Image: Brigham Young, circa 1855. L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. File via Wikipedia. Original image by Charles Roscoe Savage (1832–1909). Public domain.
She Ruled Brigham Young:
The Quiet Power of Wife No. 51
Harriet Amelia Folsom Young (1838–1910):
The Cultured Consort Who Ruled a Prophet’s Heart
Introduction: A Carriage on South Temple
On a winter afternoon in 1881, a carriage rolled up East South Temple, past the stone lion that crouched above Brigham Young’s family home and toward the half-finished mansion on the corner opposite. Its four stories rose in Second Empire exuberance against the Wasatch sky: a granite foundation, adobe walls sheathed in stucco, a tower at the northwest corner that seemed almost to stand guard over the city. Inside, beneath the black-walnut spiral staircase and European mirrors, a tall, blue-eyed woman in her early forties was supervising the hanging of draperies. She had lived in the unfinished house only a few short months, but the city already knew its name. They called it Amelia’s Palace. And they called her the favorite wife of the Lion of the Lord.
Her name was Harriet Amelia Folsom Young, and for nearly half a century, she had lived one of the most improbable American lives of the nineteenth century. Born in Buffalo, New York, on August 23, 1838, she had followed her architect father across the burned bridges of early Latter-day Saint history—from the New England hills, to Nauvoo, to the Iowa frontier, and finally to the Great Basin. There, in October 1860, she had stepped down from a wagon to be greeted personally by the president of her church. Within weeks, they were courting. Within three years, they were married. And within a generation, she had become, in the language of her own obituary, the woman who “ruled Brigham Young.”
To tell her story as it actually was—not the caricature of “Wife No. 19”’s melodrama, not the dismissive footnote in the standard histories—is to trace the full arc of frontier Mormonism itself: from wagon-train poverty to Gilded Age opulence, from prophetic charisma to federal raids, from pioneer simplicity to presidential receptions in the White House. It is also to recover, in the face of a silence she largely imposed on herself, the voice of a woman who was intelligent, musical, reserved, and—by every account from those who actually knew her—loved.
The Woman Behind the Palace
This essay argues that Harriet Amelia Folsom Young was far more than Brigham Young’s “favorite wife.” She was the cultural face of the Latter-day Saint presidency during its transition from an embattled frontier theocracy to a publicly visible American institution. Through her musical gifts, her social poise, her bloodline into one of the finest architectural dynasties of the Intermountain West, her participation in the women’s suffrage movement, and her reign as official hostess of the Gardo House, Amelia Folsom Young embodied the Church’s ambition, in the words of John Taylor, that “Zion should become the praise of the whole earth.” Her significance is measured not in children—she bore none—but in the silent, stately work of representation: in what she made Mormonism look like to the world.
Buffalo Beginnings: A Family of Builders
Harriet Amelia Folsom was born on August 23, 1838, in Buffalo, Erie County, New York, the eldest of the eight children of William Harrison Folsom and Zerviah Eliza Clark. Her father, a New Hampshire–born craftsman, would become one of the defining architectural hands of the American West. Her mother’s Connecticut roots linked her, as family tradition proudly noted, to the Folsoms of New England—the same extended kin as Frances Folsom, who would one day stand beside President Grover Cleveland in the East Room.
The family’s religious pilgrimage began early. According to the Folsom family record, they embraced the restored gospel in 1841 and removed to Nauvoo, Illinois, soon afterward. Amelia was still a small child when her father took his chisels and drafting tools into the orbit of Joseph Smith’s young Church.
When the Latter-day Saints were driven from Illinois in 1846, the Folsoms went first to Keokuk, Iowa, and then, about 1855, to Council Bluffs, where William worked as a contractor. Amelia’s education, tellingly, did not stop at the frontier’s edge: by her early twenties, she had taught school at Omaha in the Nebraska Territory, a fact recorded in the Church Historian’s biographical register (Church Historian’s Press, First Fifty Years of Relief Society).
