Samuel Leigh (1815 - 1894)

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• Connection to Samuel Leigh's page in the Early Wales blog
• History with 1st Wife, Ann David
• History with 2nd Wife, Mary Treharne
  

Samuel Leigh

The Leighs in Cedar City, Utah are all descended from Samuel Leigh, who was born on 20 October 1815 in Llanedi, Carmarthenshire, Wales, in the rural parish of his grandfather, the Reverend Edmund Leigh. Samuel was the fourth son of the carpenter and cabinetmaker Daniel Leigh. With two older brothers (Daniel Jr. and Edmund) he moved to the seaport town of Llanelli, where he married Ann David in December 1841. In 1847/8 they both became converts to the new Mormon faith, along with Samuel’s elder brother Daniel Leigh and family, his sister Sarah Leigh Walters and family, his unmarried sister Hannah Leigh, and Ann David’s cousin Morgan David and his family. 

Samuel was a carpenter like his father Daniel and his older brother Daniel, and he was prosperous enough to have built two houses (one for rental) when he and his wife decided to emigrate with their four young children from Wales to Utah in February, 1849. He traveled in a large family group with his sister Hannah, his brother Daniel and family, and Morgan David and family in the first contingent of Welsh Mormons on the sailing ships S.S. Buena Vista and the S.S. Hartley. The Leighs arrived in the port of New Orleans on 16 April 1849, and the David family arrived on the Hartley a week later. Their story is told by Ronald D. Dennis in The Call of Zion: The Story of the First Welsh Mormon Emigration (Provo, Utah, 1987). Samuel himself wrote a long journal or autobiography, but his handwritten original is now apparently lost. We used the typescript copy in Southern Utah University, Cedar City (Special Collections, Box 8695 L447 Copy 2), but a shorter, reorganized version with improved English was compiled by someone else, possibly Amy Van Cott. Both versions have many errors in names where Samuel’s handwriting was illegible, and both versions mix up the towns of Llanedi and Llanelli and give Edmund Mayas Leigh for the child Edmund Nash Leigh.

S.S. Hartley Used by permission of Ronald D. Dennis The Call of Zion, p. 32

Samuel’s first three years in America were marked by his wife’s death and many hardships (see Samuel Leigh and Ann David), but after his trek across the plains to Utah with his second wife Mary Treharne and two new children in 1852, his life could become more stable and prosperous again (see Samuel Leigh and Mary Trehorne).

They settled in Cedar City, a small community only one year old in southern Utah, part of the high mountain desert of the Great Basin at the western edge of the Rocky Mountains. Occupied by the Paiute tribe of native Americans, the area had been first traversed by white men in the 1770s as part of the Spanish Trail from the mission of Santa Fe to the Los Angeles mission, also known as the Escalante Trail. The new settlement was established on Brigham Young’s decision to develop nearby deposits of iron ore and coal, and therefore emigrants from the coal-mining areas of Britain were advised to settle there. The history of Cedar City has been extensively researched by York F. Jones, descendant of two of the earliest settlers, and his wife Evelyn Kunz Jones in their three books: Lehi Willard Jones 1854-1947 (Salt Lake City, 1972), Mayors of Cedar City and Histories of Cedar City, Utah (Cedar City, Utah, 1986), and (by Evelyn alone) Henry Lunt: Biography (BYU, Provo, 1996). 

Samuel continued his trade as a carpenter and furniture maker, and made much of the earliest furniture used in Cedar City at his cabinet and furniture shop located on what is now the Main Street of the town. He also ran a sawmill in Cedar Canyon. An article in the Salt Lake newspaper, the Deseret News for 6 February 1868, referred to “Samuel Leigh and Co. finishing their building and machinery, for an iron foundry, making shingles, laths, etc” as cited in Henry Lunt (p.265). Like everyone else, Samuel acquired land and farmed it, and he also joined in the cooperative sheep herd established by settlers from major sheep-raising areas in Wales. This community herd grew to ten thousand head in a decade and was of excellent quality providing cheese, meat, and wool (Henry Lunt p.305).

