Johanna Marie Anderson Frost (2)

Johanna Marie Andersen Frost was born 30 January 1838, in Skove, Denmark.  As a young woman, she was trained as a dressmaker and seamstress.  She was working on a large estate in a town where the Mormon missionaries were preaching.  She was not allowed by her parents to visit these meetings.  She waited until nightfall when all was quiet, then she would leave her room through a window.  She had a sincere interest in this new religion and decided to be baptized 30 August 1861.  She had heard much about a new missionary and was curious to hear his message.  There seemed to be an immediate attraction between Johanna and Jens Frost.  Johanna was known as one of the prettiest girls around.  It was not long before the young couple was making plans to go to America.  Her parents were very much against the affair.  The happy lovers left Denmark and were married on the ship taking them to the United States.

During the crossing, Johanna helped prepare burial clothes for the many children who died.  Cholera and measles were rampant.  She became very ill and was so weak it was difficult for her to walk off the ship when they finally reached America.  They journeyed to Council Bluffs, Iowa, and then began the long, hardcart walk to the Salt Lake Valley.  They arrived in 1862.  Their first home was a dugout a few bocks from relatives in Ephraim.  It was here their first child was born.  Sometime in 1865/66 they moved into a three-room adobe home.  Cooking was done on a fireplace, the only source of heat for a long time.  It was a great day when Jens surprised the family with a new four-hole stove which he had brought home in a wheelbarrow.

These were busy, productive days; spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, cooking, soap making, candle dipping, and butchering, gleaning and storing food.  They even made cheese.  Johanna’s husband married a second wife.  Seventeen children were born during their stay in the three-room house.  Eventually, a large rock house was built.  It still stands on the east side of Ephraim’s Main Street.  Johanna and the second wife gathered horsehair and cow hair from the tannery and made a large carpet, which received first place at the state fair.  Johanna made all the clothing for her family.  She was a Relief Society teacher and did much church work all of her life.  All of her children were married in the Temple which was a source of great joy to her.  She carried the responsibility of her family while her husband went on foreign missions or worked on the Salt Lake Tabernacle and the temples in St.George and Manti.  He helped build the famous spiral staircases in the Manti Temple.  They had a happy and congenial family.  He died in 1905, after two years of failing health.  Johanna died suddenly of a hemorrhage of the lungs 19 July 1907, two years after her husband’s death.  She was sixty-eight years old.