Jaraguá, Brazil (now Jaraguá do Sul, renamed to distinguish it from another Brazilian city named Jaraguá) is a city in the state of Santa Catarina. It’s a good sized city now of about 150,000 population. In 1936, it had about 35,000 residents, largely but not entirely of German ethnicity. It was an industrial city, and its citizens attended several Catholic and Protestant churches.

Three Latter-day Saint elders – Henry Hunger and Matthias Mertlich, both 23, and Harold Rex, 21 – worked in Jaraguá in 1936, and they were quite successful. The Saints had a meeting house, with rooms in the back where the Elders lived, and sometimes the elders rented a public hall a short distance down the road which could seat more people than the meeting house, and where they felt visitors might feel more comfortable listening to their public lectures than in an actual church. The elders advertized their lectures with public posts, with notices in the newspaper, and by word of mouth, and the response was usually good. Large groups of citizens came to hear … despite the attendance being vociferously discouraged by other clergymen in town.

The young missionaries had the use of that hall on the night of September 5th, where they planned to give a lecture on the Book of Mormon, illustrated by colored slides featuring Central and South American ruins. The basic lecture had been developed in English in Utah and translated into German in Argentina (where much of the proselyting work was still being conducted in German). Elders throughout the Brazilian Mission had found it a popular lecture and a good way to make friends and find investigators.

The Elders were preparing the hall for their lecture that evening, when a police officer ran in and told the young men to pack up and get out of the hall as quickly as they could. They did so, barely in time. A mob, which they estimated to be at least 250, although fear and surprise may have exaggerated its size in their minds, approached, shouting and throwing stones and eggs at the elders, who ran as quickly a they could down the road toward their quarters. In their haste, they dropped some of their belongings, breaking several of their glass slides and damaging their projector.

The mob pursued as the young men reached their meeting hall, and were so close on their heels that the elders couldn’t unlock the door and get inside before they would have been surrounded. Instead, they ran around the side of the building into a vacant lot and hid themselves in a clump of banana trees, dropping to their knees to pray for their safety. “the mob seemed to immediately disperse,” they reported to their mission president as soon as possible, “yelling threats that we must leave town before morning or would suffer the consequences.”

So rattled were the elders that they did flee Jaraguá that night, in an automobile loaned to them by a non-Mormon friend.

As soon as he learned of the incident, the elders’ District President (I have not yet found his name) went to Jaraguá to speak with the police there. The police were willing and anxious to protect the Mormons as well as anyone else; the mob had taken them by surprise that night, leaving only enough time to give their urgent warning before they could muster enough men to calm and disperse the crowd. They told the District President that the priest of the town’s chief Catholic church was very bitter against the Mormons, warning that “no one, especially the Mormons, would lead his sheep astray.” They went with the Mormon leader to call on the priest, who indeed was very angry, but perhaps a little startled by the violent reaction of his “sheep” to his protests. With further prodding, and the assistance of the police over the following days, the priest sent word indirectly to the mission leaders that he would cause no more trouble for the elders, as long as they confined their lectures to the Mormon meeting hall and did not attempt to address the public in a rented hall. Of course he had no right to restrict the elders’ activities that way, but the Mormons sensed that the man was trying to compromise.

Mission President Rulon S. Howells pulled the three elders who had been working there out of Jaraguá, for their own peace of mind and as a bit of compromise of his own, but he immediately assigned other elders to take their place. He also visited Jaraguá from time to time over the next months, monitoring the mood of the town and preparing to remove the elders if he sensed any real danger.

For the time being, those elders confined their lectures and sermons to the Mormon hall. “Many friends have been gained,” the new elders reported, “because of the unjust action.”

Today, a cluster of five wards makes up the São Paulo Brazil Jaraguá Stake.

Edit: I got caught by that two-Jaraguás trap, even though I had fair warning. Mark B. has done some checking and tells me that the stake I identified is the one in the *other* Jaraguá, not Jaraguá do Sul. He writes, “Jaragua do Sul is just outside of Joinville, and is part of the Joinville Brazil Stake. There are two wards that share the name Jaragua do Sul 1st and 2nd, and it appears that each of them cover part of that city and a swath of the surrounding countryside.”