Memphis, Tennessee History The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has had a presence in the mid-south since at least 1834. In the Memphis area the first known sermon by an ordained member of the Church was delivered 27 March 1835 by a young priest, Wilford Woodruff, who later became the fourth President of the Church. Assigned to Arkansas and Tennessee, Elder Woodruff walked 170 miles from Little Rock through mud and water along an old military trail to arrive in Memphis, tired and hungry. Arrangements were made with a local tavern keeper for Elder Woodruff to preach in return for food and lodging. Elder Woodruff later wrote that about 500 well-to-do people turned out to hear him. The missionary effort was most active around Little Rock, Arkansas, as well as northeastern Mississippi, with numerous baptisms being reported in the mid 1830s. Missionary life was difficult for the early missionaries. Paying their own way (as they do today), they traveled with suitcase in hand, preaching and boarding where they could. In addition to surviving the elements, they faced mobs that threatened, chased, tarred, and sometimes beat them. Missionaries stayed in an area for a few weeks and then moved to the next community. Conversions were slow, but as baptisms occurred, families banded together to form a nucleus for Church meetings. The state of Tennessee had many converts who migrated to Missouri late in 1836, where Latter-day Saints from around the world were building a community on the frontier. Driven from that area by religious prejudice in the winter of 1837-38, the main Church body built up a new community at Nauvoo, Illinois. But by 1845 they were being forced from their homes once again and onto the historic "Mormon Trail" to the Rocky Mountains. A group known in Church history as the "Mississippi Saints" left for the distant Salt Lake Valley from Mormon Springs (near Aberdeen), Monroe County, Mississippi, in April of 1846, under the direction of Tennesseean John Brown. The Mississippi Saints became the first since the Spanish friars of 1769 to establish a religious colony in the West, at Pueblo, Colorado. Many of these early converts were marvelous frontiersmen, resourceful colonizers, and shrewd traders. Because of their abilities, nearly all of them were eventually called to lead Latter-day Saint colonies to Colorado, Utah, California, Oregon, and other areas of the West. They were valiant in their love of God, their prophet, and their religion. They helped lead the colonization by Latter-day Saint pioneers of much of the western United States. An article published in the March 1934 edition of the Commercial Appeal titled "Mormons in Memphis" relates: "One hundred-thirty 'saints,' as the Mormons are called today, conduct their own form of worship at their little chapel at 727 Barrett Place. Some 300 men and women have been baptized here since 1901. Never attaining a size larger than its present number, because of the continuous migrations westward, the congregation worships here in comparative obscurity." Today, however, clearly the most reliable measure of the growth of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the mid-South is the Memphis Tennessee Temple, a symbol of dynamic faith that has deep roots in the soil of the South.