The Folsom family finally crossed the plains in 1860, traveling in the Joseph W. Young freight train and arriving in the Salt Lake Valley on October 3. William Harrison Folsom would soon be appointed LDS Church Architect, a post he held from 1861 to 1867, superintending or contributing to the Salt Lake Theatre, the Salt Lake Tabernacle, the Salt Lake City Council Hall, the St. George Tabernacle, the Manti Utah Temple, the Provo Tabernacle, and significant work on the Salt Lake and St. George Temples. His daughter grew up watching those drawings spread out on the dining table. A generation later, she would help shape the finest private structure her father ever built.
“Love at First Sight”: The Courtship of a Prophet
By all accounts—including those cross-referenced in the Wikipedia entry on Harriet Amelia Folsom, the Leavitt Family History, and the Utah Historical Society’s peer-reviewed account—Brigham Young met Amelia on the very day she entered the Valley. Young, then fifty-nine and a widower many times over in the particular logic of plural marriage, made a practice of riding out to welcome incoming wagon companies. When the Joseph W. Young train arrived on October 3, 1860, the bearded prophet and the twenty-two-year-old schoolteacher were introduced.
Their meeting was said to be “love at first sight” (Wikipedia; Leavitt Family History). Sandra Dawn Brimhall and Mark D. Curtis, in their 2000 Utah Historical Quarterly essay “The Gardo House: A History of the Mansion and Its Occupants,” give a precise physical sketch of the young woman who had just stepped into the prophet’s view: “Tall and graceful, with blue eyes and light brown hair, Amelia was intelligent and charming. She was also an accomplished pianist and vocalist.”
The courtship stretched for more than two years—an unusually long interval in Young’s marital history. They became engaged in August 1862, and on January 24, 1863, they were sealed in Salt Lake City. She was twenty-four; he was nearly sixty-two. Because two of Young’s other plural wives already bore the name Harriet, she now dropped her first name publicly and became, to history, simply Amelia.
The union was unusual in Young’s plural marriages. As noted in the Wikipedia biography, Young had “heavily emphasized the spiritual foundations of the doctrine of plural marriage, and asserted the diminished role of sexual attraction in plural unions. However, his sealing and marriage to Folsom demonstrate that attraction still played a role in some of his unions, as many described theirs as being a ‘love match.’” Though Amelia bore him no children, his attraction to her, the record insists, “stayed constant.”
“A Brilliant Conversationalist”: The Private Woman
Unlike many of her sister-wives and contemporaries, Amelia kept no diary. Unlike Emmeline B. Wells or Eliza R. Snow, she left no published journals, no devotional verse, no printed speeches. She gave exactly one interview in her lifetime—to journalist Eugene Traughber of the Salt Lake Tribune in 1894, fourteen years after her husband’s death. Traughber’s portrait of her, preserved in the Utah State Historical Society manuscript collection (MS A-578), remains the single best contemporary description of her person and manner:
He described Amelia as “tall and symmetrical of form, dignified and graceful of manner, and a brilliant conversationalist. The silvery locks which tell of the fifty and five years of her eventful life, are mingled with the threads of gold, reminiscent of the beauty of former years, and the large blue eyes have lost nothing of their fire and expressiveness.” It was easy for him to believe she had been the most popular of Brigham Young’s wives.
— Eugene Traughber, Salt Lake Tribune, March 11, 1894.
Her great-niece Lila Moss, who in 2022 told the St. George News she had spent twenty years researching her ancestor, acknowledged the documentary problem candidly: “A lot of her story is just bits and pieces of other people’s memories of her” (Stephanie DeGraw, “Descendant of one of Brigham Young’s plural wives seeks historical truth,” St. George News, December 4, 2022). Moss is correct. But those “bits and pieces,” when assembled, yield a remarkably consistent figure—one of the best-dressed, best-read, and most widely traveled women in territorial Utah.
