Sharon McMahon explains why eastern Idaho woman is 'one of 12 unsung Americans who changed history'
October 10, 2024
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27:57Now PlayingSharon McMahon explains why eastern Idaho woman is 'one of 12 unsung Americans who changed history'
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IDAHO FALLS – When Rebecca Brown Mitchell arrived in Eagle Rock with her teenage daughter, Bessie, they had nothing but the clothes on their back and a few belongings.
It was June 5, 1882, and the 48-year-old Illinois woman who would one day become the world’s first female chaplain of a legislative body had come out West in hopes of being a missionary.
Her husband had died 26 years earlier, leaving her a widow at age 22 with two young sons.
Laws prevented women from owning property at the time and when her husband died, it meant their home and everything else they’d acquired became the property of the state. This put Mitchell in a precarious situation.
With the exception of a Bible and a hymnal — her only possessions exempt from reclamation, according to her personal history — she was forced to buy back her own property from the state of Illinois.
She later married her husband’s brother. They had two daughters together, one of which died at age 5, before they ultimately separated.
Once her sons were grown, she attended a missionary training school in Chicago for a few months before heading west with her daughter.
In Mitchell’s personal history, she explains that she began her journey not knowing where she would end up.
“Led by God … I found myself in Idaho, in the town of Eagle Rock, now Idaho Falls, coming as a self-supporting missionary of the Baptist Church,” Mitchell writes.
Years before Idaho Falls became a thriving family community, Eagle Rock was a desert landscape with little more than a handful of shanties, a few company houses built by the railroads and multiple saloons.
With no money left to support themselves, Mitchell and her daughter stepped off the train that June morning into a “new world.” Mitchell had no way of knowing that in just a few years, her efforts would result in the town’s first church building and Idaho becoming one of the first states giving women the right to vote.
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