Home of Vilate Young
26 Charter Street
Throughout Salem’s history, houses have been moved from neighborhood
to neighborhood or from many miles outside the city (see S33).
The Chadwick House and this one, recently moved and preserved by
the Peabody Essex Museum, continue that trend. This house was briefly
the home of Vilate Young (1830-1902), the daughter of Brigham Young
and Miriam Angeline Works Young, and who was born in Mendon, New
York. Her father, an early leader of the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter-day Saints, believed strongly in the “law of eternal
progression” and that “this life is part of eternity…
eternal knowledge and glory are to be obtained and promoted on this
earth. Improvement, learning, training, building, and expanding
are the joy of life.”14 Vilate’s
mother died when she was only two, and Vilate was raised by her
father and their close friends Vilate (for whom the little girl
had been named) and Heber Kimball until Brigham married Mary Ann
Angell in 1834. Knowing Salem’s reputation for female education
and cultural opportunities, Brigham Young sent his daughter to live
with his friends Eliza Ann Prescott Felt and Nathaniel
Felt in 1842 when she was just twelve. Vilate’s father
wrote to her regularly, once reminding her “to be steady to
your school and practis on the Pianna. Get all you can while you
have an opportunity.”15 The
Felts welcomed many early leaders of the church into their home,
and Brigham Young himself visited his daughter in May of 1844. By
June of 1845, after the murder of the church’s leader, Joseph
Smith, the Felts left Salem for Nauvoo, Illinois, and Vilate is
listed as a resident of Winter Quarters (now, Florence), Nebraska,
by 1846 — making the sixteen-year-old one of the earliest settlers
to endure the grueling western migration. Six hundred residents
of their temporary haven from persecution perished during the winter
of 1846 and 1847, but Vilate survived and went on to marry Charles
Franklin Decker in 1847. That June, they left Winter Quarters for
what would become Salt Lake City, Utah, on a thousand-mile journey
on foot, pulling handcarts. Vilate and Charles had eight children.
He married two more wives and continued to father more children.
As Charles’s younger offspring arrived, he spent more time
with them and less with Vilate. This apparently did not sit well
with her, and in a highly unusual act for the times and within the
church, Vilate divorced Charles and moved to Lewisville, Idaho,
in the late 1890s to live with her sister Elizabeth. Vilate died
a few years later, and the two sisters are buried there side by
side.
Notes
14. Brigham Young, Journal of Discourses (Liverpool,
England, 1859), 6: 286.
15. Brigham Young to Vilate Young, August
11, 1844 (Archives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,
Salt Lake City, Ut.).
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