Samuel was active in the Mormon church organization, according to his personal journal (pp.16-20, 36-38, 40 in original pagination). He became a member of the Stake High Council in May 1855, was first counselor to the Bishop for 18 years, and superintendent of the Sunday school for the same period. He also occupied numerous civic positions in the town government. According to the book Mayors of Cedar City, city records for 2 March 1863 and again in February 1867 show that Samuel was elected a member of the town council (pp. 23-24). He was titled Alderman just as in Wales, where his Leigh ancestors had been Aldermen in Carmarthen as early as 1674. Samuel’s journal says he was chosen as a delegate to the convention to select a representative for the State Legislature in Salt Lake City in 1862 (p.19). In 1861 he had been appointed to construct a new Social Hall, but by 1877 it had become too small, so Samuel was again asked to supervise a new building. He ceremoniously laid the cornerstone in its place on November 27 (described in the Salt Lake City newspaper Deseret News, cited in Henry Lunt p.304). His journal says, “I was proud to have the over site…” (p.36). This is one of the very few expressions of emotion in Samuel’s journal.

As late as May 1880 Samuel was appointed to a committee to settle water rights (Mayors p.60), and in 1881 he signed a petition for the use of city lots for a new school (Mayors p.68). By then Samuel’s sons were being elected to city offices, e.g. Henry Leigh in 1876 and William David Leigh in 1884 (Mayors pp.44,78).

Perhaps Samuel’s most interesting activity was his return to Wales as a Mormon missionary in 1875-77. His journal gives considerable detail on the trip. He began the mission by traveling and preaching through the St Louis, Missouri area where he had first arrived in America and where his first wife had died. He met there and visited his niece Jane Leyshon, daughter of his older sister Anne Leigh. Clearly family feelings were still strong, as he gratefully writes: “treated us very kind I made my home there when at St. Louis” (p.22). In fact, after Samuel’s death his eldest son, William David Leigh, while on a Mormon mission in Wales in 1888-90 often visited this sister Anne and her two daughters who remained in Wales.

Samuel continued in the St Louis area from December 1875 to March 1876, then embarked for Britain on 21 March 1876 and arrived in Merthyr Tydfil on April 5. Though his journal is not detailed, he summarizes his travels through South Wales with other missionaries until October 1876 when, as he writes, “the Presidency of the Welch Confrance fell on my shoulders . … had about 20 Branchis to visit once every month” (p.26). Samuel also traveled extensively in other parts of Wales and to Liverpool in England.
 
Interestingly, Samuel wrote reports on the status of the Welsh church which were published in The Millennial Star, a Mormon journal published in Britain from 1840 on. They are presumably in the Welsh language and I have not seen them, but they are cited by Douglas James Davies in his book Mormon Spirituality: Latter Day Saints in Wales and Zion (Nottingham, ?1987). In a section on economic hard times in Wales, Davies says: “Samuel Leigh writes from Merthyr to explain that some branches have broken up simply because of this enforced mobility [seeking jobs away from home], whilst others are depleted to the point of non-viability through emigration” (p.33). Elsewhere Davies writes of Merthyr in 1877, the last year of Samuel’s mission: “Depression in the iron trade compelled many men to move away in search of work and this, as Samuel Leigh reported at the time, caused many lively branches to be broken up. Of the six hundred and thirty members in Wales, thirty emigrated by July of that year” (p.39).

[Note: information about Elder Samuel Leigh, as a missionary, was posted to familysearch.org by descendants of another missionary to Wales. The link was sent to Allen Leigh by his daughter, Tova Leigh Choate. Search on the name Leigh to find references to Samuel Leigh]

Samuel returned to Utah and lived seventeen years longer. His mission work shows that he had organizational ability and leadership qualities, and a local historian who remembered Samuel from his own boyhood called him “a gentle, kindly, refined old gentleman whom the community held in highest respect.” His Welsh brogue was so strong that it “made him one of the town characters whom the wags loved to mimic. But the laughs were always in the words and never in the ideas, for Samuel Leigh was a sound and solid thinker and a man whose wisdom was highly esteemed.” Physically, in appearance he was “a bewhiskered old gentleman of stocky build, slow of motion, very earnest of thought and speech” (William R. Palmer, typewritten copy of his series of speeches Men You Should Know given on 18 July 1943. This speech is available online via a link in the Research Files).

Our picture of Samuel's life is enlarged and clarified by our knowledge that he refused to participate in the most tragic event in Cedar City history, the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre in September, 1857.  By his refusal Samuel protected his own young sons and perhaps his young brother-in-law William Treharne from possible involvement, and he became known as one of the "clean" residents who was appointed to an important church position for the next eighteen years.  For details see Pronunciation of the name "Leigh"

Samuel Leigh died on 13 July 1894 after a painful illness and is buried in the old part of the Cedar City Cemetery not far from the red and yellow sandstone wall.

Cedar City in 1890 Photograph courtesy Special Collections, Sherratt Library, SUU

Early Cedar City, probably around 1910-1920. Photograph courtesy Giovale Library, Westminster College