Sharing our Links to the Past by

SOURCE:
Biography of Francis Marion Lyman 1840-1916
Apostle 1880-1916
by Albert R. Lyman
Edited, Printed and Published by Melvin A. Lyman, M. D.
Delta, Utah, 1958

by Richard R. Lyman, her eldest child, age 87

March 14, 1958

Clara Caroline Callister Lyman was born in Salt Lake City, April 18, 1850, a little less than three years after the first Mormon Pioneers came into the Salt Lake Valley. Her father, Thomas Callister, was born July 8, 1821, on the Isle of Man. He heard the gospel preached by President John Taylor in 1840 and was baptized in March 1841. Her mother, Caroline Clara Smith Callister, was the only sister of President George A. Smith who was Church Historian and a counselor to President Brigham Young. She was born in Potsdam, New York, June 6, 1820 and she was a cousin to the Prophet Joseph Smith.

She and Thomas Callister were married in Nauvoo, Illinois, August 31, 1845. Together they shared all the hardships of the Saints including being driven from Nauvoo after the death of the Prophet and his brother Hyrum when they were killed in the Carthage Jail June 27, 1844. They crossed the plains in the company that followed the original pioneers, arriving in Salt Lake Valley, September 25, 1847.

Eight children were born to this pioneer couple. But since the mother had been crippled since childhood, she consequently found privations and sufferings of pioneer life unusually hard to bear. This was a contributing factor to the loss of the first five of their eight children, these children all dying in infancy. Of the three living to maturity, Clara was the oldest and naturally the motherly burdens of the family and housework rested largely on her shoulders. She did most of the work and the other two girls went to school.

Thomas Callister had two wives and two homes in Salt Lake City, one located on 1st West St. near North Temple St. and the other on a ranch approximately one mile north of North Temple St. on Redwood Road. The children went barefooted much of the time during those pioneer days. When going to the ranch home they went west on North Temple street to the Jordan River then diagonally through the fields to the ranch. They complained vigorously because on that diagonal road they got so many burrs in their bare feet.

On that ranch Clara did every kind of work that the early pioneers had to do. She was a master at planting seeds, doing the irrigating and the cultivating of a fine family garden. She milked the cows, made the butter, the cottage and even other kinds of cheese. She carded the wool, and ran the spinning wheel, she fed, hitched drove and unhitched the horses. She was so expert in handling horses that one of the outstanding ambitions of her whole life, although it was never realized, was to have a horse and buggy of her own.

On October 4, 1869, Clara, at the age of 19, married Francis M. Lyman in the Endowment House, in Salt Lake City, and she was taken to Fillmore where he provided for her a small log house which was located across the road west from the old rock school house which was located in the south west corner of the Public Square.

Home in Fillmore was a very happy place. Clara’s mother, Aunt Caroline (Smith Callister) was living there, and living with her were her two younger, but mature and scholarly daughters, Philomela, who died unmarried at age 27, and Mary Miranda.

Clara’s father, Thomas Callister, owned a large apple orchard located in the deep canyon through which Chalk Creek runs. The fruit was of unusual excellence because the sun’s rays heated the stones in that valley during the day and then the warm stones warmed and ripened the apples during the early cool or cold nights.

Richard R. Lyman relates the following: “Grandfather gave us all of the delicious apples we could use. I made my own little frames for drying the apples that I had prepared for the market. Then when I had my apples all ready to take to the store my marvelous mother had me sit on the floor by her knee while she taught me my first gospel lesson and one of the most important gospel lessons I have ever learned. She said: “One-tenth of our apples you must give to the Lord for your tithing.” The Lord, said I, what has the Lord had to do with my apples? As a result of her teaching, however, I marched through the sagebrush to the Public Square and took one-tenth of my apples to the tithing office. That lesson I have never forgotten nor has God the Eternal Father ever forgotten me. With no salary and no business for the last fifteen years this Great Provider has certainly “opened the windows of heaven” and He has poured out upon me may marvelous, greatly needed and greatly appreciated blessings.

The three children of Clara Lyman who were born in her little log home in Fillmore can never forget the large fireplace and the large chimney of that home. Nor can they ever forget the vivid pictures both in reality and in the imagination which that genuinely angelic mother created especially at Christmas time. Surely, to these three children no heavenly view can ever be more thrilling than were the three stockings hung by the chimney so gleefully and confidently, the night before, and perfectly filled with Christmas delicacies and surprises. To those three children, the joy and gladness of many such situations in that little log house, can never be surpassed.

