Archives West Finding Aid

Elizabeth Pickett Tolman was born on August 3, 1850, in Curridge, Berkshire, England, to Mathew and Harriet Pickett. Elizabeth’s father was a Methodist and her mother a Baptist before the couple converted to Mormonism at some point prior to their daughter’s birth. The family departed their home in England for Utah on April 16, 1862, setting sail from Liverpool on April 18 and arriving in New York seven weeks later. After another week traveling by railroad and steamboat, they came to Florence, Nebraska, where Mathew procured supplies for their journey west to Utah with Captain Canfield’s company. They arrived in Salt Lake City on October 16, 1862, and soon settled in Tooele. On February 21, 1870, Mathew took a second wife, Millicent Rose; “then,” Elizabeth recalls, “commenced my dear mother’s trial which was the heaviest sorrow she has ever known.”

Around this time Elizabeth became acquainted with Cyrus Ammon Tolman, to whom she was married in Salt Lake City on October 17, 1870. The couple soon moved from Toole to Richfield, embarking on the seven-day journey on November 15, 1872. There Ammon worked at a sawmill and began to consider taking a second wife. "About this time," Elizabeth writes, "he began to think and talk seriously of taking him another wife which he had joked about many times before and I am sorry to say flirted with some of the girls especially since we had lived in Richfield a thing he was extremely fond of doing." He married Sophia Isaacson in Salt Lake City on June 6 [187?], but the woman subsequently abandoned him, evidently having second thoughts about engaging in a polygamous marriage. Meanwhile, Elizabeth and Ammon again relocated, this time to Knollen in Rush Valley, Utah and Ammon soon married a cousin of Elizabeth's named Louisa on December 12, 1878.

In 1881 Ammon moved to Marion, near Oakley in Cassia County, Idaho, while Elizabeth was in Salt Lake City receiving treatment for her infertility. She and Louisa soon joined him, though Elizabeth appears to have spent much of her time in Tooele with family. While they were living here Ammon was arrested for practicing polygamy but escaped prison by "promising to obey the law in the future" and moving Louisa to a different house. Elizabeth's father was also arrested, though he was less fortunate, serving six months in the Utah Penitentiary. By the 1890s Elizabeth's health began to fail and she passed away on April 13, 1895.