An open guide to the sources, archives, places, and scholarship on the movement Joseph Morris organized at Kington Fort on the Weber River in 1861, and on the congregations that carried it from Utah to Idaho, Nevada, California, Nebraska, Iowa, and Montana.
This is an independent scholarly resource. It is not affiliated with any church, descendant organization, or repository. Entries are being added and checked; corrections are welcome.
New publications, programs, and additions to this guide.
The movement's own scripture, a later compilation from within the movement, and the only book-length history of it.
Joseph Morris's revelations, articles, and letters, recorded from 1857 to 1862 and published after his death by his follower George S. Dove. It holds more than 300 revelations, making Morris one of the most prolific revelators in Mormon history. For his followers it was scripture.
Read online: Internet Archive · Google Books. Both are free scans of the University of California copy (684 pages).
A Collection of Sublime Thoughts by Modern Prophets, compiled by John R. Eardley, a leader of the Montana church after Williams’s death, and printed in San Francisco by Joseph A. Dove in 1899. It shows how the movement kept and passed on its prophetic writings a generation after Morris.
Read online: Internet Archive.
Anderson, a sociologist at the University of Montana, built the book on Morrisite papers found in a Deer Lodge attic and on the records of Andrew Hendrikson, who presided over the Montana church from 1886 to 1921, kept by his family. His research files are the core of the Morrisite collection at USU.
The 2010 edition is in print in paperback and as an ebook. Please buy it from Utah State University Press, an imprint of the University Press of Colorado; buying from the publisher supports keeping the book in print.
Forscutt (1834–1903) was clerk of the Morrisite First Council and an apostle in Morris's church, and later a minister in the Reorganized Church. He wrote about the movement at least twice.
Further reading: Eric Paul Rogers, “Mark Hill Forscutt: Mormon Missionary, Morrisite Apostle, RLDS Minister,” John Whitmer Historical Association Journal 21 (2001): 69–100. Author’s copy (Zenodo)
The main events, from Morris’s revelations through the Montana congregations to later claimants and the present.
How the Morrisite congregations descended from one another, where many members went, and the later groups that drew on the tradition without descending from it.
Solid line: organizational succession or movement of members. Dashed line: a later claimant drawing on the Morrisite tradition.
Sites connected with the movement, and what can be seen at each today.
Built in 1853 and abandoned in 1858, then reoccupied by the Morrisites. Nothing of the fort survives; a monument to the Kington Fort–Morrisite War site was dedicated in 2006. The fort was named for Bishop Thomas Kington, and “Kington” is the correct spelling. The monument itself notes that the earliest sources (the notebook kept by Kington’s wife, his gravestone, Wilford Woodruff’s journals, and early church records) all spell it that way; recent scholarship such as Holley (2008) follows them. Many nineteenth- and twentieth-century accounts, and some modern references, including the Utah History Encyclopedia and Wikipedia, write “Kingston Fort.” Insiders used both: Forscutt, who lived in the fort, wrote “Kingston’s Fort” and called it “the proper name” of the place (“Sketch of Joseph Morris,” CHL MS 702). Search under both spellings. A log cabin nearby, which local resident Ed Johnson believed was the building Morris used to hold the three departing members whose detention led to the siege, is shown in MO-IMG-046–049; the identification rests on local tradition. About 200 yards south, on the west side of the road, in the South Weber Pioneer Cemetery, a marker reads “Joseph Werner, ‘Morrisite,’ about 1870” (MO-IMG-021). The name lingered locally. In the early 2000s, while the editor was going door to door in South Weber, a woman then in her sixties said that elementary-school classmates had called her “Morrisite” as a taunt because of where in South Weber she lived; she said her family had no Morrisite connection. (Editor’s memorandum of recollection, written November 1, 2026; the conversation was not recorded at the time.) A cannonball from the siege was kept by the family of Al Peek, together with a portrait of Mary Christoffersen Anderson (MO-IMG-051–053; the portrait is MO-IMG-062).
VisitThe monument is public. The Pioneer Cemetery appears to lie on private land but is reached by a public easement; stay on the access route. The cabin is on private property.
