This story was posted on the Facebook page of She Shall Be an Ensign a while ago – which resulted in something special, reported below. Now I have discovered a tribute to Eliza published in Liahona, the Elders’ Journal. It’s time to bring her story to Keepa.

Eliza Stapleton Woollacott (1831-1910) came from England in 1850 and settled in Salt Lake City’s 14th Ward. She married Henry Woollacott in 1857, a plural wife, and began to raise a family.

We know from historical records that Eliza remained a faithful member of the Church all her days, but those records don’t tell us how she felt when her family left the Church. Her husband, who had worked as a stonecutter on Temple Square, began trading in wines and liquors, and was soon joined by their oldest son, Henry John, when he was still just a boy. Their liquor business became so successful that father and son decided to establish themselves in the boomtown of Los Angeles in the early 1880s. You have to think this must have been hard on Eliza, but she stayed with her family, moving to Los Angeles in the summer of 1884.

There was no branch of the Church in Los Angeles, not even a single missionary. Still, there were Church members who came to Los Angeles from time to time, and Eliza made them welcome in her home. She took to her pen, writing letters to Salt Lake asking for missionaries to come. They hadn’t come by the time she was widowed in 1888. Eliza kept writing … and she must have been overjoyed when two elders were assigned to Los Angeles in 1892.

The elders made her home their headquarters, and as they began teaching, Eliza welcomed their investigators and then their converts. Her home served as the branch meeting place for several years. Her son, who became one of Los Angeles’s first millionaires, no longer claimed to be a Latter-day Saint – but Eliza kept him friendly to the Church and its members. When the son toured England in 1900, he stopped at mission headquarters there to buy the finest available edition of the combined Book of Mormon and Doctrine and Covenants to take home as a gift for Eliza.

When Eliza died in 1910, she was buried in Los Angeles with a fine monument – and her son also raised a similarly fine stone to her memory in the Salt Lake City Cemetery.

That was posted in June last year. In August, this happened:

This is a picture of the Mormon past becoming the Mormon present, a picture of a Mormon woman of today remembering and honoring the contributions of a Mormon woman of more than a century ago.

In June I posted about Eliza Stapleton Woollacott, the Latter-day Saint woman who had moved to Southern California in the 1880s, whose home became the center of LDS activity – headquarters for the missionaries, the meeting place for a fledgling branch – in the 1890s and 19-aughts. If you’re from Los Angeles, Eliza is your pioneer, the woman who did so much to bring the Church there.

When Rachel Evans Davis – like Eliza, a Southern California transplant – realized that Eliza’s burial place was within reach of her own home, she drove to the Angelus Rosedale Cemetery. With the help of caretakers who, she says “were very helpful, though surprised, to see me,” Rachel located Eliza’s grave and took pictures. She notes the brownness of the cemetery due to watering restrictions, but brightened the spot with a bunch of jacarandas.

The jacaranda, Rachel tells me, is a flowering tree that Eliza may very well have known and appreciated. It was popularized in the region by another woman, Kate Sessions, a Berkeley-educated horticulturist who spread the trees so widely that in 1912, two years after Eliza’s death, an account in the Los Angeles Times noted that “a Southern Californian would still know that it was wonderful to be alive merely for the jacaranda.” Surely Rachel is right – Eliza would have seen the gorgeous purple-blue blossoming trees that became such a fixture in Los Angeles during her life.

There is something particularly warm and sisterly when a living woman remembers a woman from the past and makes a tangible effort to make a personal connection. This is the second time I’m aware of a friend of this project making a special trip to take flowers to the grave of a long-gone sister. Thank you, Eliza, for your contributions to the Church, and thank you, Rachel, for remembering those contributions and the woman who made them.

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And the tribute from Liahona, published 27 September 1910:

Death of Sister Woollacott.

At the home of her daughter, Mrs. Winnifred Weimer, funeral services were held over the remains of Sister Eliza Woollacott. President Jos. E. Robinson presided at the services and spoke of the stalwart fight made in the defense of right by the deceased and of her generous spirit in giving of her time and material assistance to all with whom she came in contact. Music was furnished for the occasion by Elders and Saints here.

Sister Woollacott was born in Bedford, England, seventy-nine years ago. In early life she became a member of the church, and emigrated to Utah, traveling overland by ox-team and walking for a period of three months until the Great Salt Lake Valley was reached.

For thirty years she, with her husband, henry Woollacott, were residents of Salt Lake City. Brother Woollacott was a stone-cutter and spent 25 years working on the Salt Lake Temple. In 1884 they moved to Los Angeles.

As soon as missionaries were sent into this city they found a welcome home with the Woollacotts. For years the few saints were furnished a place of meeting at their home, and later a small hall was provided at their expense. Soon a ladies’ Relief Society was organized with Sister Woollacott as its president. Many needy have been relieved and suffering cared for by her patient motherly love.

Sister Woollacott was titled the mother of the Los Angeles branch of which she and her husband, who has some time since preceded her to the Great Beyond, were the founders. She has made many trips to Salt Lake since leaving there, where she has done a great deal of temple work, also at least one trip to England to gather genealogy. Many an elder and saint who has been in this city will remember the kind acts of the departed to them.