Agreement with Ebenezer and Elender Moore Wiggins, 14 May 1841
Source Note
and Elender Moore Wiggins, Agreement, with JS, , Hancock Co., IL, 14 May 1841; handwriting of JS; signature of ; mark of Elender Moore Wiggins; one page; JS Collection (Supplement), CHL. Includes notations and docket.
Single leaf, measuring 13 × 8 inches (33 × 20 cm) and ruled horizontally with thirty-five blue lines. The agreement was written on the recto only. The document was folded for filing and docketed. The leaf has some separation along the folds and tearing on the outer edges.
The docket by , who served in a clerical capacity for JS from 1841 to 1842, indicates the document was retained by the office of JS in 1841. Sometime between 1974 and 1984, the document was added to the JS Collection (Supplement) at the Church Historical Department (now CHL).
See the full bibliographic entry for JS Collection (Supplement), 1833–1844, in the CHL catalog.
Historical Introduction
On 14 May 1841, JS entered an agreement to exchange property with and Elender Moore Wiggins. The Wigginses were residents and recent converts who lived just north of on a farm they acquired from and Cyril Call in 1839. The Wigginses agreed to sell JS their farm—valued at $2,700—in exchange for $1,000 in Nauvoo city property, $100 in goods, and three annual payments of $533.33 in cash.
JS wrote the agreement featured here, and signed it for himself and his wife, though Elender also marked it with an “X.” The next day, on 15 May 1841, Ebenezer Wiggins officially deeded the property to ; for unknown reasons, JS was not named on that deed, despite the agreement featured here. The agreement was filed in JS’s office, and the deed was recorded in the record book six weeks later.
Anson Call and Cyril Call joined the church in Ohio in the early 1830s. Cyril was father to Anson, and the two followed other migrating Saints to Missouri in 1838. There the Calls purchased land from Missouri residents “at the three forks of the Grand River.” The following year, the Calls sold this Missouri land, with a questionable title, to Ebenezer Wiggins. A July 1839 deed from the Calls to Wiggins specified that if the Missouri land Wiggins had purchased from the Calls did not have a good title, then Wiggins would be “entitled to a good and suficient deed” for land in section 30 of Hancock County, the farm land featured in this deed. (Call, Autobiography and Journal, 9; “Record of the Quorum of the Lesser Priesthood,” 76; Cyril Call and Anson Call to Ebenezer Wiggins, Deed, Hancock Co., IL, 25 July 1839; Ebenezer and Elender Moore Wiggins to Emma Smith, Deed, Hancock Co., IL, 15 May 1841, Hiram Kimball, Collection, CHL.)
Call, Anson. Autobiography and Journal, ca. 1857–1883. CHL. MS 313.
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Record of Members Collection, 1836–1970. CHL. CR 375 8.
Promissory notes signed by JS on 15 May 1841 reveal JS intended to pay $533.33 annually for the years 1842–1844. Although one of the three promissory notes is no longer extant, the first note includes a notation made in December 1844 indicating that some payment had been fulfilled. (JS to Ebenezer Wiggins, Promissory Notes, Nauvoo, IL, 15 May 1841, JS Collection, CHL.)