A HEADSTONE FOR SOPHIA ATKIN WHETTEN HUFF
Sophia Atkin Whetten Huff, my great, great grandmother, lay in an unmarked, unknown grave for nearly ninety years. Suffering from dementia and convinced family members were trying to kill her, she was committed to the Arizona State Hospital in 1922 where she died December 7, 1924 of pneumonia. No death certificate exists. Records at the hospital in Phoenix are not open to descendants and, according to the chaplain, the book linking the grave numbers in the hospital grounds cemetery to names of those buried there has been lost. I assumed we would never know exactly where Sophia was buried.
Born in 1844 in Empingham, Rutlandshire, England, Sophia Atkin crossed the Atlantic at age thirteen with Levi, her seventeen-year-old brother. Planning to meet their brother William in Philadelphia, William had meanwhile found work 140 miles NW in Sunbury and they were unable to locate him. Levi turned around and signed on with a ship’s captain as a cabin boy, never to see his family again. Sophia found various jobs, working her way first to Nebraska, looking for her brother William, and then to Wisconsin where lived her cousin William Haynes.
In Dane County, Wisconsin, Sophia met and married Englishman John Whetten, but within three years of the marriage John died of pneumonia and widowed Sophia was left with a two-year-old son and a tiny grave holding an infant daughter. Traveling with the John Murdock wagon train, twenty-year-old Sophia carried young John Thomas and walked across the plains to Utah with her father and sister Adelaide who had arrived from England. Sadly, Sophia’s mother Elizabeth died prior to emigration, but they were able to reunite with her brother William after their arrival in Utah.
The following year Sophia married James Huff, a man whose wife had left him. Sophia had lived with James Huff’s parents in Nebraska as she earned money to go to Wisconsin. James, a good mechanic and blacksmith, built sawmills and shingle mills; Sophia, not afraid of hard work, would bunch the shingles together and fasten them into bundles. James had a roaming nature and moved often to many different towns in Utah and then helped colonize the Little Colorado River area in northern Arizona. The Indian Agent encouraged them to establish Forest Dale in 1878 and assured them it was not located on the Apache Indian Reservation, but four years later the boundary of the reservation was moved several miles north, enclosing Forest Dale. Harassed and threatened by Apaches, the settlers had to leave their homes mid-winter, in February 1882, under conditions of great hardship, suffering from cold and exposure. Moving to Pinedale and then Juniper (later called Linden) the family oftentimes feared for their lives from the many outlaws in the area.
In addition to at least two or maybe three more babies who died, Sophia bore James two daughters, Mary Adelaide and Olive, and a son, James, who lived to adulthood. In 1894 husband James began to suffer from dropsy which proved to be progressively debilitating. Son John Thomas Whetten had moved to Mexico a few years earlier and James and Sophia decided to move near him. In Colonia Garcia James again set up a sawmill and shingle mill, but Sophia was again widowed in 1903 when James died. She was fifty-nine.
Mexico became engulfed in a Revolutionary War in 1911. Their guns and ammunition confiscated, in July 1912 the American colonists were told their safety could no longer be guaranteed and were given little more than twelve hours to prepare to leave their homes. Taking only the bare necessities, women left everything else behind, including family heirlooms. Then women and children were crowded into train cars and traveled to El Paso, Texas, where they moved temporarily into sheds in a large lumber yard, hanging quilts for privacy. Within a few years, the colonists began moving back to Mexico, Sophia and her son John among them.
Both of Sophia’s daughters died in 1921. In 1922 Sophia left Mexico for Mesa, Arizona and son James in hopes a change of locale would ease her fears, perhaps a remnant of terrifying days of Indians, outlaws and revolutionaries. It did not. She was moved to the state hospital.
Linda Despain called every cemetery in Phoenix looking for Sophia’s grave. Greenwood Memory Lawn Cemetery answered in the affirmative. We contacted known descendants for donations for a headstone, and once placed, we met at her gravesite, April 4, 2014 (the anniversary of her 170th birthday) for a simple service.
Sophia no longer lies in an unknown, unmarked grave.