The Daughters of Utah Pioneers’ collection in the Pioneer Memorial Museum holds a portrait of her and a display case containing some of her personal belongings: five shawls (a large black lace piece, a red silk embroidered and fringed, a white silk also embroidered, and two smaller lace shawls), collars of intricate lace and beadwork, “elegant fans and other accessories.” Among the dresses preserved there is one object that, better than any paragraph, tells you who Amelia Folsom Young was in her prime: a light-blue taffeta, trimmed in cream lace, which she wore to the inaugural ball of President Ulysses S. Grant in 1869. The dress contained sixteen yards of silk purchased in France and one hundred twenty-five yards of imported lace at five dollars a yard—roughly seven hundred dollars all told, in an era when a skilled laborer might hope to earn a dollar-fifty a day.
This was not a woman who hid in Salt Lake. This was a woman who traveled, who danced at Washington receptions, and who, even her great-niece recalled through family memory, “taught young women piano lessons… [and] taught them to be more refined.”
“His Most Favored Wife”: The Politics of a Title
No question dogged Amelia Folsom Young in life—and, frankly, still dogs her in death—more than whether she was Brigham Young’s favorite. The title is as old as the Gardo House itself. Its source, however, is revealing.
Most of the gossip originated with Ann Eliza Webb Young, the plural wife who divorced Brigham in 1876 and went on the national lecture circuit denouncing polygamy and promoting her 1875 memoir Wife No. 19. Ann Eliza portrayed Amelia as “domineering and controlling,” a woman “constantly feuding with Young’s other wives, as well as Young himself” (Wikipedia). Her most-quoted line:
Polygamist, as he professes to be, he is, under the influence of Amelia, rapidly becoming a monogamist, in all except the name.
— Ann Eliza Webb Young, quoted in John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Harvard/Belknap, 2014)
Leonard J. Arrington, dean of Mormon historians, summarized Ann Eliza’s charges soberly in his 1985 biography Brigham Young: American Moses. Ann Eliza had claimed Amelia “demanded to be ‘first wife,’ insisted on her own home, and was pampered, ill-tempered, and despised.” Arrington, like Turner, treated these accusations with appropriate caution. They were the words of an estranged ex-wife addressing anti-Mormon audiences.
The record from those who actually remained inside the Young family circle is strikingly different. At Amelia’s funeral in December 1910, her stepson Richard W. Young—Brigham’s son—offered a eulogy that the Utah Historical Quarterly’s Gardo House study preserved in full:
She [Amelia] came into the family of President Brigham Young when he was nearly 60 years of age while she was young and attractive, but blessed with a mental grasp of the problems of the day. President Young’s health was enfeebled on account of an onerous life and he needed great care. Aunt Amelia was a natural nurse and performed the duties expected of her in a most praiseworthy manner… From these incidents came the report that Amelia was President Young’s most favored wife. He however was an absolutely just man… As the years grew on, however, the family learned to love Aunt Amelia. She was so just, so fair that I can truthfully say that she had the love of every member of the family.
— Richard W. Young, funeral address, Deseret Evening News, December 15, 1910; Brimhall & Curtis, Utah Historical Quarterly 68:1 (2000).
Heber J. Grant, who would soon become the seventh president of the Church, echoed the assessment at the same funeral with one of the most quietly moving testimonials in Mormon familial history:
I believe no higher tribute could be paid Sister Amelia than the fact that President Brigham Young’s wives loved his young wife.
— Heber J. Grant, funeral address, Deseret Evening News, December 15, 1910.
Amelia herself, in the 1894 Traughber interview, denied the title outright. Speaking of the other wives, she said:
We were all members of the same family and treated each other as such. I would sacrifice anything for the surviving wives of President Young, and their feeling toward me, I think, is the very same… I can’t say that [Young] had any favorites. He was equally kind and attentive to all in his lifetime, and left each surviving wife an equal legacy… There is no reason why a polygamous marriage may not be as happy as the ordinary marriage, if it is entered understandingly.
