Wilford Woodruff on the Fox Islands: Scores of Baptisms in a Remote Fishing Community (1838)

In 1838, Elder Wilford Woodruff and his missionary companion Jonathan Hale felt impressed to focus their mission in an unlikely location: the Fox Islands, a remote fishing community in Penobscot Bay, Maine, far from the mainstream preaching grounds of the eastern United States.

The Fox Islands were two small, rocky islands populated almost entirely by fishermen and their families — people largely cut off from the religious currents of the day. By most conventional missionary calculations, they were not a promising destination.

Woodruff and Hale went anyway, guided by the Spirit.

The results were remarkable. The missionaries found a receptive people, held meeting after meeting, and performed scores of baptisms. The Fox Islands became one of the most fruitful fields of the early Church's missionary work in New England.

The community's geographic isolation, which might have seemed like an obstacle, proved to be its own kind of preparation. Removed from the sectarian competition and social pressures of larger communities, the fishermen and their families were open in a way that allowed the message of the Restoration to take hold deeply.

Woodruff's mission to the Fox Islands is remembered today as one of the earliest examples of what would become a recurring pattern in his ministry: following impressions to obscure places and finding them already prepared to receive the gospel.