Item Detail
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Cordon, Sally Agnes Call
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1858-1955
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MSS SC 413
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Biography
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Sally Agnes Call Cordon was born December 19, 1858 in Willard, Box Elder County, Utah to Omer Call and Sarah Maria Ferrin Call. Sally was the eldest daughter and the second birth of eleven children. As a child she enjoyed Sunday school and singing practice. She only attended school about three months out of each year. When Sally was twenty-one, her mother died, leaving her to care for the eight children still at home. Sally cared for her siblings until she married George Albert Cordon December 15, 1881 in the Endowment House. They lived in Willard until the fall of 1885 when they moved to Idaho. George, two of Sally's brothers, and a cousin had filed claims on land in the Snake River Valley near the location of Rigby, Idaho today. They lived in a log cabin there and became active participants in the growing Rigby community. George became the bishop, and Sally served as first counselor in the Relief Society and later as a Relief Society president for eight years. They counted their time there in the small log cabin as one of the happiest in their lives. Sally and George had seven children: Alfred C., Omer S., Herbert E., Agnes M., Mabel E., Sarah N., George A. Jr., and Clarence H. They also cared for two of Sally's nieces for about eight years after their mother died. Although George endured about nine years of serious illness in later life, he and Sally were both in good health at the time that the biography was written. George died September 26, 1944, and Sally died February 26, 1955 in Rigby, Idaho.
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The 'Sketch of the Life of Sally Agnes Call Cordon' was written by Norma H. Morris in 1941, when Sally was 82 years old. This biography is located in the third folder of a collection of papers on the Alfred Cordon family. It is six typewritten pages long. Morris begins the biography by quoting Proverbs 31:27; she notes that Sally has embodied the concept of looking to 'the ways of her household' throughout her long life. The section of the biography about Sally's childhood contains several stories of events that Sally remembers, some of which are quoted in her own words. One detailed story she tells is about her family's experience with the grasshoppers. The grasshoppers were destroying their wheat crop, so her grandfather called his boys together and asked them to make a covenant with the Lord that if the Lord spared their crops from the grasshoppers, they would save the wheat for breadstuff only. The grasshoppers left, and they kept the wheat for breadstuff. People came from miles around to buy the wheat and offered as much as ten dollars a bushel for it, but Sally's father would take no more than two dollars a bushel. Other stories are about her seeing Brigham Young as a child and about her father's mission in the States. The part of the sketch about the Snake River Valley gives less detail about events and focuses on giving the reader a sense of what daily life was like in the log cabin. Morris does mention some events in passing, such as George crossing the frozen Snake River, and Sally giving birth during a small pox epidemic. She goes into some detail about Sally's Relief Society service; Sally's duties included preparing bodies for burial, gathering grain under the Relief Society Wheat Storage Project, and providing hospitality for travelers as the bishop's wife. At the end of the biography, Morris lists the accomplishments of Sally's children and gives tribute to Sally for her long life of blessing others. The final page of the biography is a poem entitled 'Old Romance.'
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1873-