HISTORIC MORMON SITES

Narrator: Wm. Stinson, 73, Hamilton, Missouri

Fifty years ago Mr. Stinson used to be very familiar with the historic Haun's Mill site in Fairview township, for his fathers home north west of the present city of Braymer gave him a riding range over the county where the ill-fated mill once stood. He said that Shoal Creek where he played was about a town block's distance from the mill site. Old timers told him there had been a store, a blacksmith shop and a few houses there once. About thirty feet from the shop was supposed to be the well into which the eighteen (18) dead Mormons were buried by their people after the Gentile attack in the Mormon War. This attack was made on this place 1838. All these things were still matters of talk as the boys swam in the Shoal swimming hole nearly sixty years ago.

The well then was covered with split timbers and crossed with others. It was in a wood lot and the pile of wood was pointed out to him as the spot of the well. There seemed to be no doubt of the site then.

He used to hear that the first burials in the White Cemetery (an old graveyard) were made by the Mormons down in that section near the Mill. He also had the idea that they had graves in a graveyard (perhaps without stones) on the Mud Creek in Davis Township. The Mormon ford was south and a little west of the Mill.

Fifty years ago in that section people still nursed hatred for the Mormons and when they wished to threaten a person they would say: "I'll send you where the other Mormons are buried."