— Harriet Amelia Folsom Young, in Eugene Traughber, ‘The Prophet’s Courtship: President Young’s Favorite Wife, Amelia, Talks,’ Salt Lake Tribune, March 11, 1894.
The historical verdict, weighed on its evidence, is that Amelia was certainly Young’s most frequent female companion in the final fifteen years of his life—at the theater, on tours to southern Utah, at public receptions, and at the dinner table. Whether that amounts to “favorite” is a question the woman herself seems to have preferred to leave unanswered.
The Gardo House: “Amelia’s Palace” and the Making of a Legend
In 1873, during the last years of his life, Brigham Young turned his mind to a project that had haunted the Latter-day Saint imagination since the Nauvoo days: an official residence for the President of the Church. Joseph Smith had envisioned something similar in the Mansion House and the Nauvoo House. Young wanted a place where he could receive “official callers and entertain the dignitaries who traveled great distances to see him” (Brimhall & Curtis, Utah Historical Quarterly 68, no. 1, 2000).
He chose a lot at 70 East South Temple, diagonally across from his Beehive House. He chose, as his architects, two men of genius: Joseph Ridges, the English-born craftsman who had designed and built the original Salt Lake Tabernacle organ, and Amelia’s own father, William Harrison Folsom. The design—a four-story Second Empire mansion with a northwest tower, granite foundation, adobe walls, black-walnut spiral staircase, and Belgian stained glass—would become, for better or worse, the most talked-about private house in the Intermountain West.
Young was fond of naming his homes. The origin of the name “Gardo” remains disputed: his daughter Susa Young Gates remembered it being taken from a Spanish novel her father liked, while others in Salt Lake insisted the towering house seemed to stand “guard” over the valley. The BYU Journeys historical site records both traditions.
And then there was the problem of for whom the house was being built. The Wikipedia article on the Gardo House states the matter with unusual clarity:
There were widespread rumors that the Gardo House was built for Harriet Amelia Folsom Young; allegedly she was Brigham Young’s favorite wife. It was indeed Young’s intent that Amelia would act as the official hostess for the building. According to his daughter Susa Young Gates, family members agreed that Amelia, who was young, childless, mannerly, and talented, was well suited to assume such a responsibility… the claim that the house was built solely for Amelia’s pleasure, as an act of favoritism, is a misinterpretation. It was, in fact, a specific calling for her with which the family apparently agreed.
— Wikipedia: Gardo House
Great-niece Lila Moss put the point even more pointedly in 2022: “She never really got credit for helping build the Gardo House, which I think is wrong. But in those days, women didn’t get credit for things” (St. George News, December 4, 2022). Having grown up watching her father draft, Amelia appears to have been deeply involved in the design decisions of the very structure that would bear her nickname.
Progress on the house was painfully slow. Lumber, plaster, granite, and glass were chronically delayed. Young, often away on ecclesiastical rounds, was rarely available to sign requisitions. And on one famously sour visit back from St. George, he stood in the half-finished rooms and, displeased with the vertical windows and ornate tower, snapped that it looked like his “tabernacle organ” (Joseph Heinerman, “Amelia’s Palace,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 29, 1979).
Then, on April 5, 1876, came the Arsenal Hill disaster. Two hunters fired into a powder magazine on the hill to the north. Five hundred tons of boulders, concrete, and pebbles rained over the city, killing the hunters and injuring dozens of residents. The blast blew out several of the Gardo’s windows. New glass had to be ordered from the East. By May 20, construction resumed.
Brigham Young would never see the house finished. He died on August 29, 1877. In his will, he granted both Amelia and Mary Ann Angell Young—his first plural wife and matriarch of the Beehive—life tenancy in the Gardo House. To secure their claim, the two women occupied it briefly during construction. Amelia, the record confirms, “only lived there for a few months during its construction” (Wikipedia). In the probate settlement, the mansion was credited against the estate at the inflated figure of $120,000, as part of what turned out to be a one-million-dollar obligation to the Church, and the house passed to ecclesiastical ownership.
