Porter Summer Tour - Hiram, OH and a long flight home

Whew . . . it has taken me a month to finish this journal of our summer trip. For the sake of our family history, I'm glad to have the stories and pictures together in one place.
On Friday, September 2nd we drove from Sandusky to Hiram, Ohio to see the historic Johnson farm.  For one year (from Sept 1831 - Sept 1832) Joseph and Emma and family lived in the Johnson home, which is about 40 miles SE of Kirtland.   The Johnsons were a very well-to-do family with a prosperous farm. In the spring of 1831 Elsa Johnson had heard about Joseph Smith.  She found him and asked him to heal her rheumatic arm, which had been lame and unable to move much for years.  After the blessing her arm was healed completely, and the Johnsons subsequently joined the church.  Two of the Johnson's sons, Luke and Lyman Johnson became members of the original Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and their daughter, Marinda, married Orson Hyde.

The home in Hiram is the original, and it has been restored to look exactly like it was when the Johnsons lived there, right down to the elaborate "feather painted" woodwork, painted designs on the floor and bright colored trim throughout the house.  I could tell I would have liked Elsa Johnson - this was a woman who wasn't afraid to take a paintbrush and change the look of her room. One room had orange trim, the next yellow, the next turqouise, etc.  I loved it!

While staying at the Johnson farm, Joseph received 16 revelations which are now part of the Doctrine and Covenants.  He and Sidney Rigdon saw Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ in one of the upstairs rooms of the home (it's in the 76th section of the D&C).

This is also a place where Joseph and Sidney and their families were greatly persecuted. One night both men were dragged from their homes on a freezing night and beaten, abused, and tarred and feathered. It is thought that Sidney Rigdon suffered a brain injury which haunted him the rest of his life after being dragged across frozen ground by his feet. Joseph and Emma had been sleeping in this room with their 1 year old twins, Joseph and Julia Murdock, who were sick with the measles.

After Joseph was forcibly removed from the room the door was left open and in the chaos the twins become very chilled. Joseph Murdock later died of complications of the exposure and the measles.
The Johnson farm was a fascinating last stop on our church history tour.  After our visit we drove to a highly recommended Amish restaurant in a nearby town. Hiram is in the heart of Amish country. We loved seeing all the horses and buggies, hitching posts in the parking lots, and other fun things like this stop sign by the restaurant:

We thought the food at the restaurant was over-hyped, but the pies were extraordinary. Maybe the best pie we have ever eaten!

 

After eating we started the long drive back to Buffalo, where we stayed in a hotel near the airport. By this time we were getting really tired of hotels and fast food. We were ready to go home and think about starting school!

The next day our flight left on time from the Buffalo airport and landed for a on hour layover in Chicago. We bought ourselves another Chicago pizza and settled in for a short wait. But, I felt a portent of impending doom when I saw lightning strikes and black clouds outside the terminal. Sure enough, all flights into Chicago were re-routed to different airports, and planes were grounded for hours. We finally got on the plane four hours later than planned.

The wait was boring, of course (especially for Joseph, who spent the hours making nonsensical videos of himself on my ipod touch), but was especially disappointing for Dan. He is the new deejay of the multi-stake youth dances, and there was a big dance scheduled for that evening. He had worked for weeks to find the best new (and clean) music to play for the kids and had prepared some prizes and activities.  Had our plane been on time or even a little delayed, he would have been fine. As it was, we dropped him off for the last 15 minutes of the dance ! (Luckily a different guy in the stake was willing to cover the deejay duties for him.) Oh well!