Edward Partridge

A Painesville hatter appointed the church’s first bishop in February 1831, who directed the settlement of Zion in Missouri until the Saints were driven from Jackson County.

Edward Partridge (1793–1840) met the church’s missionaries in Ohio in November 1830 and was baptized within a month. Two months later he held an office no one had held before: bishop, charged with receiving the consecrations of the Saints and dividing their inheritances in Zion. No securely identified likeness of him survives; a portrait often published under his name shows his son, Edward Partridge Jr.

Background

Born 27 August 1793 at Pittsfield, Berkshire County, Massachusetts. A hatter at Painesville, Ohio, he married Lydia Clisbee there in 1819. First a Universal Restorationist, he was a Reformed Baptist when the missionaries arrived.

1830

Traveled with Sidney Rigdon to see Joseph Smith at Fayette, New York, and was baptized by him in the Seneca River on 11 December. Ordained an elder by Rigdon within days.

1831

Named the church’s first bishop at Kirtland in February, and ordained a high priest on 4 June. Went with Joseph Smith to Independence that summer and was appointed to oversee the settlement of the Saints in Missouri, administering stewardships of land under the law of consecration.

1832

Appointed to the United Firm in April.

1833

Received Joseph Smith’s letter of 2 May on the administration of consecration. During the mob violence at Independence in July he was tarred and feathered, and in November he fled with his family to Clay County.

1834

Served as bishop to the scattered Saints in Clay County, Missouri, to whom Joseph Smith wrote in December 1833 and March 1834.

Reading the record

Partridge’s office was the first created by revelation for a specific practical task, and his record follows that task closely: receiving consecrated property, assigning stewardships, and keeping the settlement in Jackson County together. When the settlement was broken up in 1833, the office went with him into exile, which is why the church’s records for Missouri after 1833 so often pass through his hands.

After 1834

He continued as bishop in Clay and Caldwell Counties and, after the expulsion from Missouri, at Commerce (later Nauvoo), Illinois, where he died on 27 May 1840. The Joseph Smith Papers biography covers the rest of his life.

Biographical details follow the biographical entry for Edward Partridge in the Joseph Smith Papers, checked against the dated documents cited on this site’s chronology pages. This page links out to primary sources rather than reproducing them at length.