The Hatter of Nauvoo: Philo Johnson, Who Hatted the Prophet and Walked with the Vanguard (1842–1847)

Philo Johnson was born December 6, 1814, at Newtown, Fairfield County, Connecticut. Baptized there in December 1841 by Charles Wesley Wardle, he moved to Nauvoo in June 1842, where Joseph Smith shook his hand on arrival and helped him obtain a stock of furs and lamb's wool to set up as a hatter — a trade the growing city badly needed. For four years Philo made hats in a house on Kimball Street belonging to Hyrum Smith, and by his own count made about a thousand hats in Nauvoo, supplying Joseph and Hyrum Smith, Brigham Young, Heber C. Kimball, Parley P. Pratt, and others of the Twelve with all their wool and fur hats. He drilled as a member of the Nauvoo Legion under the Prophet as its General, stood on the city guard, was present when Joseph and Hyrum were taken to Carthage, and when their bodies were brought home dead stood among the twenty thousand Saints who filed past them in the Mansion House.

When the mob came in September 1846, Philo fought in the Battle of Nauvoo — three hundred Saints against some fifteen hundred, holding them off for three hours behind a breastwork until the attackers' bugle sounded retreat. Given three days to leave the state, the exhausted Saints rowed flatboats across the Mississippi day and night until every hand was blistered and all the poor were across. Philo's own record preserves what heaven did for those destitute exiles camped on the Iowa shore: at about eleven o'clock in the morning the whole air was darkened with tens of thousands of quail that lighted all over the camp, tame enough to be caught by hand, until every family had meat enough to last until they could move — "and so did the Lord preserve his Saints at this time" (the archive's record of this September 1846 provision, the Miracle of the Quail, is told in full under Multiplication of Resources).

That winter at Winter Quarters, while hundreds died and were buried on the hill above the camp, Philo was employed digging graves for the dead. In the spring of 1847 Brigham Young called him into the pioneer company; one of his wagon wheels carried the roadometer William Clayton had built to measure the distance in the wilderness, and Philo kept the machine in repair across a thousand miles. He entered the valley in July 1847, was present when Brigham Young stuck his cane into the ground and said, "This is the place that we will build a Temple to our God," laid rock and brick for the temple block, and built adobe for the first fort. He settled Payson in 1857, made hats there for nearly forty years — once trading six silk hats for two city blocks — and died there April 3, 1896, at eighty-one, with 83 grandchildren, every one of whom, he recorded, was in the Church.

Writing in 1895, the old hatter summed up the life that had carried him from Connecticut to the Rocky Mountains: "I am now eighty years of age and cannot work any more, but can use my influence with my children and grandchildren for good."