The Wisconsin (Updated 11/1/09

"Wisconsin”

The Wisconsin was a single screw (propeller) steamship with a shipping tonnage of 3238 tons and was 378 feet long and 43 feet wide. It was built in 1870 by Palmer's Shipbuilding & Iron Co. at Jarrow-on-Tyne, England.

More than eighty-eight hundred Mormons were transported from Liverpool to New York aboard this British steamer. The thirty-three emigrant companies ranged in size from 7 to 976, the first sailing on 31 July 1872 and the last on 11 October, 1890. The passages averaged eleven days. During these voyages the following captains commanded the vessel: Thomas W. Freeman, William Forsyth, Edward Bentley, Charles Leonard Rigby, Thomas Dunn, and John P. Morrall.

This three-decked Guion Line steamship's home port was Liverpool. She was built with an iron hull, two masts, one funnel, and the earliest compound engines used in the transatlantic service. Her tonnage was later increased to 3700. She was the sister ship of the Wyoming. In 1893 the Wisconsin was scrapped.

The Emigration

"Come To Zion!" (As written by LaMar Mills)

The call, "Come to Zion!", "Flee Babylon!", "Build the Kingdom!" was heard throughout the Church in Europe beginning in the early 1850s. What was it that really convinced our ancestors to come to America? What were conditions really like in England during this time? Why would a family desire to leave their home of generations to travel to a new and strange land?
In my search I came across a book called "Expectations Westward", written by Taylor. He had gathered a tremendous amount of information on this subject that is far too detailed to repeat here, but I'll try to bring out some pertinent facts that will make experiences of our ancestors more interesting and believable to us all. I will never try to convince my readers that I speak with great authority or understanding but only that I have a sincere desire to learn more about my ancestors. If I had had this enthusiasm for history in college and I might not have suffered such a great loss in my GPA. But here I share with you my meager findings.
In 1872 when George Mills and his small family emigrated from Sussex County, England Victoria had been queen of England for about 35 years. It was a time when religious freedom was sought by most everyone. It was a time of change in the way people worked and played. What was known as the Victorian Golden Age had

begun to grow weaker and industrial expansion in England was slowing down. Unions had been formed to protect the workers in the large cities and common men in the rural areas were banding together to buy and distribute produce and consumer goods among themselves on a large scale. The rural class was expanding and growing though the country was on the brink of a financial crisis that was to touch both England and America.
Everyone was looking for new opportunities and the Church was there to provide it with promises of a better life, spiritually and physically.
The words that seemed to be most common among the early missionaries was that Mormon converts were to flee from "Babylon", which was doomed in some early future to suffer God's punishment, and gather to Zion, which would give them not only safety but also a positive role in building the Kingdom. The Millenial Star (the forerunner of our Ensign ) printed numerous reports and letters from leaders of immigrant companies and even from ordinary immigrants writing to their relatives who had remained in Britain. The main purpose of The Millenial Star was to keep Zion firmly in their minds. It printed numerous reports and articles describing conditions in Utah, devel¬opments in communications, proceedings of conferences, movements of the Church leaders. The articles were

sweetened with comments like, "vegetation flourishes with magical rapidity. And the food of man, or staff of life, leaps into maturity from the bowels of mother earth with astonishing celerity....This great basin is adequate to sustain many millions of people." (Millenial Star, x,40-l [1 Feb, 1848])
With the rapid expansion of the settlement of Utah, under Church planning, meant that many laborers were needed. "We have got a nation to raise, cities to build, and temples to erect." (Millenial Star, xii.358 [1 Dec. 1850])
The preamble to the law incorporating the Perpetual Emigrating Fund Company contrasted the "unremitting toil" of the "poor and oppressed!" of Europe, whose work was "insufficient to procure even the most common necessaries of life," with life in Utah, "a more genial soil...a place where labor and industry meet their due reward." In Britain, workers lived in "poverty and...refined yet cruel slavery...free to starve, and the willing toiler free to beg, and often to beg in vain for the privelege to toil;" (Dale L. Morgan, "The State of Deseret," Utah Historical Quarterly, viii [1940], p. 187.)
It was no wonder that some 55,000 British Mormons emigrated between 1840 and 1890.