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King Follett: Hannah Oak's son and the King Follett Discourse

On April 7, 1844, at the church's conference in Nauvoo, Illinois, Joseph Smith preached before "several thousand Latter-day Saints" in honor of a man who had died four weeks earlier. The Joseph Smith Papers calls the sermon "widely considered Smith's greatest discourse" and "the best documented of all his discourses," and it has carried the dead man's name ever since: the King Follett Discourse. King Follett was a grandson of John Oak of Westborough. His mother was Hannah Oak, the only surviving daughter of John Oak and Susanna Allen and the sister of Captain Nathaniel Oak of Chelsea.

Hannah Oak's son

Hannah Oak was born at Westborough in 1749, went with her widowed mother and stepfather to Shrewsbury in 1754 and to Winchester, New Hampshire, in 1766 (register, pages 17-18). She married first, in 1768, Seth Alexander, a sergeant in 1775-76 and an ensign in 1777, who died in 1780, leaving eight children. On November 18, 1783, she married John Follett, a farmer born at Attleboro in 1752, "a Revolutionary soldier and later captain of militia." They had six children, all born at Winchester. Hannah's own page is Hannah Oak; her parents' story is John Oake and Susanna Allen.

The register counts her "registered descendents—the record being practically complete—" at "over 700." Its compiler, Henry Lebbeus Oak, descended from her only brother Nathaniel, wrote that "strangely no knowledge or tradition of her family was possessed in my own branch." Of the "over 600 of her descendants" he had himself found, he wrote that they "in character and culture seem to excel the average of most other branches," though he allowed that he might be "prejudiced by the promptness and courtesy" with which they had answered his appeals for information: "I find it hard to resist a division of our tribe into folks of two classes—the good who answer my queries, and the bad who will not reply" (register, page 18).

King Follett was born in July 1788: the 1906 family register gives "July 25 (24 or 26), 1788," and the Joseph Smith Papers "24/26 July 1788," born at Winchester, Cheshire County, and "Son of John Follett and Hannah Oak (Oake) Alexander." The register follows his brothers and sisters: Lifa, who died unmarried in 1809, "Killed by fall from a building"; William, a hotel-keeper at Winchester; and Alexander, who "went to Ohio with his brother King" and died there before 1823 (register, page 55).

West with the church

The register traces King "from New Hampshire to Cooperstown, N. Y., and to DeKalb, 1809; to Ohio, before 1824." He married Louisa Tanner, born in 1799; the register says about 1816, the Joseph Smith Papers "by 1815." They had nine children.

He joined the new church early. The Joseph Smith Papers says he was baptized in the spring of 1831, was a member of the Whitmer branch in Jackson County, Missouri, by 1833, moved to Clay County that year and in 1835 to what became Caldwell County, and was ordained an elder at Kirtland, Ohio, on January 28, 1836; the register dates his becoming "a Mormon Elder" to 1831.

The Missouri troubles caught him. The Joseph Smith Papers records that in 1839 he was imprisoned at Richmond, Ray County, and Columbia, Boone County. The register gives the outcome: "He shared the presecution [sic] of the saints, being in jail in Richmond and Columbia, Mo., April to October, 1839, on a charge of robbery, but was acquitted on trial." He moved to Illinois in 1839 and by 1843 was a constable of Hancock County.

The well

In March 1844 he was "stoning up a well" at Nauvoo when the rope lowering a tub of rocks snapped and the load fell on him. He died on March 9 and was buried the next day. The register, written sixty years later, puts it plainly: "He was killed by a bucket of rocks falling upon him in a well." His family asked Joseph Smith to speak in his memory, and the April conference sermon became the discourse that bears his name.

The family divided after his death. "Part of his family went on with the church to Utah," the register says, "but the widow and two sons went to Iowa." Louisa Follett died on November 15, 1891.

What is missing

King Follett and his children are not yet in the family tree; his parents, Hannah Oak and John Follett, are. The register's acquittal "on trial" is not in the Joseph Smith Papers biography, which records only the imprisonment. His obituary in the Nauvoo Neighbor (March 20 and 27, 1844), Louisa Follett's 1839 Missouri redress affidavit and Joann Follett Mortensen's biography, The Man Behind the Discourse, have not been used here. The register's compiler drew on a Follett family record printed by Judge David Follett of Norwich, New York, which has not been found.

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