“I shall never forget,” George Madison Fielder wrote as a 12-year-old, “the evening two Mormon Elders came to our home. They were Joseph A. Cornwall and Thomas Palmer. We granted them shelter with the best of feelings and kindness. I am now a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, for I was baptized Oct. 3, 1901, by Elder John H. Watson and confirmed by Elder James Newman. I have learned much since that time, though I have not learned my letters yet in the Gospel.”
Those are mature words for a 12-year-old, aren’t they? George had had to mature early. Both of his parents had already died by the time he met the missionaries, and he was living with his grandparents in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, when he was baptized. By the time he was 18, George appealed to the courts to become an emancipated minor, able to buy property and marry and conduct his other affairs as an adult, without the supervision of a guardian; that emancipation was granted.
More of his testimony:
I am sure that my guardian angel protects me. Would to God that the world could see as I do and would teach the children those principles of the Gospel as my dear grandpapa and grandmamma have taught me!
I wish to bear my testimony that Christ built his church upon the rock of revelation and that revelation is necessary. If it required a revelation for the Apostle Peter to bear witness that Jesus was the Christ, it will require revelation for every person to bear the same testimony. I have a testimony that the world cannot take from me. I know that Joseph Smith was a Prophet of God. That the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the true church of Christ.
I hope some day to be able to go forth and bear my testimony to the world.
Our door is always open to the Elders for we like to have them come.
I have not been able to confirm that George retained his connection to the Church as an adult. I know he married and raised children, and I’ve found this photograph of him as an adult. He died too young, at age 50. Still, whether he retained that testimony of the Gospel through life or not, or whether he lost contact with the Church or whether his activity simply doesn’t show up in the usual places I research, George was one of us at one time, in a time and place where there were few members, and as a child he was touched by and responded to the same spirit that all Latter-day Saints know.
Can you please point me to the source of this? I have been researching the early years of the Louisiana Conference for a few years now and have apparently missed this account.
My great-grandfather was baptized two days before young Mr. Fielding, by Elders Frederick H. Critchfield (then conference president) and William S. Berrett. In May 1901, my great-grandmother was baptized by Elder Berrett and Elder John H. Watson confirmed her. That opened the flood-gates; a couple months after baptizing my great-grandmother, Elders Berrett and Watson returned to our uncharted spot on the bayou and found a total of ten persons applying for baptism. My great-grandmother is remembered among her many descendants as being the family “matriarch” at the time; her baptism sanctioned these others, all of whom were part of our same family “clan”; Elder Watson baptized most on this occasion, including two of my grandfather’s brothers, one of his sisters, some cousins, and spouses.
The same thing happened twice more that year; again with Watson and Berrett c. August 1901, and again with Critchfield and Berrett October 1901. The latter two baptized more than a dozen, I believe; and again, over 80% of the baptisms in our parish that year were family. In October 1901 an uncharacteristic note was even written in the mission record about their baptisms.
In less than twelve months, our sparsely-populated, (then) impossible to travel to, and mosquito-infested swamp made up one of the largest Mormon congregations in Louisiana, and I believe their familial ties quickly caused Mormonism to become part of their cultural and within two decades even ancestral, self-identity.
My great-grandparents had first met the Elders in 1898; the year before they were even baptized, they donated the large church-like house where they had raised 12 children to adulthood to the Elders and built a new house on an adjacent acre of land. In subsequent missionary journals the elders refer to this building as the Mormon Meetinghouse, the “Latter-day Saint Chapel,” and William S. Berrett even liked to call it the “Mormon Tabernacle.”
I am eager to see Mr. Fielding’s account! His area in Natchitoches Parish (where the state’s first Sunday School was established since Louisiana was opened to missionary work in 1895) is also a rural area (near communities that were called “Red Rock” or “Vowell’s Mill,” today remembered only by rural road signs), and at the close of 1901 it was likely the only location in Louisiana with a larger LDS population than had the D’Arbonne Bayou where I grew up.
Joseph, young Mr. Fielder wrote a letter to the editor of the Deseret News — I am sending you an image of that printed letter, together with the citation.
Thank you so much for all the wonderful detail you include in your comment. I really appreciate your willingness to share, and not just to seek a source. The years you write about are exactly the same ones my own family was joining the Church elsewhere in the South (Alabama), and you write about a place about which we know very little in Church history. Thank you, thank you!