They must have traveled to Crittenden by way of the Flynn's Ferry Road, as the little Oakland school house/church was located on that road. (It was located near the corner of S. R. 654 S and the Cave Spring Church Rd. )
Oct. 6, 1891 - Mormon Missionaries
Last week the Press
learned that a meeting of Morman preachers was to be held at Oakland,
and a reporter was dispatched to that place to learn something of
these wanderers and of their work.
Oakland is a neat little
frame church house about seven miles east of Marion. It was built by
the Universalists some sixteen years ago, after a time the builders
became somewhat disorganized and now the doors are open to whatsoever
sect that chooses to use it properly for the the worship of God.
This fact probably drew
the Mormon preachers to friendly portals for the purpose of talking
over the effect of their law in Kentucky and Tennessee. The business
meeting Saturday was attended by seven of these missionaries and as
they evidently preferred to be alone on that occasion, they were not
intruded upon.
They were all from Utah
and have been traveling and preaching over Kentucky and Tennessee.
Wherever they find the people friendly enough to listen, they preach,
and whenever they find that a community prefers “their room to
their company” they “fold their tent like Arabs and as quietly
steal away.”
It soon became known
abroad in the neighborhood that these itinerants would preach on
Sunday, accordingly a large number gathered to hear them.
Three discourses were
made by as many discoursers, each more or less along the same line,
and permit the writer to say, that they said some mighty good things.
They took no text from
the Bible, but their discourses were not wild nor scattering, but
were confined mainly to three things, namely Faith, Repentance and
Baptism.
The congregation
listened to these things patiently and not with disapproval, but
wanted to here about some other doctrines of the “Latter day
Saints, that of a plurality of wives, for instance.
One of the preachers,
who appeared to be higher in ecclesiastical authority than the
others, seemed to anticipate our wants, and he took the stand and
said that they used to teach polygamy, allowing a man to have more
than one wife, if he was able to support more than one, but now as
the laws of the country forbid it, they no longer taught nor
practiced it, as they believed in being subservient to the laws of
the country in which they lived.
They thanked the
congregation for its attention and, leaving a sharp sprinkle of their
literature behind, they departed for other fields.
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