In February 1839, Quincy, Illinois had a population of 1,500. Five thousand Mormons crossed the frozen Mississippi looking for shelter. The town opened the doors.
A Pirep featured story · KUIN Quincy Regional/Baldwin Field, Quincy, IL
On October 27, 1838, the Governor of Missouri, Lilburn W. Boggs, issued Missouri Executive Order 44 — better known as the "Extermination Order." It directed that the Mormons "must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace." Three days later, at Haun's Mill on Shoal Creek, a mob of 250 Missouri militiamen attacked a Mormon settlement and killed seventeen people, including a ten-year-old boy. The Mormons of Missouri — perhaps 10,000 strong — were now refugees in winter, instructed to leave the state by spring.
The closest free port was Quincy, Illinois, 200 miles east. Quincy in 1838 was a young Mississippi river town of 1,500 people, an outpost on the western edge of organized white settlement. The town had been founded only 15 years earlier and incorporated for 7. Its leadership was a Democratic Committee chaired by a 33-year-old attorney named John Wood, who would later become governor of Illinois.
The first Mormon refugees began arriving in mid-November 1838. By February 1839 the trickle had become a flood — 5,000 refugees, three times the town's population, crossing the frozen river on foot, in farm wagons, dragging belongings through Iowa Territory and over the ice. They had been driven from their homes in midwinter with no preparation. Many had walked the 200 miles.
The town's Democratic Committee voted on February 27, 1839 to receive them. The minutes of the meeting are remarkable for what they are not — they are not theological, not political, not about Mormonism. They are about food, clothing, shelter, and how to get them. Resolution 3 of the meeting: "Resolved, That the citizens of Quincy are urged and invited to devise the most expedient and effectual measures for the relief of these people."
The town opened houses. The Congregational Church on the public square took refugees in. Families took refugees in. The committee found work — laborers, farmhands, washerwomen. The Quincy Whig newspaper appealed for donations and got them. The relief effort was funded entirely by the town. Quincy had no help from the state or federal government and asked for none.
Joseph Smith himself, who had been imprisoned in Missouri's Liberty Jail through that winter on charges of treason, escaped his guards in April 1839 (they may have looked the other way) and crossed into Illinois. He came to Quincy. The town fed him.
By the summer of 1839 the Mormons had moved upriver to a swampy bend at Commerce, Illinois — which they renamed Nauvoo, the Hebrew word for "beautiful place." They drained the swamp and built a city of 12,000 by 1844. For several years it was the largest city in Illinois, larger than Chicago. They built a temple of cut limestone on the bluff above the river.
In June 1844 Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum were murdered by an Illinois mob at the Carthage Jail, 25 miles east. Within two years the Mormons had left Nauvoo entirely, crossing Iowa toward what would become Salt Lake City. They never went back. Nauvoo is now a quiet town of 1,100; the rebuilt Nauvoo Illinois Temple, completed 2002, occupies the original bluff site.
But Quincy is remembered. In April 2002, on the 163rd anniversary of the relief vote, Brigham Young University and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints presented the people of Quincy with a formal plaque on the courthouse square. The inscription thanks the town for what it did in the winter of 1838-1839. It hangs there still.
Quincy Regional Airport (KUIN) sits eight miles east of downtown. The historic district along the bluff above the river — the same streets the refugees walked up from the landing — runs north from Washington Park.