About the Ashby's

Many years ago, we spent a day in Nauvoo. If I remember correctly, we were in Illinois for a family reunion? I think we already lived in Texas, but it had to have been soon after we moved here, if so. Anyway, we asked a missionary couple if they knew where the Ashby's home had been and it turned out the missionary couple were living in it. It is a two story house that is one room deep and two rooms plus a hallway wide - very plain and simple.

-I tried to draw it, but the BLOG compressed it and it didn't work. Picture two squares, with a small rectangle between them and connecting them.

They were very nice to us and gave us a tour of the house, even though it is not open to the public, being used as a residence. The overwhelming impression I got was that it was tiny. It is on a nice, big lot, however. Of course, at the time the Ashby's were there a good home had a stable for horse and tack, a garden area and fruit orchard, a well, and an out-house away from the well (hopefully). My mother used to tell us the story of how horrible it was that the Ashby girls were forced out of their home in the dead of winter and forced to cross the Mississippi on the ice to live in their wagon, out in the open in Ohio. She also told us about the girls remembering looking back over the ice and seeing the temple burn. Trouble is, the temple wasn't burned until quite some time later - maybe a year later. They may have seen it burn, but not on the night they crossed over the ice. That's the trouble with family stories - they tend to drift around as details blur and get reinvented, unless they are written down.