When, in 1873, Francis M. Lyman was called for the second time to go to England on another mission for the Church, he made arrangements with the Co-op Store in Fillmore for his wife Clara to purchase and to have charged to his account whatever she needed for the maintenance of herself and her two little children, one an infant, the other nearly three years old. Clara was so able, wise, and thrifty that by her own efforts, she provided for herself and her two children during the two years her husband was on his mission without charging anything whatever to his account at the store.

Francis M. Lyman was called to be President of the Tooele Stake in 1877. He moved Clara and her children from Fillmore to Tooele in the spring of 1879. Clara, like her father, Thomas Callister, was a great maker of friends. Her devotion, affection and fondness for the friends she made in Fillmore during the ten years she lived there are all clearly expressed in two letters she wrote to her closest neighbor, Mrs. Mary Starley. These two letters have recently been turned over to the family by Rulon S. Starly, an Ogden banker, who is a grandson of Mary Starley.

The first letter is dated Tooele, Utah, February 12, 1880. The letter covers four pages of short sentences, every sentence of which conveys an interesting message. Among many other things she says: “I have quite a comfortable house here, not a very nice one, but we have plenty of room.” She concludes: “I often think of you and Brother Starley and your many kindnesses. Give our kind regards to him and to John and Betsy. I hope to come to Fillmore angain some day and when I do I shall see you the very first day I get there. I seldom write a letter and then only to those I love. Your friend, Clara Lyman.”

Tooele, May 16, 1880, she writes another interesting four pages of short sentences. The following are a few of her words: “We have moved into a great big house. I told Sadie when she gets home she must tell you all about it. * * * Mother was with me six months. We had such a good time togther. * * * Dear Sister Starley, I see you often in my sleep. I cannot begin to tell you how I long to see you in reality. * * * I expect to bring all the children to see you some day. * * * You must excuse all the mistakes. The children make such a noise and disturbance that I hardly know how or what I write. Love, Clara.” Enclosed and tied with a little blue ribbon was a lock of Lucy’s hair for Sister Starley. Enclosed in the former letter was a lovely little valentine. Under the picture of a beautiful baby girl are printed the words, “Forget me not.” In Clara’s had writing on the back it says: “From you little friend Lucy to Aunty Starley.”

About six years later, near the fall of 1888, when the United States government was prosecuting most intensely those who were practicing plural marriage, Clara Lyman being a second wife, she with her two year old son Don and five of her other children, were snet to Manassa, Colorado “on the underground.” Of her experiences in Manassa we shall mention but two. First she was made President of the Primary Organization. Since she was a master seamstress she not only created great interest in the work by teaching the children sewing, but she furnished the material with which they did their work. Next, in the fall of 1891, her son Richard made his first trip to see his mother and the other children in Manassa. He was on his way to attend college at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

When his visit was over and they were all climbing into the “white top” to take Richard several miles back to his train, his mother noticed as he was putting on his old coat for a long trip in a day coach, that the lining in one sleeve was torn. At once, out of the wagon she climbed, got her needle and thread, and repaired that coat as they rode. As the train came in sight she gave him a tight hug and a farewell kiss with these words, which he never forgot: “Good bye my son. I hope this is all for the best. God bless you.” That is the last time Richard ever saw his mother alive. He came from Ann Arbor to attend her funeral in Tooele, Utah. She died September 22, 1892, and her baby boy Don, then six years old, died two days later. She had suffered with an ulcerated stomach for many years. While lifting and otherwise caring for her strapping son Done, who was desperately ill, she ruptured her ailing stomach and died in great distress vomiting great quantities of blood. She and her baby were buried in the same grave.

With great regularity this mother got her children together both morning and evening for family prayers. She did most of the praying herself. Her prayers were much like gospel sermons. Her son Richard, oldest of her seven children, often went to work away from home. He remembers with great clearness that when he was leaving home in the early morning she would get his breakfast ready before the other children were awake. She always had two chairs, one for him an done for herself, with their backs to the table. He insists that no one ever offered more impressive or more effective prayers than his mother offered on such occasions. Her prayerful appeal on one occasion in particular was so effective that when a group of sheep shearers with whom he was working, undertook to compel him to smoke and drink a glass of the beer that had been brought to the camp in a keg, he had the good sense and the blessed ability to resist that great temptation. While death has separated this son from that mother for sixty-six years, and to him mind that long separation may have magnified her virtues, yet that son, now eighty-seven years plus, insists that in his marvelous mother he was never able to see an imperfection.