Amelia moved, in 1879, to a home her father designed and built for her at First West and South Temple—nicknamed, inevitably, the “Junior Gardo.” She would live there for the rest of her life.
The real house would go on to a second life no one had predicted. John Taylor reluctantly moved in when the membership voted on April 9, 1879, to make the Gardo the official LDS parsonage. Oscar Wilde toured it in April 1882 and pronounced it “a good deal of feeling in it in the pleasing works of art and good furniture.” Apostle Franklin D. Richards dedicated it as “a House unto the Lord” on February 22, 1883.
The Salt Lake Daily Tribune, meanwhile, saw in it Utah’s moral ruin, editorializing just before Taylor’s first public reception that the “favored saints have received an invitation to call upon President John Taylor at the Amelia Palace tomorrow…” and accusing the Church of “trying to build up an aristocracy in Utah, where the few are to rule in luxury” (Salt Lake Daily Tribune, January 1, 1882).
Wilford Woodruff would sign the 1890 Manifesto at that desk. Federal marshals would raid its hallways, hunting polygamists. The Keeley Institute would run a gold-cure clinic in its parlors. The Silver Queen, Susanna Bransford Emery Holmes, would throw receptions beneath its Tiffany chandeliers. And in November 1921—three years after Amelia’s own death—the wrecking crews of the Ketchum Builder Supply Company would pull it down to make way for a Federal Reserve branch bank.
Its demolition, John Taylor’s biographer B. H. Roberts might have said, was a very Utah kind of irony. A house built by the Lion of the Lord’s father-in-law, named in honor of his last great love, fell so that the United States government could build a vault.
St. George Winters: Nursing a Prophet
From 1870 until Young died in 1877, Brigham and Amelia spent the winters in St. George, Utah, to escape the harsh Salt Lake City cold and treat his rheumatism. Amelia’s great-niece—citing family memory more forcefully than some historians allow—pushed back against the popular notion that the Brigham Young Winter Home at 155 West 200 North was “built for Amelia.” “It was not built with the idea of her coming and staying there,” Lila Moss told the St. George News in 2022.
What is not in dispute is Amelia’s role on those southern tours. Young, in his late sixties and early seventies, was in declining health—overweight and plagued by chronic ailments. “He was overweight and had many health problems, and Folsom cared for him on his journeys,” Moss recalled. “I’m sure he wouldn’t want his flock to see him as not well. She was the one who took care of him.” Stephen DeGraw, the reporter, added the further detail that the round trip from Salt Lake to the southern settlements “could take two weeks… because they would stop at all the little towns along the way” (St. George News, December 4, 2022).
This was the nurse Richard W. Young remembered at the funeral: “Aunt Amelia was a natural nurse and performed the duties expected of her in a most praiseworthy manner.” Not a palace hostess in that image. A woman with a cold cloth and a steady hand, helping an aging prophet through a southern Utah night.
The Civic Amelia: Suffrage, Silk, and a Presidential Handshake
Amelia Folsom Young was not merely an ornament on the presidential arm. Among the surprises hidden beneath her reputation is a substantial record of civic and political engagement.
In February 1870—seven years into her marriage—she was one of fourteen signatories of a public letter to Stephen A. Mann, the acting territorial governor, thanking him for signing the act that granted Utah women the right to vote. The letter, co-signed by Eliza R. Snow, Bathsheba W. Smith, Marinda N. Hyde, and Phebe C. Woodruff, was published in the Deseret News on February 23, 1870, and is preserved today in the Church Historian’s Press edition of the First Fifty Years of Relief Society documents.
Cowbody State Daily: The First Woman To Vote Was In Utah.
