Mr. Hunter's Defense of Latter-day Saints
Published October 25, 2026 at 1:51 AM
Contributed by
Millennial Star Research
During an open-air meeting on the steps of the Bolton Town Hall, a stranger named Mr. Hunter, who had previously walked from San Francisco to New York, voluntarily spoke to the crowd to refute negative claims about the Latter-day Saints. He praised the Church's welfare system for eliminating poverty, confirmed that English families in Utah were living in peace and prosperity, and stated that polygamy had been abolished twenty years prior. He urged the audience to investigate the Church for themselves, noting that the missionaries were only trying to help them.
In Their Own Words
“Recently President Merrill D. Clayson, of the Manchester conference, and Elders Ronald D. McGregor and Russell C. Capener and I went to Bolton to hold an open-air meeting on the steps of the Town Hall. . . During the course of the meeting a gentleman came forward from the audience and expressed his willingness to speak about the 'Mormons' as he had found them while in Utah. . . 'Those "Mormons,"' said he, 'have a wonderful system of taking care of the poor, for they pay ten per cent, of all their income into the Church, and if there are any poor people in the community they are helped first, and so it does away with real poverty.' — Millennial Star 85:39”
Sources & References
The Latter-day Saints' Millennial Star (Manchester, later Liverpool, England, May 1840–1970), Vol. 85, No. 39 (1923). https://archive.org/details/millennialstar8539eng (account extracted verbatim from the issue's Internet Archive OCR text; research confidence: high)
Related Miracles
Similar miracle types and stories from the 1920s.
Miracle of the Week
One remarkable, documented account in your inbox every Monday, drawn from the full archive.