Wilford Woodruff

Wilford Woodruff

Wilford Woodruff, Sr. (March 1, 1807 – September 2, 1898) was the fourth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) from 1889 until his death. Woodruff's large collection of diaries provides an important record of Latter Day Saint history, and his decision to formally end the practice of plural marriage among the members of the LDS Church in 1890 brought to a close one of the most difficult periods of church history.

Woodruff was one of nine children born to Aphek Woodruff, a miller working in Farmington, Connecticut. Wilford's mother Beulah died of "spotted fever" in 1808 at the age of 26, when Wilford was just fifteen months old. As a young man, Wilford worked at a sawmill and a flour mill owned by his father.

Woodruff joined the Latter Day Saint church on December 31, 1833. At that time, the church numbered only a few thousand believers clustered around Kirtland, Ohio. On January 13, 1835, Woodruff left Kirtland on his first full-time mission, preaching without "purse or scrip" in Arkansas and Tennessee.

Woodruff was always known as a conservative religious man, but was also enthusiastically involved in the social and economic life of his community. He was an avid outdoorsman, enjoying fishing and hunting. Woodruff learned to fly fish in England, and his 1847 journal account of his fishing in the East Fork River is the earliest known account of fly fishing in North America that occurred west of the Mississippi River. As an adult, Woodruff was a farmer, horticulturist and stockman by trade and wrote extensively for church periodicals.