Only Member of His Family, Father of Twelve: Francis Boggs and a Life of Answered Calls (1841–1889)

Francis Boggs was born May 17, 1807, in Belmont County, Ohio, to Alexander and Hannah Martin Boggs. In 1841, missionaries came to his home and he and his wife Evalina Martin Boggs were baptized — the only members of either of their families to join the Church. They gathered to Nauvoo, where Francis, a skilled carpenter, helped build the temple and the city.

The Boggs family's sacrifice for that faith was among the heaviest in the pioneer company. Of their first five children, every one died young. A little daughter, Mary, born in Nauvoo, lived — and a son, Francis, died at Omaha, Nebraska, in January 1847, just weeks before his father was chosen for the vanguard company. Having buried his child at Winter Quarters, Francis — now almost forty — went west with Brigham Young's company in April 1847 to find the home the Saints had nowhere else to make.

He arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, and stayed: planting the first crops, building roads, and raising the fort. Evalina and Mary followed, arriving September 19, 1847, in the Daniel Spencer company. Two more children were born to them in Salt Lake City, three in Fillmore — twelve in all, only five of whom lived to adulthood.

When the calls kept coming, Boggs kept answering. In 1850 he took a company of settlers 265 miles south and helped found Parowan in the Iron Mission — firing a cannon in celebration of their arrival, a celebration the town re-enacts annually. He was then sent on a mission to Las Vegas — deep in Indian territory — to mine lead, farm, and help pacify the natives and build a way station on the southern route. In 1861 he answered the call to colonize Dixie, settling his family in New Harmony, Washington County, where he and Evalina lived out their years. He served in positions of responsibility in every community he built and one term in the Utah Legislature.

He died January 22, 1889, in Washington, Utah. His life is a quiet witness: the man who had given his family, his trade, and his children to the gathering gave forty more years of answered calls to the kingdom they died for — and never once asked to be excused.