John Halliday and the Church in Wiltshire
John Halliday’s name appears on several documents relating to the Church in Wiltshire in the middle of the nineteenth century. Born in Trowbridge in 1819, he was the oldest child of Stephen and Jane Halliday. In 1836 he emigrated to America. Sometime between 1836 and 1842 he was baptised a member of the Church.
Sometime in 1844 John was sent back to Britain as a missionary, bringing his wife, Emily, and their youngest child with him. They would remain in Britain until the spring of 1850.
Two main sources provide information on John’s activities during those years: the Millennial Star and records from Salisbury Diocese, which detail applications to register ‘dissenter’ places of worship. ‘Dissenters’ were any denomination other than the Church of England.
The following applications were made by John Halliday to register places of worship in Wiltshire: [Table 1 Inserted as image)
Steeple Ashton was something of a stronghold of the Church in the mid-nineteenth century, as shown by the number of different locations registered for worship, and several histories have been written about the village residents who converted.1 As the list also shows, meeting places were most commonly family homes, particularly in villages. Many of the early converts emigrated, so by the end of the century most of the branches had been disbanded and no purpose-built Church meetinghouses are known to have existed in Wiltshire until the twentieth century.
John Halliday made the applications to register places of worship for the Church because of the leadership role he held in the area during his missionary service. Halliday was responsible for a total membership of 350 spread across eleven congregations, in three counties.
In May 1848 Halliday reported continuing success in a letter to Orson Spencer, then president of the British LDS mission. The letter was printed in the Star:
“Indeed I have never travelled so much and preached so often with so much satisfaction since my arrival in England; and what is better, I have never felt in better spirits for the battle, either in-doors or out in the public Market-place.“2
In October of the same year, he also reported:
“Large additions have been made to the kingdom of our God. I think we have baptized since conference over 100, and the elders and officers feel ripe and ready for the harvesting.”3
The work of John Halliday and his fellow missionaries, with the associated growth in Church membership, did not go unnoticed or unopposed. Writing to Franklin D. Richards (1821–1899) in December 1847, Halliday stated, “Since I wrote last to you, the officers of the law have interfered in our behalf, and last week we had quietness again,”4 showing that opposition was serious enough for Church members to seek police protection to be able to worship as they pleased.
John Halliday was central to the mission and growth of the Church in Wiltshire in the mid-nineteenth century. He was evidently a man of faith and conviction, and was willing to put that conviction to work, to help spread the good news of the restored gospel which he and his wife and brother had embraced. He was still a young man when he died, but we can say with some certainty that a wish he expressed in May 1848 was fulfilled: “My prayer to God is, that I may continue faithful.”5