ELIZA ANN FOSCUE LEE
23 Sep 1829 – 9 Mar 1920

Eliza Ann Foscue Lee was born in Tallahassee, Florida, the sixth child of Benjamin Foscue and Eliza Skurlock. Her mother died in childbirth while having her. Benjamin named the child Eliza after her dead mother and gave her to the care of Mrs. Harriet Skurlock Pope, one of her mother’s sisters. When she was two, she came back to live with her father and his new wife, but only for a short time. Benjamin was a Primitive Baptist and would travel all over the south as a preacher. Benjamin’s uncle, Amos Foscue, and his wife, Elizabeth, daughter of William Foscue and Sallie Smith, being childless, begged for the little Eliza and took her home to live with them, where she remained throughout the Seminole war. In 1838, Eliza was separated from her aunt and uncle as her father brought her back to Coosa County, Alabama, to once again live with him. Eliza was just 15, when she met and married John Percival Lee on 18 Feb 1844. Their oldest child, Sara Lucinda Lee (aka Lu Dalton, a famous Mormon feminist writer and poet) was born in Coosa, Alabama on 9 Feb 1847. The family then moved to Texas where they gave birth to their second daughter, Ann Eliza Lee in Dewitt on 11 Jan 1849. In that same year, a Mormon missionary by the name of Preston Thomas was sent from Salt Lake to Texas with orders from Brigham Young to get Lyman Wight and his splinter religious colony known as Zodiac back into the Mormon fold. Lyman and his followers refused to come to Utah but, while in Texas, Preston did bring John and Eliza into the Mormon church. They were baptized on 1 Aug 1849. The winter of 1849 found the Lee family camping in Council Bluffs, Pottawatomie County, Iowa, preparing for the journey to Utah. They left the following summer and traveled to Utah as part of the Benjamin Hawkins Company, which consisted of 150 wagons, arriving on 9 Sept 1850. They didn’t stay in Utah for long, however. In 1851, they joined Amasa Lyman and 500 other early Mormon settlers and traveled further west to California, helping to settle the area that is now known as San Bernadino.