2 Growing Up

At age five, Andrew moved with his mother and four siblings to Bountiful, just north of Salt Lake City, where Heber owned a mill. However, they soon moved back to Salt Lake City and settled a few blocks northwest of Temple Square, in the Nineteenth Ward. Ann Alice moved a number of times, but Heber saw that her family was well housed.

When the twins became old enough for baptism, Heber took them and several other children of baptismal age to City Creek. He baptized the first child and then had two of his older sons baptize the rest. David Patten Kimball baptized Andrew on September 20, 1866, and Charles S. Kimball confirmed him.¹⁸

Andrew and his twin, Alice, about ten and sixteen years of age.

About 1866, when Andrew was eight, his mother became seriously ill and death threatened her. Her daughter Alice described how Heber sat by Ann’s sickbed and wept.¹⁹ Although Ann did not die then, she never regained her health.

One of Heber’s families lived in Provo and he often visited them. On a May day in 1868, he left Salt Lake for Provo with a small buggy and arrived after dark. Since he had last visited there, a ditch had been dug in front of his Provo house, and the horses refused to cross. Heber, not understanding the situation, touched them with his whip. They jumped over the ditch, throwing him forward and striking his head on the ground, where he lay unconscious. Brother A. F. Macdonald found Heber and helped get him into the house, but over the next two weeks he became weaker and took to his bed, finally dying on June 22, 1868, probably of subdural hematoma, bleeding in the brain. The unexpected death shocked Heber’s family. He was just sixty-seven years old and had been vigorous.²⁰

Heber left twenty-one wives and forty-one children.²¹ Brigham Young declared a day of mourning; about eight thousand people crowded into the new Tabernacle for the largest funeral yet held in the territory. The day of Heber’s funeral saw torrential rain, but during the burial the sun came out and a rainbow formed, cheering those present. Burial took place in the private Kimball cemetery, located in the middle of the Kimball block.²² Andrew was just nine years old when his father died; his mother lived another eleven years, passing away on October 12, 1879, at age fifty-one. During her last years she was often bedfast. A kind neighbor, a Sister Hooper, helped look after the children when Ann could not care for them.

Heber did not leave his family without resources. His net estate, mostly real property, had a value of approximately $85,000, about $1,600 for each of the forty inheriting survivors. According to the census report, Ann had one of the best houses in the neighborhood,²³ though for income she relied to some extent on her older sons. They kept a substantial garden and sometimes the family paid tithes of produce—apples, potatoes, cabbage, wheat—and once a heifer, but other times they looked to the bishop for help.²⁴ In 1875, with her two older sons now moved on, Ann and the three younger children at home needed help from the bishop; he provided coal, flour, beef, soap, potatoes, and a small amount of cash.²⁵