At the age of 16, Charilla Abbott received her endowment on Tuesday, 3 February 1846 in the Nauvoo Temple, Nauvoo, Hancock, Illinois. She lived with Captain James Brown and Esther Jones Roper Brown in Weber County, Deseret in 1851.

History of Utah, Volume IV Biographical by Orson F. Whitney, 1904, Pages 591-592:

Charilla Abbott came to Utah in 1849. A native of the State of New York, she was born at Hornellsville, or Arkport, in Steuben county, April 4, 1829. Her parents were Stephen Abbott and Abigail Smith Abbott, the former from Luzern county, Pennsylvania, the latter from Ontario county, New York. They were industrious, well-to-do people, engaged in a variety of occupations -- farming, furniture making the manufacture of potash, and the turning out of the finest products of the woolen mill. Their daughter received. a fair education, attending school both in New York and in Illinois, to which state the family moved when she was about seven years old.

They went down the Alleghany river on a flat boat, touching at Pittsburg and Cincinnati, and thence. proceeded by steamboat and wagon to their destination, Perry, Pike county, Illinois. There Mr. Abbott bought a quarter-section of land, built a log house the second one in the place, and started to farming. He afterwards built a two-story frame house, a furniture shop and a woolen factory. Charilla's natural tendency was to school teaching and dress making, but as the boys of the household were not old enough, she and her sisters had to do the work of boys and chore about the farm, planting corn, gathering eggs and selling them by the barrel in the neighboring market; meanwhile attending also to household duties.

When she was about thirteen years of age her parents, who were Latter-day Saints, moved to Nauvoo, and she then resided a couple of months with her uncle, James Abbott, nursing her invalid grandmother. Finally, after staying with various relatives and ac quaintances, she followed her parents to Nauvoo. She was baptized into the Church by the Prophet Joseph Smith in May, 1843. She at once became a member of the Relief Society which he had founded. In October of the same year her mother was left a widow with eight children and Charilla went to work at fifty cents a week to help maintain the family.

In the exodus she drove her mother's ox team wagon, leaving Mosquito Creek July 7, 1849, and crossing the Missouri at Winter Quarters. They traveled in the general emigration of that season under the direction of Captain Case, Elisha Everett and George A. Smith. Along with them went a Welsh company under Captain Dan Jones. One Welshman was lost for three days, causing much labor and anxiety among his friends, until he was found in one of the companies ahead. Precious time was lost by this incident, and at South Pass the company was snowbound for three days. The snow drifted nearly to the tops of the wagon covers and the wagons had to be dug out. The cattle stampeded and some were found standing among the willows, belly deep in snow, frozen to death. Some of the vehicles, having no cattle, had to be abandoned. Two or three families were put into one wagon and many persons walked, weeping and despairing, until met and helped in by teams from the valley. All arrived in safety on the 25th of October.

Two days after their arrival the Abbott family continued their journey northward, reaching, in the evening of October 27, 1847, Captain James Brown's fort on the Weber; the site of Brownsville and now the present city of Ogden. There they settled permanently. Charilla's time was occupied in teaching school, killing crickets and helping her mother and the rest of the family make cheese and butter, much of which they sold to emigrants passing through to California. She remembers a terrible flood in the spring of 1850, when the Weber river rose so high that the water entered the houses, floated the furniture and compelled a temporary removal by means of boats, oxen, etc. She helped civilize the Indians in her vicinity, and took part in the organization of relief societies for the care of the poor and the gathering of means to maintain those who stood guard during Indian troubles or went to the frontier to bring in the regular fall immigration. Says she:

["About forty years after her arrival in Ogden, Utah, Mrs. David E. Browning wrote the following letter, which is the only record known of the First School in this district. She was then Miss Charilla Abbott.
"Mrs. Charilla Abbott Browning, Ogden's first teacher, says: "I arrived at Brown's Fort, Oct. 27, 1849. That winter I taught school in a log house, situated about five blocks south of the present railway depot. It was no easy task in those days to teach school, owing to the meagre circumstances of the people.We had to collect letters from scraps of papers and old books, these we pasted on paddles. We also made letters on the inside and outside of our hands. In this way the children learned to read." --History of Utah 1847-1869 by Andrew Love Neff , edited by Leland Hargrave Creer. 1940. Page 351-352. Also in Heart Throbs of the West, Vol. 2, 1940, Page 128.]