The Morrisites were among the founders of Soda Springs, one of the oldest towns in Idaho. Connor reported bringing 160 settlers (53 families, seven single men, and four widows), who arrived May 20, 1863, and were given building lots on a town site surveyed on the north bank of the Bear River, beside the military reservation of Camp Connor (Connor’s report, June 2, 1863, OR). A later marker describes a 200-acre survey west of Soda Creek, lots of 25 by 130 feet, and one-room log homes with dirt floors. The Morrisite “Lower Town” stood below the military “Upper Town”; Soda Springs was the first seat of Oneida County, 1864–66. After the troops left in 1865, hard winters and failed crops thinned the settlement. Many Morrisites moved on, some north to the Blackfoot area, and others sold to miners and to Latter-day Saint settlers, whose new town site dates from Brigham Young’s visit of 1870–71. Most of the old town now lies under Alexander Reservoir. Those who stayed, led by Niels Anderson, carried their quarrel with the Mormon hierarchy into territorial politics; the Niels Anderson Homestead marker credits his anti-polygamy campaign with helping deny Mormons the vote in Idaho. Accounts differ on some details: most give 160 settlers (one popular account says about 325), Camp Connor’s founding is dated May 20 or May 23, and the National Park Service marker wrongly calls Morris Welsh-born. Markers stand in town, including the Park Service’s Morrisite settlement marker in the parking lot of a Latter-day Saint meetinghouse (HMDB), the state’s Camp Connor marker (HMDB), and “Law & Order on the Frontier” on Camp Connor’s probable site near the hospital (HMDB). Descendants held a reunion in Soda Springs on August 3, 2013.
Niels and Mary Christoffersen Anderson, married at Morristown on July 20, 1863 (the date on their gravestone; some accounts give July 30), are buried in Fairview Cemetery at Soda Springs. Their gravestone carries a long bronze inscription giving a Morrisite account of the 1862 siege, in which Mary, then fourteen, lost her jaw to the first cannon shot fired into the fort. Forscutt, who was present, described her lower jaw “hanging only by a narrow strip of skin,” with two women dead beside her (“Sketch of Joseph Morris,” CHL MS 702; MO-IMG-061, with transcription; MO-IMG-062; HMDB; see also the Niels Anderson Homestead marker).
VisitThe markers and the Anderson gravestone in Fairview Cemetery are publicly accessible. The townsite is largely under Alexander Reservoir.
The western congregations, where George Dove published The Spirit Prevails and led the California church after 1882. In May 1863 Connor gave 150 Morrisites passage to Carson City in an empty quartermaster’s train bound there for stores (Connor’s report, June 2, 1863, OR).
VisitNo surviving sites identified for this guide. Information welcome.
Danish-speaking congregations whose 1869 membership and account books survive in translation.
VisitNo sites identified; the record survives in documents only.
The longest-lived center of the movement. The wood-frame Morrisite church, begun in 1877, stood on private land at Racetrack, visible from the west side of Interstate 90 south of Deer Lodge, when last photographed for this guide in November 2018. Called the Lord’s House, as the panel over its doors reads, it was the church’s meeting place: George Thompson was elected president of the church there in 1886, and Andrew Hendrikson (1886–1921) and George Johnson (1921–1954) presided over the Montana church from it. It is the only Morrisite church building known to survive, and its condition has worsened markedly since 2009. See the condition record in Series 5.
View onlyThe church is on private land and unsafe. View it from the public road; do not enter or trespass.
William W. Davies's commune on Mill Creek, 1867–1881. A road called the Mormon Grade, an interpretive sign at Scenic Loop Road and Mormon Grade, and Davies's grave in Lyons Cemetery remain.
VisitThe interpretive sign and Lyons Cemetery are public.
Where the original and copied records are held, with call numbers for requesting them.
Where the material comes from, how it is checked, and how to cite it.
The guide brings together work done over more than two decades. Its foundation is the research of C. LeRoy Anderson, whose files at Utah State University (Caine Coll. MSS 10) remain the largest body of Morrisite records. The editor assisted Anderson with the 2010 edition of his history and has studied the Morrisite apostle and later RLDS minister Mark Hill Forscutt since at least 2001, when his first article on Forscutt appeared, including transcribing Forscutt’s journals. Photographs of the sites were taken by the editor from the early 2000s onward. Kirk Watson’s 2026 edition of Morrisite writings, published scholarship, and records shared by descendants fill out the rest.
Records of the editor’s own fieldwork, cited in this guide.
Rogers, Eric Paul, ed. Morrisite.org: A Research Guide to the Morrisites. Accessed [date]. https://morrisite.org.
Photographs by the editor may not be reused without permission while a reuse license is being chosen. Please ask through the contact address below.