Salt of the Earth

John Neff Mill, East Mill Creek
Pages Turned Back a Century ‘SALT OF THE EARTH̓'

By Gordon B. Hinckley

(From The CHURCH NEWS. MAY 30, 1948)
This week this column reaches into the pages of history for the story of a man who was of ‘the salt of the earth.̓

An even century ago hordes of crickets began attacking the first grain ever grown in the Salt Lake Valley. A hundred years ago men, women, and children desperately fought this foe which threatened their very existence. Then in answer to their prayers came the seagulls. That story is well known, and worth remembering.

But there is another less well known, but also worth remembering, and of particular interest to this generation of 1948, influenced on all sides by examples of lust and greed for personal gain. tie the story of John Neff, who in that same 1848 of cricket-seagull fame settled along the stream since known as Mill Creek in Salt Lake County.

He was a prosperous man. But he is remembered today not for how much money he made, but for how much he refused to make and for how much he gave away.

He grew up in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the ways and traditions of the Mennonites. He was a mill operator, a substantial citizen, frugal, shrewd, and independently rich.

Then one day in 1841 a Mormon missionary preached a strange but plausible doctrine in that part of the Keystone State. The record is not clear as to the struggle that took piece in his mind when he heard this doctrine. His Swiss ancestors generations before had fought the battle of conscience, and had come to America at the invitation of William Penn to enjoy the religious liberty they cherished. Now they were to give up the Mennonite faith to which they had devoted their lives. He end his family were baptized members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In May. 1844, he went to Nauvoo to meet Joseph Smith. There he stayed in the prophet̓s home and listened to the counsel of this man who was to die a martyr six weeks later.

John Neff returned to Pennsylvania fully satisfied in his faith. In 1844 he liquidated all his holdings so that he might move with the body of the Church. When word reached him that the ship ‘Brooklyn̓ could not leave New York until wharfage charges had been paid, he donated a thousand dollars so that Sam Brannan and the members of the Church with him could be on their way to California. That was the first of many substantial donations to the cause.

When he arrived in Nauvoo the peace he had seen two years earlier was gone. Mobs were burning fields and homes. Twenty thousand citizens were evacuating the city as rapidly as possible. He joined the throng moving over the Mississippi and the Iowa prairie.

At Winter Quarters one of his boys died from the plague that swept the Missouri bottomlands that tragic fall and winter of 1844-47. But there was little time for mourning. The people needed bread, and John Neff, experienced mill operator, was requested by Brigham Young to build and operate a grist mill.

In the summer of 1847 he and his family moved west with the third company to cross the plains. They arrived in October, and spent the winter in the old fort with its dirt floor and leaky roof. He wished for better things, and with the coming of spring boldly moved ten miles south and east from the fort.

It is reasonable to assume that he had assisted in the planting of the first grain that previous fall and winter. But wheat must be ground for bread. He set to work to build a mill. He dammed the stream, constructed a race, and led the water to a huge, ponderous overshot wheel. As the wheel turned, it rotated a great stone burr which crushed the grain. A part of one of those stones is preserved today in a monument which stands in front of the East Mill Creek meeting house. The crushed grain was then bolted through silk screens to separate the flour from the bran.

Much of the grain grown in the valley that first season, as well as subsequent seasons, was ground in the Neff mill.

The real test of John Neff’s character came in 1855-58. Those were lean years, when drought and grasshoppers had decimated the crops. Those were also years when great numbers of emigrants came to the valley, including the ill-fated Martin and Willie Handcart companies. On top of all that, the situation was worsened by the demands of hundreds of California-bound gold-seekers. on their way to find the precious metal that had been discovered in 1848.

Flour became a precious commodity. The gold-seekers who had money offered John Neff one dollar a pound. They would have taken all he had at this fabulous figure. A lesser man would have succumbed to the temptation.

But he refused. He set for himself a policy that flour should be sold only to those who needed it, and that it should be sold at the tithing office price of six cents per pound. For every hundred pounds he sold, he passed up ninety-four dollars in cash.

What an example for this day when black markets and consequent starvation are the rule rather than the exception in many parts of the earth, and when the practice almost everywhere is to charge all the market will bear, regardless of consequences to those who must buy.

That one incident alone is enough to assure John Neff a high place in history. But there were others. He gave uncounted thousands of dollars to the Church as Brigham Young indicated a need for money. It has been said that at his death he left less money than he and his sons had carried in their belts across the plains, when he might have multiplied this original capital many times.

Quiet. unassuming. inconspicuous in public gatherings, John Neff was nonetheless a giant. He was an exemplar to a generation a century beyond his own time.