Wyoming was the first state or territory to legislate in favor of voting rights for women. A law passed in December 1869 earned Wyoming’s place as the vanguard in female suffrage, following a long campaign by suffragettes across the country. Utah Territory followed suit, passing similar legislation in February 1870. Stephen A. Mann, Utah’s acting territorial governor, signed the bill Feb. 12 of that year.
Two days later, on Valentine’s Day 1870, Salt Lake City held a municipal election. So, while politicians bloviated and a brass band played at the Council Hall, home of the Territorial Legislature and City Hall, Seraph Young stopped by on her way to her teaching job at the University of Deseret to cast a ballot—making her the first woman in the United States to vote under a law allowing equal suffrage for women.
Amelia also served on the committee for the Utah exhibit at the Centennial International Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876, in the very year the Gardo windows were being reset after the Arsenal Hill explosion. In 1886, she traveled east to attend the wedding reception of her distant cousin Frances Folsom, newly married to President Grover Cleveland. On May 31, 1893, Emmeline B. Wells recorded her as one of the Utah directors on the Board of Lady Managers for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She served on the board of the Utah Woman’s Silk Association from 1894 to 1895, alongside Wells herself, working to build a sericulture industry in the territory.
Perhaps most striking, in February–March 1902, when she was sixty-three years old, Amelia accompanied a Utah delegation to the Convention of the National Council of Women and the National American Woman Suffrage Association in Washington, D.C., where Senator Thomas Kearns personally presented her to President Theodore Roosevelt. The Buffalo-born schoolteacher who had crossed the plains in 1860 had, in her own lifetime, walked into the White House.
The Widowed Years: A Junior Palace and a Private Marriage
After Young’s death and the transfer of the Gardo House to the Church, Amelia moved into the home her father had built for her at 6 South First West. She taught piano. She traveled. She kept, as her Beaver Weekly Press obituary (December 16, 1910) put it, a “goodly” life, “using her influence in all directions to the bettering of things in Utah.”
One quiet, and historically contested, episode deserves mention. According to the Leavitt Family History, maintained by her descendants through John Quincy Leavitt, Amelia entered a plural marriage to Leavitt on August 15, 1878, in the Lion House—approximately one year after Brigham Young’s death. A notice reportedly appeared in the New York Times on August 26, 1878, and in the Salt Lake Tribune on August 18, 1878. The Leavitt family site states candidly that “we will probably never know why John Quincy Leavitt married Amelia Folsom Young, since this was a time when the Federal Government was cracking down on polygamy. It is inferred in our family history that John Quincy Leavitt knew Brigham Young quite well, so it is possible that he requested John Quincy Leavitt to marry Amelia after his death.”
Other principal sources—including the Utah Historical Quarterly article and Amelia’s own 1894 Tribune interview—state that she “never remarried.” The Leavitt sealing, if it occurred, was evidently a quiet, ritual union rather than a public domestic partnership, of the kind many plural widows of the period entered to preserve religious standing. In any case, Amelia lived the rest of her life at her own residence on First West, not in any Leavitt household.
She remained active into her seventh decade: traveling, receiving guests, holding court in a quieter, smaller theater than the Gardo. Her great-niece Nina Folsom Moss, who visited her as a young woman, later recorded—in the privately published A History of William Harrison Folsom (1973)—that Amelia welcomed young women into her parlor, “let them play with her jewelry, and… taught them to be more refined.”
Harriet Amelia Folsom Young died at her home in Salt Lake City on December 11, 1910, at the age of seventy-two. Her death certificate listed the cause unexceptionally. She was buried in the Salt Lake City Cemetery, where her Find a Grave memorial (ID 1693) notes a simple stone in the old family section.
