Daughter of Ezra Hayes and Catherine Cotterman

Married Janvrin Hayes Dame, 19 Jan 1851, Salt Lake City, Salt Lake, Utah

Children - Mary Ann Dame, Sophia Dame, Joseph Smith Dame, Margaret Dame, Catherine Hayes Dame, Edward Dame, Lewis Leroy Dame, Nina Dame

Treasures of Pioneer History, Vol. 4, p. 190

Lovina Hayes was born December 3, 1826 in the West Buffalo township, Pennsylvania. Her father, Ezra Hayes, was a descendant of Scotch Irish people. Her mother, Catherine Cotterman, was Pennsylvania German. They made their home in Burton, Ohio, the birthplace of Ezra, which was not far from Kirtland, Ohio where they moved when Ezra became converted to the Church. That was about 1835. They moved, with the Saints, to Nauvoo where Ezra died in 1842. Lovina was sixteen years old at the time; her mother was crippled with rheumatism and had been ill for some time. To help out Lovina went to work for Joseph Smith in the Nauvoo House. Her mother had not embraced the faith, but she had made a promise to her husband before he died, that she would stay with the Latter-day Saints and bring their children up in the Church of his choice. When the Saints were driven from Nauvoo, Catherine Hayes and her two daughters, Lovina and Lucinda, were with them.

They spent the winter of 1847-1848 in Nebraska sharing the hardships of all the Saints at Winter Quarters. In the spring they moved across the Missouri River to Kanesville, near Council Bluffs, Iowa, where on May 1, 1848 Lucinda married Janvrin Hayes Dame. Janvrin had spent the winter on the Niobrara River among the Ponca Indians. He had wintered there with the Newell Knight company. In January, his wife had died there and Lucinda took his four motherless children to heart and cared for them. On May 6, 1848 the Dame and Hayes families started their long trek westward in the Brigham Young company. Lovina drove a team all the way across the plains. She drove a light wagon ahead of the main company where large barrels, in the wagon, were filled with water which she took back to the thirsty oncoming party moving slowly over the hot desert with ox team and on foot.

The company arrived in Salt Lake City in September. They found a few houses with dirt roofs and dirt floors and a fort. Their trials were many but they were brave, courageous and unwavering in their faith that God would open the way for them to accomplish what He had sent them here to do.

Early in 1850, Lovina married Janvrin Hayes Dame as a plural wife. The family moved to Farmington, Davis County for a short time where Lovina's first child, Mary Ann, was born December 14, 1850. On June, 1852 the Dame family was called by Brigham Young to go to Fillmore, which had been settled in 1851, to help strengthen it against the Indians. Their first home in Fillmore was a dugout inside the fort. Janvrin helped to build the fort and helped to enlarge it later. He built his house about midway along the north wall with a lookout tower on top for the purpose of sighting the Indians. He acted as a guard, for the Indians were very troublesome.

Lovina's second child, Sophia, was born here in 1854. Later Janvrin built a large adobe two-family house in the north part of town. It was one of the first houses outside the fort. As soon as it was completed he and his oldest son, Wesley William, went by ox team to work on the Salt Lake Temple for two winters, donating their labor. These were hard winters for his wives and children, but they had the faith and courage to carry on. Perhaps they were being schooled for harder days to come.

Lovina had a son, Joseph Smith, born in 1856 and a daughter, Margaret, in 1857. In 1859 Catherine Cotterman died. They had built a little log house for Mother Cotterman whose health had improved as the Church patriarch had promised her it would. She had been helping out with rug making and gardening and had woven the first cloth in Millard County. Now the little house was vacant it could be moved to Oak Creek canyon where there was forage for their milch cows. Lovina went to care for the cows, herding them, milking them and making butter. Once a week someone came with provisions and took the butter back to town. She had her children for company and sometimes other families brought their cows to graze in the canyon. I remember she said she and "Cran" (Charity) Prowes were often alone for days. It was lonely and often they were frightened by Indians who came to beg for flour or bread. However, they were never molested or harmed in any way by the Indians. Grandmother said they made haw cakes and dried them in the sun.

In 1861, Catherine, my mother, was born in Fillmore. Feed was still scarce for their cattle, so Grandmother moved to Deseret, where meadow grass grew lush along the Sevier River. The little house went along for her to live in. There in 1863, Edward was born and, Lewis Leroy, in 1866. He later died and was buried there. In 1868 the dam washed out and left Deseret dry. Grandmother moved back to Fillmore. Here, that same year, her last child, Lovina, was born.

After having these eight children Grandmother found that she had them to support. Grandfather was a family man. He loved his wives and children and spent his life working for them and his Church. The days were never long enough for him to accomplish all he planned to do. If the nights were lighted by a moon, he would be in the fields working. But, in the summer of 1868, he had a severe sunstroke from which he never fully recovered. With this illness came a great longing to see his kinfolk who had quit writing to him since he became a Mormon. After struggling for a year with ill health he "laid down the shovel and the hoe" and returned to the East.

His family wrote that he wanted to come back, but that he suffered a complete breakdown and was unable to come; that they would keep him, and give him the best of care. It was years before he returned; then he spent his last days working in Meadow in the mountains with his son Joseph. One day at dinner he remarked "that he could have returned sooner but he thought he would preach the gospel, while there, to his kith and kin." Grandmother with a show of emotion, asked, "And what did you think your children were doing at that time?" "Oh, Biddy," he said, laying his hand over hers on the table, "I knew my children were in good hands."

