"What Comes Next for Willing Hands to Do?"


Lucy Meserve Smith, led a group of Latter-day Saint women in Provo, Utah. She and other sisters responded to calls to help Latter-day Saints who arrived in Utah. At the October 1856 general conference, President Brigham Young announced that handcart pioneers were stranded hundreds of miles away. ...

Sister Smith recorded, “Women stripped off their petticoats [large underskirts that were part of the fashion of the day and that also provided warmth], stockings, and every thing they could spare, right there in the Tabernacle, and piled [them] into the wagons to send to the Saints in the mountains.”

They continued to gather bedding and clothing for Saints who would arrive with only a few belongings in small handcarts, gathering clothing and bedding from their own meager supplies until all were made comfortable. 

“I never took more satisfaction and, I might say, pleasure in any labor I ever performed in my life, such a unanimity of feeling prevailed.” After they had done all they could to help the handcart pioneers, Lucy Meserve Smith’s words expressed the feelings of their hearts: “What comes next for willing hands to do?”

Source: Daughters in His Kingdom: The History and Work of Relief Society, 2017, pg. 36-37 

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