“She Ruled Brigham Young”: The Obituary of a Legend
The most striking headline about Amelia’s life, predictably, came not from Utah but from the East. On December 12, 1910, the New York Times ran her obituary under the banner “She Ruled Brigham Young: Harriet Amelia Folsom, Once Power in the Mormon Church.” The headline itself is the purest distillation of how Gilded Age America saw her—a woman whose soft power was read, even by her contemporaries outside the Church, as genuine dominion.
The Beaver Weekly Press, closer to home and more sympathetic, supplied what remains one of the most quoted summations of her place in Utah memory:
Moved by his infatuation for this beautiful and intelligent woman, President Young built the famed Amelia palace, filled it with beautiful things and placed his wife in it as queen of all its beauties. There she reigned, a goodly woman, using her influence in all directions to the bettering of things in Utah.
— Beaver Weekly Press, December 16, 1910; Find a Grave Memorial #1693.
The language of queenship is never accidental. Amelia Folsom Young became, in the cultural imagination of Utah and the national press alike, the nearest thing the nineteenth-century Latter-day Saints ever had to a consort—a figure of style, taste, and quiet authority beside a prophet-king.
Legacy: Why She Still Matters
The historical impact of Harriet Amelia Folsom Young on the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is, at first glance, indirect. She held no ecclesiastical office. She bore no children. She left no published writings. She never even agreed that she was the favorite.
And yet she shaped the public face of Mormonism at a hinge moment as few other women did. Consider the ways:
She was the cultural hostess of the Church presidency at the precise moment when Latter-day Saint leaders chose, deliberately, to move from frontier austerity to representational dignity—when John Taylor could argue that “Zion should become the praise of the whole earth” and would need, in his words, to “take a prominent and leading part in the arts, sciences, architecture, literature.”
Conclusion: A Final Image
Stand, in the mind’s eye, on the corner of East South Temple and State Street on a November afternoon in 1921. The Gardo House is coming down. The Ketchum crews are prying out Belgian windows and splintering the black-walnut staircase for auction. Ninety-year-old John Brown, foreman on the original 1873 construction, stands in the chill to pay his respects to the doomed building on his birthday. Amelia has been dead for eleven years. Brigham Young, forty-four.
The mansion falls. A Federal Reserve bank rises. In time, even that will fall, and a twenty-two-story office tower will take its place. The palace is gone. The piano is gone. The French silks are in museum cases. Only the story remains—and the verdict of the people who actually lived beside her.
Let them, from across the century, have the last word. At her funeral in December 1910, amid the black crepe of the Salt Lake City chapel, Heber J. Grant, future president of the Church, delivered what remains the finest single sentence ever written about her:
I believe no higher tribute could be paid Sister Amelia than the fact that President Brigham Young’s wives loved his young wife.
— Heber J. Grant, funeral of Harriet Amelia Folsom Young, Deseret Evening News, December 15, 1910. Cf. Brimhall & Curtis, ‘The Gardo House,’ Utah Historical Quarterly 68:1 (2000).
It is, in the end, the only verdict that counts—and the one Harriet Amelia Folsom Young, self-effacing to the last, would herself have preferred. Not queen. Not a favorite. Not Amelia of the Palace. Simply the young wife, in a family of plural wives, whom the rest had learned, over the long, slow years, to love.