Dear, dear Grandmother. She did everything she could to keep her family together and care for them. She helped other women in their homes; she sewed, made rugs and quilts in her own home; dried fruit on shares and many other things; praying all the while that God would just make it possible for her to keep the children together. Bishop Thomas Callister let her move onto a small farm which he owned in Meadow. Here, with the united effort of all the children, they were able to pay for the place, and the struggle became easier. The little log house that had gone with her before was moved to Meadow, where she sold it to Silas Smith. It stood for years where the Meadow schoolhouse now stands. Later it was moved to Smith's lot on Main Street where one of Silas' wives reared her family.

When Grandmother became aged, one of her sons gave her a home on South Main Street. It was here that I got to know Grandmother. I went to spend the nights with her for company. I can remember the quilts she always had in the frames, although it was no longer necessary for her to make quilts. I remember the four big hooks screwed into the ceiling of her kitchen through which a small rope was run to hold the frames up. There was a contraption of some kind made with a pulley to hoist the quilt up near the ceiling, "out of the way" when she was not working on it. "There will always be need for warm bedding," she would say. She made hundreds of quilts in her lifetime, for which she washed and carded the wool and she often sheared the sheep to get the wool. Grandmother made quilts for their utility, in fact, utility was the law of her life. She had very few things that were valued only for their aesthetic worth. The beauty she enjoyed was in a well-ordered home. "The House of the Lord is a house of order," she often quoted, and her home was indeed such a place, clean, comfortable and homey. A rocking chair and her mending basket stood near a sunny window in the kitchen. The tall, narrow cupboard in her kitchen always fascinated me and it seemed to tower over the stove, table, chairs and the little washstand. I liked her front room best. It was a combination bedroom and sitting room; along the north wall were two beds, one of them a four poster, in between the beds was a big cupboard like a wardrobe. On the south side of the room was a fireplace.

The memory of the long winter evenings I spent before this fireplace will always be precious to me. There was never a lamp or a candle lighted until the twilight had faded into darkness. This was the time of day she loved best—with her hands folded in her lap, she would sit in front of the fireplace and talk about the happy days of her childhood, the hard years that had brought her from her childhood home into this far western land. I would sit on the rug and watch the fire while she told me stories which came from her heart. She told me of her life in Nauvoo and I can see her head shake slowly back and forth as she spoke of the death of the Prophet and his brother, Hyrum. She told of the hardships she endured, with others, while crossing the plains, and the harder years when it took all of her time and energy to keep hunger and want from her door.

There was the first winter after Grandfather went away. "We lived almost the whole winter on Lumpy Dick," she said. "What is Lumpy Dick?" I asked. "Flour with a little salt and enough water sprinkled in to make it possible for one to roll it into little pellets with the fingers. This we dropped in boiling water to cook. It isn't bad if you have milk or cream to pour over it which we often didn't have."

She told me how she had to send the children to school barefooted and recalled, with laughter, Bill Payne bringing them home in a wheelbarrow after a big snowstorm. She would never let them go to Sunday School barefooted. One time she was called out to assist with the birth of a neighbor's child. She left the children alone, but two of them, my mother, and, another child, washed their faces and feet and went to Sunday School. In class that morning they were giving the children picture cards for rewards of merit and for good attendance. They gave Mother and her sister one. When Grandmother came home, they came running to meet her, joyfully waving the cards for her to see. She said she shed copious tears that night after tucking them in bed. I asked her if the Church didn't help widows then ? "The Church was good to help us find work," she said, and, "one time they gave me a sack of flour. I paid that back as soon as I was able."

Grandmother learned to "meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same." Out of the vicissitudes of life she had evolved a philosophy that sustained her in her trials. "This, too, will pass," was one of her favorite sayings. "Life," she said, "is just a teeter-totter, when your end goes down some one's is up—when you go up, someone goes down. One must learn to take the ups and downs with the same degree of fortitude."

Her frankness was one of her virtues. A book peddler once tried to sell her a book about the big flood in Galveston. It gave a graphic account of the looting and disorder that went on at that time. Grandmother had told him a number of times that she did not want the book, but he kept on telling her more and more about the horrors that went on after the flood. Finally, she said, "Young man, I'll give you to understand that I have horrors enough of my own without buying yours." There was always such a twinkle in her eyes, no one ever took offense at what she said.

An inner peace and faith seemed to give her power. One night we had a terrible electric storm; flash after flash followed by thunder so terrifying that I thought the end of the world had come. I lay trembling and alone in one of her great beds wishing I were at home with my sisters. Then Grandmother spoke from her bed. "Do you know what I think when it thunders like this? I think that it must be housecleaning time in Heaven and people are moving. Listen! that rumbling noise is a great moving van loaded with furniture and that rip-clatter is a lighter gig taking a few things too choice to go in the van. There goes another load, listen! and another." The bright sunshine streaming through the window awakened me. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. "Shucks," I thought to myself, "she told me that so that I would not be frightened. Now, whenever I hear an electrical storm, I think it is housecleaning time in Heaven."

One time I asked Grandmother what the pioneers did for recreation. "Very much as they do now—dances, picnics, quilting and rag bees." Then her memory raced back over the years to recall the little hurts she had sometimes suffered at the hands of those who had more of this world's goods than she had. "If there was ever a quilting or a rag bee, I was the first to be bidden; if it was an afternoon tea or party, I was seldom there, because I never had the proper clothes for such occasions." After rocking in silence for some time she said, "There is one feast I will be to; when the Savior sends out into the highways and byways to gather in guests for His banquet, I will be bidden." I am sure that she will, for she was one of the most worthy as God judges values. — Inez B. Allred.