Letter: Beyond a New Meetinghouse Location, Wilton has Stronger Connection to LDS Church History in Former Resident Whose Family had Once Been Enslaved

To the Editor:

A joyous and moving ceremony took place on Saturday, Dec. 2 with the groundbreaking of the new Wilton meetinghouse for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS).

This is the first new faith institution coming to Wilton since the dedication of the Hindu Temple on Rte. 33 in south Wilton almost a decade ago. The new meetinghouse’s siting here, as with the Hindu Temple, offers a very powerful and good message about the Wilton community.  

The meetinghouse plans were under development for multiple years and required some serious negotiations both with the church’s leadership in Salt Lake City and with our own town Planning & Zoning and Architectural Review authorities. The result (after about 18 months of construction work) will be an attractive structure sitting right across from our Town Hall. As First Selectwoman Toni Boucher noted in her remarks at the ceremony, she and all of us are “here to stand with you in our community.” Speaking immediately after Toni, Brett Keller — who is Counselor to the Stake’s (LDS regional district) President — noted to much laughter from the audience and looking straight at Toni, “You keep an eye on us, and we’ll keep an eye on you!”

That cheerfully witty and joyous spirit was present throughout the ceremony, but there were also very serious reflections by adults, including LDS Bishop Brad Gibson, congregant Kristen Jacobson, and youth Adeline Francis. They spoke both of their faith and of how much having this new meetinghouse will mean to them. LDS congregants join in many church activities throughout the week, and being close to the meetinghouse makes it much easier to participate without long drives to and from meetinghouses much further away.      

LDS Stake President Todd Herget described the significance of this meetinghouse in the continuing LDS presence in Connecticut from the 1830s forward. Part of that history includes the remarkable role in the LDS faith of Jane Elizabeth Manning James. Manning was an African-American woman who was born free here in Wilton, probably around 1820. Manning’s mother was born into slavery but freed at age 21 under the 1797 revision to Connecticut’s 1784 gradual manumission statute. (Slavery was finally abolished in Connecticut only in 1848). 

Manning worked as a paid (or possibly indentured) servant locally, as recounted in Bob Russell’s masterful book, Wilton, Connecticut. Thanks to the work of Dr. Julie Hughes of the Wilton History Room of the Wilton Library and Wilton Historical Society, much information has been gathered about Manning‘s life and work in Wilton as part of her research commissioned by the Historical Society and funded by a grant from the Ambler Trust. Hughes’ detailed article on Manning appears in The Journal of Mormon History. It offers fascinating insights into the lives of Black Wiltonians generally in the first half of the 19th Century. In it, she notes that in 1840, Wilton’s population “was 2,053, of which 35 or 1.7% were Black, all free.” Earlier, Manning’s “aunts and mother were all baptized at the [Wilton] Congregational Church while still enslaved by the Abbott family.”   

Herget recounted how Manning became an early LDS convert while still living in Wilton. In 1843, she left Wilton with 22 other converts for Nauvoo, IL — in Herget’s words, “walking the 800 miles by foot, fording cold rivers and avoiding local authorities” including slave catchers who had no scruples about seizing any Black person without “free papers” (written evidence of their free status). In a sad blot on Wilton history as Hughes reports, when Manning wrote Wilton town authorities — in particular, Erastus Sturges, who knew full well of her free status — to request written confirmation of that fact, they nevertheless refused to confirm her status in writing, denying her lifesaving free papers potentially crucial to her safety from enslavement.

In 1847, Manning’s westward movement continued with fellow members of her church and her husband Isaac James whom she had met and married in Nauvoo in around 1845. They trekked 1,400 miles to the Salt Lake Valley where she lived out the rest of her life and wrote her autobiography. 

In Salt Lake City, there is today a beautiful statue of Manning with her two young children that has with it a prominently displayed summary of her life mentioning that she came from Wilton, CT. Her statue is part of a giant LDS monument of tribute to those early settlers of the city. The Wilton meetinghouse is planning to have a portrait of Manning on display and may have a smaller replica of that Salt Lake City statue also created as a tribute to her. Manning worked hard throughout her life to advance greater participation and recognition for Black people within the LDS community’s faith practices and beliefs, and these special forms of recognition of her that have been, and are now being, made are very fitting tributes to the remarkable person she was and the influence she had.

Jane Elizabeth Manning James is a proud part of LDS history even as she is also a proud part of Wilton history, and it’s great that the meetinghouse can reflect both for us all in its tribute to her.

Recognition of Manning in this way fits well with the Witness Stones Project that took place this past year and sought to create tangible acknowledgment of the role that people of color played in the life of Wilton, both in slave times and thereafter, and to do so in places significant to their lives. That project specifically recognized with a witness stone (and a ceremony at the Wilton Historical Society for its emplacement) Manning’s cousin and fellow Wilton resident John C. Walley who was, in Hughes’ words, “a sometime employee of St. Matthew’s [Episcopal Church], was married at the church, and had his son baptized there, too.” So Manning’s family ties through mother, aunts and cousins extended across Wilton’s faith institutions of the early 19th Century. 

As the LDS meetinghouse groundbreaking ceremony underscored, its congregants join the congregants of the dozen other Wilton faith institutions in honoring the personhood of all of our fellow human beings and doing our best to make life better for those around us. That’s a very firm foundation on which to continue building our town. 

Steve Hudspeth