Selected Sources
- Wikipedia, “Harriet Amelia Folsom,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Amelia_Folsom
- Wikipedia, “Gardo House,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gardo_House
- Stephanie DeGraw, “Descendant of one of Brigham Young’s plural wives seeks historical truth,” St. George News, December 4, 2022, https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/local/descendant-of-one-of-brigham-young-s-plural-wives-seeks-historical-truth/article_02584e9e-c78a-5cd8-ae54-e8b92c68660f.html
- Jan Tolman, “Amelia Folsom Young and The Gardo House,” Relief Society Women (blog), January 10, 2011, https://www.reliefsocietywomen.com/blog/2011/01/10/amelia-folsom-young-and-the-gardo-house/
- Leavitt Family History, “Harriet Amelia Folsom Young Leavitt,” https://www.leavittfamilyhistory.com/Harrietameliafolsomleavitt.html
- “Brigham Young’s Favorite Wife,” Salt Lake Tribune, July 30, 1995, Utah History to Go (archived), https://web.archive.org/web/20160303174550/https://historytogo.utah.gov/salt_lake_tribune/in_another_time/073095.html
- “The Gardo House,” Utah History to Go (archived), https://web.archive.org/web/20120115012015/https://historytogo.utah.gov/utah_chapters/mining_and_railroads/thegardohouse.html
- FamilySearch, “Harriet Amelia Folsom (L21B-Q9C),” https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/L21B-Q9C/harriet-amelia-folsom-1838-1910
- “She Ruled Brigham Young: Harriet Amelia Folsom, Once Power in the Mormon Church,” New York Times, December 12, 1910, https://www.nytimes.com/1910/12/12/archives/she-ruled-brigham-young-harriet-amella-folsom-once-power-in-the.html
- WikiTree, “Harriet Amelia (Folsom) Young,” https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Folsom-2
- Find a Grave, “Harriett Amelia Folsom Young,” Memorial #1693, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/1693/harriett_amelia-young
- Riverton Utah History (Facebook), “Gardo House 1870–1921, Known as ‘Amelia’s Palace,’” https://www.facebook.com/riverton.utah.1/posts/gardo-house-1870-1921-known-as-amelias-palace-was-a-controversial-salt-lake-city/1388599889969420/
- BYU Journeys, “The Gardo House,” https://byujourneys.byu.edu/salt-lake-city/the-gardo-house
- Sandra Dawn Brimhall and Mark D. Curtis, “The Gardo House: A History of the Mansion and Its Occupants,” Utah Historical Quarterly 68, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 19–39, https://issuu.com/utah10/docs/uhq_volume68_2000_number1/s/10352190
- Improvement Era, Vol. 20 (1917), including Susa Young Gates, “The Gardo House” (1099–1103), https://dn720706.ca.archive.org/0/items/improvementera20012unse/improvementera20012unse.pdf
Additional corroborative records: Church Historian’s Press, Emmeline B. Wells and The First Fifty Years of Relief Society biographical entries for Harriet Amelia Folsom Young; Wilford Woodruff Papers subject entry; Leonard J. Arrington, Brigham Young: American Moses (Knopf, 1985); John G. Turner, Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet (Belknap/Harvard, 2014); Deseret Evening News, December 12 and December 15, 1910; Beaver Weekly Press, December 16, 1910.
A Note on Research Methods and Accuracy
In recent years, some have voiced concern that artificial intelligence may distort facts or introduce inaccuracies into serious research. That criticism deserves acknowledgment. However, AI has now evolved into the most powerful research instrument available to any dedicated scholar—capable of analyzing vast datasets, cross‑referencing historical records, and surfacing overlooked connections across sources. This work represents a collaboration between the author’s investigative inquiry, verified primary documentation, and the advanced analytic capabilities of AI research tools. Here, AI was not used as a ghostwriter or a shortcut for scholarship, but as a disciplined research partner devoted to rigor, accuracy, and transparency.
Every factual claim in this work has been subjected to active verification. Where AI‑generated content was used as a starting point, it was tested against primary sources, peer‑reviewed scholarship, official institutional documentation, and established historical records. Where discrepancies were found—and they were found—corrections were made. The author has made every reasonable effort to ensure that quotations are accurately attributed and historical details are precisely rendered.
That said, no work of this scope is immune to error, and the author has no interest in perpetuating inaccuracies in the service of an argument. If you are a reader—whether sympathetic, skeptical, or hostile to the conclusions drawn here—and you identify a factual error, a misattributed source, or a claim that cannot be substantiated, you are warmly and genuinely invited to say so. Reach out. Corrections offered in good faith will be received in the same spirit, and verified corrections will be incorporated into this edition without hesitation.