Desdemona Fullmer Smith Benson

Desdemona Wadsworth Fullmer, a daughter of Peter Fullmer and Susanna Zerfass, and the sister of David Fullmer, was born in Huntington, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, 6 Oct 1809. She embraced the Gospel about the close of the year 1836, in Richland County, Ohio, being baptized by Elder John P. Greene. Soon afterwards, she removed to Kirtland, Ohio, and from that time forward shared in the persecutions to which the Church was subjected in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois. She was living with her brother David’s family near Haun’s Mill, Missouri, at the time when the massacre of the Saints occurred at that place, and she and other members of the family were forced to hide in the woods to escape the mob. (L.D.S. Church Encyclopedia, Book page 235)

In 1842 she married Joseph Smith, Jr. who had been born 23 Dec 1805 at Sharon, Windsor, Vermont. After his death, and just before the exodus of the Latter-day Saints from Nauvoo, Illinois, Desdemona married Ezra T. Benson on 26 Jan 1846 at Nauvoo, Illinois. On this same date, 26 Jan 1846, Desdemona was sealed to the Prophet Joseph Smith, Jr., Ezra T. Benson stood as proxy.

Eighteen women gathered on Thursday, March 17, 1842 in the second-story meeting room over the Smith's Red Brick Store in Nauvoo. Smith, John Taylor, and Willard Richards sat on the platform at the upper end of the room with the women facing them. The Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning was sung, and Taylor opened the meeting with prayer. The women in attendance at the initial meeting were:

Emma Hale Smith Sarah M. Cleveland Phebe Ann Hawkes
Elizabeth Jones Sophia Packard Philinda Merrick
Martha Knight Desdemona Fulmer Elizabeth Ann Whitney
Leonora Taylor Bathsheba W. Smith Phebe M. Wheeler
Elvira A. Coles Margaret A. Cook Sarah M. Kimball
Eliza R. Snow Sophia Robinson Sophia R. Marks

“Sometimes the mob would come to the door all armed and yell like Indians, ‘You must leave here in three days or all will be killed!’ When snow and winter was there, my brother lay helpless with fever. I spoke and said, ‘We have no team and wagon. We may as well die in the house as a few rods from it.’ So they let us go. We started to march for Illinois. On the way, the sectarian priests came around us and would say to us, ‘Give up your faith and stay with us, and you shall never want.’ I said, ‘I have no faith in you nor in your father, the Devil.’ So I shut them up every time.

“In Nauvoo I lived until the spring after the war took place. Afterwards, the mob often came to the house and told us to leave. My father lay speechless at that time with a fever. There were three or four families living in that house at that time. The mob came one day with 100 armed men. Part of them stayed in the street and yelled like Indians. The rest of them came into the house, broke locks and took all they pleased to take. They found one keg of powder. Then they told all of us to leave in one hour. I told them that keg belonged to a man they had driven away that morning.”