"It fell to my lot to teach the first school in my section. It was in a small log house plastered with mud, having two small windows, and literally a ground floor. The benches were of slabs. We had few books, and pens were made of chicken quills. I gathered the alphabet from scraps of paper and pasted the letters on paddles for the A, B, C class. In winter paths were made for the pupils by taking oxen and dragging logs through the snow."

"This log house was graced with a roof garden of mud and sunflowers; a dirt floor packed hard by feet, which were mostly bare. A fireplace provided charoal with which Miss Abbott traced letters on the palms of hands. From her description we assume that this First School was located at about Wall Avenue and Thirtieth Street.

About 1850 the city council made an effort to establish free schools, ruling that all children between the ages of four and twenty-one should have $3 spent on their education annually, provided school was maintained for six months in their districts! Lorin Farr, James Brown, and Joseph Grover were the active councilmen on this ruling." --Heart Throbs of the West, Vol. 2, 1940, Page 128.

Charilla describes the long, tedious journeys to Salt Lake City, where wagon loads of grain were exchanged for store goods, and customers had to put down their names, with lists of the things they wanted, and take their turns at trading. Sugar was fifty cents a pound, calico fifty cents a yard, and other articles in proportion. She tells how the early settlers utilized weed blossoms, bark and roots for dye-stuffs; cat-tails and hay for beds; greased paper or cloth for window glass; rushes and dirt for shingles; and how they gathered salaratus [leavening agent scooped from the ground around soda springs, mixed with water to allow the dirt to settle, resulting liquid could be used to make camp biscuits] from the gulches for bread and soap making, and salt from the lake to season their frugal meals.

"From 1849 to 1854," she continues, "we suffered great annoyance from the Indians, having to stand guard nights in order to protect our lives and property. Though kind as a rule, they had their rebellious spells, when our folks would have to get their chief, `Little Soldier,' and his associates, confine them in a corral, and guard them there until they agreed to be peaceful and let our stock alone. They were great hands to slip around the house when the men were away, and if the latch-string was out, come in and

HISTORY OF UTAH. Page 593

stand against the door and make the women and children give them what they asked for. We were glad to go to the fields with the men in order to escape such visits. Once a year the Indians had their time for hunting game and gathering service berries, which they had a way of drying far superior to ours. Everybody was glad to trade with them for their berries, and for elk, deer and antelope skins to make clothing and moccasins for the men. Occasionally one tribe would fight another and come back riding, whooping and yelling through the streets, singing war songs and exhibiting scalps on long poles. They ate crickets and grasshoppers, first drying them and then grinding them between two flat rocks, after which they made them into soup. The gulls also helped us to get rid of the crickets, which were so thick at times that we could not move without stepping on them. The Indians said that the gulls were never seen here until we came. Our people built a wall out of clay and dirt, ten to fifteen feet high and a mile square, with bastions and port holes for defense against hostile Indians. It was a great help in that direction, but it hindered greatly the progress of our farming."

Son of Jonathan Browning and Elizabeth Stalcup Browning

It was in the midst of such primitive conditions that our heroine entered the state of wedlock, marrying on January 27, 1853, David Elias Browning [in Brownsville, Weber, Utah]. The ceremony uniting them was performed by Lorin Farr, mayor of Ogden City and president of the Weber Stake of Zion. Eight children blessed their union. and from these have sprung numerous descendants. The Browning family were in "the move" of 1858, camping on the Provo bottoms for a couple of months, destitute of all comforts, and then returning to their northern home.

"Since those times," says Mrs. Browning, "we have had our ups and downs and have had to be `jack-of-all-trades,' as the saying is; we have worried through with railroads, booms, bonding and high taxes, until we are pretty nearly used up by such `improvements.' "

During the fall of 1893, in company with her husband and her daughter-in-law, her son Stephen's wife, she had the pleasure of visiting her mother's relatives in Birmingham, Michigan, eighteen miles from Detroit, where they were received with great kindness. On their way back to Utah they visited the World's Fair at Chicago, and escaping two great railroad wrecks, returned in safety to their homes. Mrs. Browning is now a widow, but is still one of the prominent women of Weber County.

End of HISTORY OF UTAH account.

Charilla and Charilla Emily Browning

Charilla Abbott died on Friday, 10 April 1914 in Ogden, Weber, Utah at the age of 84 years, 9 months and 6 days.

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