf. Its 320 pages include captioned photographs, selected pages from actual letters, an area map, and three pertinent family trees. It regularly sells for $25.00, plus 7.25% tax for Illinois residents. Shipping is included.

Abraham Lincoln and the Mormons - Another Legacy of Limited Freedom.

Abraham Lincoln and Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith, Jr., were in Springfield, Illinois, at the same time, and they may have met in U.S. Circuit Court Judge Nathaniel Pope’s courtroom on the last day of 1842. Lincoln, as a state representative, had voted for the unusual city charter that granted a military force, the Nauvoo Legion, to Nauvoo, the Latter Day Saints theocracy on the banks of the Mississippi River. Both Lincoln, a Whig, and Democrat Stephen A. Douglas vied for Mormon political support. In the midst of the Civil War, Lincoln sought the aid of Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, Utah, but signed into law the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act, outlawing polygamy and fulfilling a Republican political campaign promise to eradicate “those twin relics of barbarism– polygamy and slavery.” In a 20-page fully annotated and illustrated booklet, Gary Vitale traces Lincoln’s involvement with Mormons and the efforts of men who came after him– Justin Smith Morrill, George Franklin Edmunds, and Charles Zane– to rid America of what many called the Muslim, or Mohammedan, practice of polygamy, as much a limitation of our freedom of religion and states’ rights as the abolition of slavery is.

Click on this button to buy, for $8.00 each, one or more copy of Abraham Lincoln and the Mormons. Postage is included